I entered my room and slouched on the bed. I grabbed the
folded blanket kept on my side, wrung it loose, and flopped it over my legs. It
was cold and I needed warmth. The blanket trembled like non-circular ripples
and long ribbons someone’s shaking from a stick. I sat there and started
thinking about a feeling I was feeling in that moment. I couldn’t find a word
from my memory to describe this feeling. I kept thinking, and meanwhile, turned
my head to stare on an untidy pile of notebooks that lay on the bed and on the
side table and all around me. My head was buzzing with thoughts and I needed to
quieten their restless voices by giving them shelter in a notebook. But then I
started thinking which notebook should I choose to do this task. It was a huge
and laborious task. First, I needed to organize these voices in different
categories and in the second step, I needed to see which notebook was to be
assigned to thoughts of a particular category. So, now I was thinking about two
things. One, finding a word to describe the feeling that I was feeling and
second, which notebook should I select from the heaps to write down the
thoughts spinning in my head. Both steps. I was still jostling with these two
tasks when a third one popped up. A question that left me curious and terrified
at the same time. Do I have all the words I need in my memory to describe
everything I want, now or in the future? If not, then it’s a crisis. The
thought jolted me in a bad cognitive dissonance. The emotion of insecurity
gripped me. And envy. What if the other writer, who I despise, knows some words
that I don’t? I clenched my fists. My fingers were sweaty and my elbows were
quivering. My eyes became glassy with an intrusive pang of fear, the fear of
impending doom, doom of my writing career. And before I could overcome this
fear, I remembered that I still hadn’t found the word to describe the feeling
that I was feeling a few moments ago and I hadn’t even selected a notebook for
putting down my restless thoughts. I sat there, inside the warm blanket,
frozen. And glassy eyed. After thinking some more for a while, I ditched the
heap of notebooks. I regretted and mourned the loss of my ability to retrieve a
suitable word to describe that feeling. And I apologized to my restless
thoughts because since I hadn’t selected a notebook, I couldn’t do anything
about them. After all these cathartic, therapeutic, and healing rituals, I
pulled my laptop and wrote down all the things I had just did ever since I
started feeling that feeling. I wrote everything down. And then suddenly, I
realized, that I could describe that feeling with the word “overwhelm.”
And the moment I wrote this word, the restless thoughts
quietened down and I no longer needed a notebook to write them down. Now caught
red-handed for the feeling they were trying to evoke within me, they settled
down, crankily on my shoulders, around my ears, and inside my fingers,
well-mannered but frantic, like crowds of refugees in a shelter camp or drops
of dew on a tree. And then I took the lead and started calling them one by one.
One by one they could come to me and report their stories and questions and
worries and I could write these down.
“Fear of losing my identity”
Okay, next. “How to deal with the feeling of overwhelm?”
Well, you write it down.
