A Caveat

In my first week at a new school, the fire alarm went off, and I was the lone Quixote who didn’t know it was a drill. I grabbed my bag and charged, even though no one else was moving. These demented girls are chuckling in the face of death, I thought.

On the first day of college, I used my unsuspecting classmate as a human shield against two dogs. Said person later befriended me altruistically. Another time, a date tried to hug me, but I had gone in for a firm handshake instead, which resulted in me gently stabbing him with my fingers. For a second or two, his stomach was concave.

Soon after, at an internship, I overslept on Day 1 and distinguished myself by my absence. The next morning, I splattered ink over my supervisor’s face.

All this to say that I make a terrible first impression. And if you have ended up here, due to ties of blood and water, you might be underwhelmed or even vaguely bewildered. There is also no guarantee that it will get any better along the way. Yet, against all odds, I have decided to become a Substack Girl because I thought it might make me accountable about my writing. Should one need an audience to be accountable? Polonius said: to thine own self, be true. But he also said, “Oh, I am slain!” so we aren’t expected to take him seriously.

Anyway. I have been struggling to write for some time now. As a kid, my uncle would get me a bunch of sarkaari naukri diaries at the beginning of every year and I would fill those with inane thoughts; as a teenager, I would write needlessly erotic poetry about my crush. (Some of this was posted on Facebook. My relatives expressed concern.) But with the onset of adulthood, I stopped writing anything besides half-baked assignments. I blamed my literature degree(s) for making me self-conscious about craft, composition, idiom, voice. I blamed my reading for besetting me with a constant anxiety of influence: I, like a second comer, waiting, etc. I scrapped whatever I wrote—each sentence felt pompous, wooden, inauthentic. The more I discovered what I liked in storytelling, the deeper I cowered inside my shell.

This predicament would not have been a problem, seeing as I wasn’t exactly robbing the world of the next Virginia Woolf, if it were not for the fact that my abstinence from writing also turned out to have a direct relationship with my emotional (dys)functionality. When I stopped trying to put what I was thinking into words because my words were never good enough, I also shrank from the whole business of communicating what I felt, even to myself. Sincerity felt kitschy. Love and Death seemed unnecessarily dramatic.

Then something unthinkable happened this June—a Great Humbling, an unsolicited encounter with Cosmic Injustice. And I still found myself incapable of saying a single thing about it.

So I ended up here. Not because I could talk about the Great Humbling, but because I wanted to talk about something—anything: chain-smoking landlords, the long Delhi dusk, a verbose novel about divorce—in hopes that someday this might lead me back to a place of coherence or, if not that, at least language.

Please stick around if you don’t mind receiving some missives in your inbox occasionally, and I’d love it if you wrote back sometimes. Remember I make a terrible first impression but so did Mr. Darcy. Though I am neither tall nor rich.

Until next time,

Adreeta