She didn't hurt me. I hurt myself.

This is a step towards understanding our invisible mental patterns that usually get concealed by our own emotional instability. I want to write about this with the help of two posts that found me right on time—Mia’s words heal and always spread positivity. This one came on my way out of nowhere, exactly hearing the weight i had been holding onto silently.

Hello my dear gentlest readers, i am sorry i have been very irregular here lately without talking to my soul and to you as I used to do earlier. Because of that gap, I couldn't confront the feelings of what I consciously or unconsciously kept avoiding talking about. I let the wounds hide. I let the feelings surface under silence that i didn't know was growing slowly, only to eventually break down. The worst thing here is that what honestly needed to be reflected usually went unchecked or even left unknown in the silence. And the cost of all that ends up in taking too much time on nothing that actually worked, except going numb on a default mode. Even now, I have got an emotional breakdown to work upon and this feeling of wanting to write about it seems the only right option to hear what goes unheard or at least gently try to hear what i systematically leave silent every time in the name of obsessed mental convenience.

Mia in her article says,

We are conditioned to respond quickly. Respond when we are fueled with emotion.

How true is this, and when I read this, I felt a sudden surge of relief, slowing me down from the invisible weight I'd been asked to carry alone all the while. I understood that I am not the only problem here to be sorted out, and that there is always something left unspoken in the moment of any mental conflict, which gets silenced eventually.

We break down emotionally and keep moving on with it, not knowing what it has silently done to our internal systems or what it has taken away from our side of emotional perception. Maybe we have even stopped noticing the loss that hides only in hindsight —our right to be honestly available to our own systems and to the emotions we give out to others and carry within ourselves.

There's something subtly suppressive about all these mental patterns we carry only in our emotions and thoughts. They do not always speak out loud because sometimes they become the dialogues that we only carry within ourselves, slowly concealing our emotional reality in ways we do not carefully know or even notice at the time of its original occurrence. Such is the mental isolation that hides in your own mind. You do not give it any personal note- taking surveillance to keep you consciously engaged when you are replying and responding to some emotions or even when you are choosing silence over an unsettling conversation with yourself or with somebody else. And you wonder what must be emotionally wrong or unstable with your internal system. why did you react that way. why were you not emotionally stable with your own action. why did you break down so badly that left you both fierce and silent. But maybe we are all a little emotionally unavailable to ourselves while fighting something that asks us to stay open mentally or to participate consciously in the mess. Maybe we are all a little fragile to react gently when something emotionally heavy is handed down to us without our own permission. And the outcome of all these silent mental patterns reveals one thing in common—how we let go of all the proofs we already have within us to reduce this emotional mental weight.

It is slowly disturbing me to realize how we have stopped facing our own mental instability in the name of emotional resistivity, calling it mental breakdown. Maybe it is or maybe not but it definitely points out to an unresolved mental calamity that leaves us all a little tired both in mind and being. For a long time, I'd known myself only as someone who gets emotionally weak often, someone who can not mentally stand up to a conversation that demands more courage and love. someone who had stopped believing she had a voice of her own. someone who convincingly accepted that she cannot rewrite the mental narrative constantly running at the back of her mind. I am here now because there's always something silently left unsaid and unheard to be slowly said on its own course of time. maybe even now I do not have enough mental clarity or composure to address the matter soundly, but god let me not escape this again.

Recently, I had a quarrel with my elder sister — a bit of both serious and silent battle over something that was really important at the moment and the thing is I feel very bad about how I had reacted to her. This is not the first time I am sitting with something like this. Maybe I had willingly kept it ruling my internal system all this time or maybe for the first time in life, the pattern feels heavy and inescapable to walk away from.

There are reasons to what they say, how they react but the tone or the emotion they carry while responding to you reflects a different language of mental instability and the same goes with you. And this is not meant to be carried only by you as you have your own uncertain reactive mechanism to work upon. As Newton's Third Law of Motion states that for every action (force) in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This means that forces always occur in pairs—if object A exerts a force on object B, object B simultaneously exerts an equal and opposite force back on object A. This goes similar with my reaction while i was responding to my sister on what she forcefully said—a communication quarrel over an important medical file led to our emotional conflict. While returning home after my father's medical check up with a cardiologist, I accidentally brought his medical history file along with me, which was actually needed at my younger sister's home for a doctor’s consultation again along with his online medical reports. Though the mistake was unintentional, her words —“how careless you are, no basic sense at all, i have left important things to people like you” and the tone with how they were directed towards me made me feel very small. It deeply hurt my ego and affected my emotional temperament letting me suddenly go numb and react back fiercely, hitting her left arm forcefully in the heat of the moment. It left me feeling guilty, upset, and mentally disturbed as I couldn't control the emotional weight of it all. The outburst felt wrong only very later. Maybe this will make you feel very cruel or silly about me but my ego couldn't stand up to her with any emotional composure at the moment of our conflict and i chose beating without any second thought. I could have instead politely explained how bad i felt by her words. But i wasn't able to or even aware of it. Only later I realized what i did was even more hurtful than what she said. The silence that followed with how it ended was even more mentally disturbing and silencing.

I was there with my father, pleading with him to understand the seriousness of his health issue, crying and fighting to get him to the doctors on every checkup he'd been advised to take for being diagnosed well. How can i allow myself to be seen as careless or irresponsible just because i had brought his file with me, only keeping it in mind as a matter of important thing to carry and not be forgotten in a hurry. Yes,I completely forgot about the fact that my younger sister and her husband will be needing it to consult the doctors again, with a few other medical reports. I was deeply worried about his health just as my sister and i had taken enough care of him as I could. But at the end of the day, having all my affection and time go to nothing like i was useless and senseless hurt me deeply. Still, I do not want to justify my action of beating her. Yeah, it was out of uncontrolled anger that i did not want to accept her misconception of who I was and what i did only by mistake. I also understand that beating someone is not the right way of letting them know you are hurt or making them understand they were wrong.

There isn't any healthy space for a cultivated communication when you are carried over by uncontrolled emotions that are solely propelled by preconceived notions from both the sides. when she said “you could have explained it without beating me” i again relied only on my defense mechanism with unstable answers, saying “i shouldn’t have stayed helping at all, i should have left to my work” which reflects my egoistic attitude on the conflict. She said i was pointing out to the time I had spent and the help i had done, which again only left me feeling bad. Maybe i shouldn't have let my ego spill thoughtless words over there or made it a point as a counter argument to defend my action. Maybe i should have apologised straightaway for forgetting the file and admitted my mistake in the first place. But the mistake was genuine; not intentionally careless. And the words let out by anger and communication breakdown, always land wrongly at the time of conflict.

Only in hindsight, i honestly realized maybe i shouldn't have reacted like that, maybe i should have stayed silent, maybe i should have calmly tried to accept my mistake, maybe i should have explained my feelings gently, maybe i shouldn't have hurt her in that manner. maybe i shouldn't tried to protect my ego. maybe i shouldn't have hurt myself too. Rosie in her letter says, In order to love who you are, you must not hate the experiences that shaped you and maybe something in that conflict had quietly tried shaping me to understand this message—to not hate the experiences that made me realize some invisible truths—to not bring it all down to myself just because i made a mistake—to not let the emotional weight of the matter to suppress my clarity over time.

Maybe unraveling these patterns is not to weaken my emotional health but to slowly address them as i keep both my mind and heart open to healing and growth as Rosie again says,

Forgive yourself for the mistakes you’ve made. You’ve learned your lessons — now let them guide you. Use that wisdom to build a brighter, kinder future for yourself.

I forgive my sister and i forgive myself too because we only love each other more with all these little emotional fights. now I am learning to stay open and understand our love for each other even better. now I am choosing reflection over obsessed silence. I realized what I did was wrong and had moved on from that mistake not with regret but with grace as it allowed me to sit with something that i always kept running away from. I told her, “I am Sorry” the next day and my soul felt more lighter than ever. more humbled than ever. more honest than ever.

Here's what I have to say from this experience— maybe nobody is too right or too wrong, it is our own minds creating situations that hurt and hide us in invisible mental patterns but also they are the ones that help us build clarity over confusion, healing over suppression and grace over something that always leaves us mentally disturbed and silent without any reason. So let me say this out loud for one last time again, we are all still healing the wounds that we carry invisibly within ourselves and to others, we are still choosing love over our little fragile actions that keep testing our patience and perseverance for choosing compassion, we are still trying to understand our own unidentified patterns before hating them, because, time and again we still all have something honest and very grounding in us to keep learning from and not conveniently always escape from.

There are so many other patterns and invisible truths in me that i keep escaping from, that i have to express in order to be aware of its silent heaviness, which in time i will reveal it with grace and love but right now let me cherish this one little fight that I have chosen not to run away from. I am here.

I am grateful for the people who are still choosing to read me here. I love you.

With Peace,

Revathi Ganesh