A Bowl of Elusive

When I woke up in the morning, I was ‘feeling low’. I didn’t feel like going to work. I couldn’t get out of bed as much as I tried. So, I texted my boss that I wasn’t well and I couldn’t come in. He didn’t read the text right away and every passing moment scared me some more. I dropped a few more texts in my team Whatsapp group asking for certain reports and stuff, things I do every day. And then kept staring at the phone waiting for that text from my boss. After a while, his screen indicated that he was typing. I started panicking. What if he asks me to give more details about what was wrong with me? I was bad at lying, I had always been bad at lying. The phone pinged and he’d sent an “ok”. I breathed a sigh of relief and collapsed back on my bed. An hour later, I woke up from a bad dream. That’s when I got a call from one of my stressors. “Stressors” are people/things that invoke anxiety in me. A term I learned from my psychiatrist back in 2015. I suffer from an anxiety disord...

While I sat there working on that 87 mb excel sheet, I couldn't for the life of me, figure out how to represent the data I had to. I had put in some tags and now I didn't remember why I'd put them. Even a simple copy paste function was taking several minutes. This problem was just not getting resolved. So I just closed the file, without saving it. I took a leak, drank some water and came back. Then I started fresh on the file. I put in new tags, named them so that I won't forget their purpose, jotted down my thought process and I was done with the file an hour later. This got me thinking about starting fresh. So many times in our lives we keep on persevering on things that aren't going well. We keep trying to find solutions while repeating the same mistakes. It's like if I kept on creating more pivot tables in the 87 mb file, bumping it by another 20-30 mb so that it would hang more and waste more of my time, instead of closing it and starting fresh. ...

In one of my earlier posts, I had revealed that I suffer from a condition called Generalized Anxiety Disorder. It’s a very common mental disorder where the patient experiences severe, ongoing anxiety that interferes with daily activities. Now I have spoken about it to many of my friends and acquaintances and the usual reactions are on the line of “try-to-calm-down” or “relax-its-all-in-your-mind”. What people fail to understand is the extreme nature of stress that I experience. EVERYTHING STRESSES ME OUT. WebMD says “Generalized Anxiety Disorder (or GAD) is characterized by excessive, exaggerated anxiety and worry about everyday life events with no obvious reasons for worry. People with GAD tend to always expect disaster and can’t stop worrying about health, money, family and work. The worry is often unrealistic or out of proportion for the situation. Daily life becomes a constant state of worry, fear and dread. Eventually the anxiety so dominates the person’s thinking that it ...

I have always found it difficult to make friends. Normal day to day interactions make me nervous. And yet, I’m often perceived as very confident and outgoing. Welcome to my world where opposites co-exist. I laugh & I smile. And I find it tedious. You see, I grew up in an unconventional setup; no parents; no siblings; raised by grandparents. And at one point of my life, I was an abuse victim. Mix all that up and you have a recipe for either a socially awkward guy or a psychopath. Thank God I am the former. (Still haven’t ruled out the latter.) For a large part of my life, I have been perceived as “weird”. When I was in school, I was widely unpopular for no apparent reason. I was most nice to people but they’d ridicule me or not talk to me at all. I kept trying to get into people’s good books for a while, but when that didn’t work, I gave up. I started getting into little tiffs with people who wouldn’t accept me. But I haven’t been the violent or disruptive type so my tiffs w...

Please don't let the dramatic title or that picture lead you astray. I recently got transferred to the divisional headquarters of my company, which is at IMT- Manesar, Gurgaon. I am still in the process of relocation and this article is about that. A few years back, "relocation" was no big deal. I would pack two bags and a backpack with all my precious stuff and scoot to a new place. As simple as that. But I am a grown up now. Once I could afford it, I rented a place of my own back in 2014. At first, I lived like a bachelor, living on junk food and hoarding trash till the house smelled like someone died in it. But then a girlfriend helped me buy some furniture and make the place more like a home. Before I realized, I had set up the whole place - bought a big bead, several appliances and a sofa too. So I plan stuff now. I can't just get up and go. Except, I did just that. I was offered this new profile in Gurgaon and I said yes.  The whole moving to a new plac...