Open Letter Number 7: Lights and Rejection
My and Raj's take on these two seemingly ordinary things
This time, we also made a podcast that you can listen to while you chill if you are an audio person. Do check it out and give us feedback. Also, thank you all for the audio feedback. We loved how you all suggested some hacks and we tried to impliment it. Here is our new episode-
Harsh’s Blabbering
Bang, my mother comes into the room and switches on the lights to find something that is in her hand. And then goes. With my sleep. Lights are such a weird thing. You find them everywhere. In your phones, on the road, in your watch, on the vehicles, etc., etc. You got the idea. They are pretty much everywhere.
The beauty of lights is not that they are omnipresent. It is that they are controllable. Even when my mother comes in and disturbs me by turning on the lights and spoiling my sleep, I do have a chance to go ahead and switch it off. Interestingly, lights not only make or break sleep but it has vast usage in different areas. Have you ever been to a clothes shop and found the cloth extremely cool and attractive but when you look at it at home, it feels bleh? That is our friend light doing magic. The lights in the shopping places are so made to make things look attractive and cool. Also, different colors of white do give you different emotions. If you compare buying something in white light to buying something in yellow light, you would feel a difference. White may feel a bit cooler and you would spend more time there than the yellow one.
I am a photographer and I love to play with light. The best thing I have learnt by doing photography is to control the light and get some desired results. Results that would seem extraordinary in real life. I draw things with a flashlight or just let the light move and do its magic. Lights are extremely flexible. What comes complimentary with lights is darkness. I feel that lights and darkness are not opposites in the literal sense but the pair that would only exist with the presence of other.
Often, lights and darkness are equated to good and evil, hope and despair. I think that is very basic in its true sense. I love darkness. I remember one of the rare instances when I had a chance to live in complete darkness. I was in a cave and we were using flashlights to navigate. After reaching a substantial part inside the cave, we were to switch off our flashlights. The feeling of darkness was like no other. It was complete 100 % darkness. Something that we do not find easily now. Even when you look at the sky to see the stars, you are prevented to see each of them because of light pollution.
However, lights never go dim if you switch them off. It never goes bleh and stops working if you say no to them. I think rejection and refusal is like that. Often,we have so many instances wherein people are so afraid to say no. Be it just walking inside a store and coming out empty-handed or saying no to a relative for a dinner that they invited us for. Everything is so ingrained in us that rejection feels like the absolute end of everything. It does not feel like darkness but it feels a point wherein no light or darkness exists. That is the most terrible thing to have in life. People are also afraid to ask out to their crush or the person that they like because they are afraid of rejection. I guess everything comes to a single thread- conditioning. We are so hammered by subtle references and examples that we would rather make up an absurd excuse like a relative died than to say to our teacher that I did not feel like doing the homework. I mean, there is no place for honesty in the world we have built for ourselves. I have a lot of friends that would give me a reason or two when they refuse something or reject an idea.
The feeling of saying no for the sake of it seems like digging out a diamond together, assessing its value, and finally stealing it and running away from the person you dug it out with. There seems no basis for this connection and logically, there is no connection between diamonds and saying no. But that is exactly the whole point of rejection and refusals. There should not be any reason to do so. I do not remember people asking me why when I agree to something immediately. I remember people asking or saying different things as soon as a disagreement or refusal is put in their way.
In many cases, it so happens that the opposite person starts to feel insecure and odd when a refusal is laid down. It feels like a personal attack on the relationship and the very personality of theirs. The person would invariably try to convince you. Maybe even bribe you. If you are lucky, with some handsome gifts like a car or Taj Mahal, if you are unlucky, then with an eclair. Walking off with integrity to a refusal is like shining bright after the light is switched off and on.
Remember simple games like switching on and off the lights? No matter how often you play them, the bulb or the light stays the same. It does not throw tantrums or feel insecure about its own glow. It shines as it used to and it will do so until it meets its end.
Yep. That is the connection between lights and refusal. You do not stop shining because someone said no to receive it. You stop shining when you do not want to. No is a simple word. Amitabh Bacchan had to act in a full movie to explain the lexicon and its meaning. It was like an exhaustive explanation. It is not only related to major things like rejecting someone for a romantic relationship or a sexual act but also for something as puny as giving them your water bottle.
How beautiful it would be if the world understood this! Wait, maybe not. If people started understanding everything this simply, I would run out of things to write my open letters on! Haaye GareebI! Staying a bit dumb goes a long way for everyone. One can only shine after there is darkness na?
Chalo. Thanks for bearing the bakbak. Like every time, I had little clue about what I am going to pour out here. Hope you had fun reading it. As always, here is a comic to lighten your day.
My tryst with light.
Have a nice day with this song-
Raj’s Meanderings
Lights (camera) and rejection
Can’t say I have given much of a thought to light in the philosophical sense. And connecting it to rejection, I don’t think it ever even occurred to me. Let’s see how it turns out
So lights, I can see it in two senses, one would be the human-made light and the other the natural light. And both are quite interesting. In the last edition about cupboards and washrooms we went on to discuss the safe spaces, vulnerability, and privacy which I think can be given a thought in the context of light as well. Doesn’t light allow us to be seen? To be in the public sphere? And to be acknowledged? To be known? This would however also mean that we are in a very conscious state under light, the human one at least. And there can be some scary and intimidating lights as well which might make us even more conscious, imagine facing something like it when on an interview for something. On the other hand, the absence of light, the dark helps us relax, and release a lot of our worries from the day world at least. As we become vulnerable, enter into a safe space, and gain some privacy, it might be our internal thoughts that come to haunt us. This aspect would remain true for even the natural dark or nighttime. In that time we get a sense of being with ourselves, being slightly away from the world. And I suppose it sometimes turns out to be a very refreshing and fun time while being quite tormenting on some occasions. We might be safe from the world’s judgments and rejections during this time but then our inner self has been trained well by the cruel world by now. It might arise on this opportunity to judge, reject, or just be overall unkind to our own self. Darkness also brings a sense of desolation, of helplessness...you don’t know where you are, you don’t know where to go. At least mentally if not physically. Often i see people who sleep late, mostly because they can’t sleep and their experiences during the night often turn out to be long and weary guilt trips, introspections flights, or on some odd days peaceful co-existence with self (music or nature of the humans might have to do something with it :p). People also tend to kill their time during the night by taking refuge behind their screens, just so that they can keep that ship of thoughts at bay. I have come to know this by seeing people around me, so I am not judging anything or anyone, I myself go through these phases on some rare night that I am awake. Sometimes when I see others who want to sleep but can’t I feel quite blessed and grateful to have a body and mind that wants to sleep and can by the time it's around 10 in the night. Sometimes I feel I am missing out on something, my romance with the dark probably but then I feel happy that I can have a good share of both worlds. I may not be able to take all that comes my way if we're up all the night till late (nor would my body or mind support it).
Okay, after this long blabber about the light, dark, and night, let me consider rejection. One heck of a topic to write on this is. Who wants to write about it man? Rejection isn’t ideally the kind of topic you want to write on because it would mean diving deeper into yourself, and unlocking the doors you shut firmly. Isn’t that also something that happens in the dark, at night? First of all I think I’ll take this opportunity to rant against our society and culture which reinforces rejection in such a negative light, it’s probably worse than even an ugly giant. I mean rejection is sometimes made to feel worse than dying, how much more crazy can we get! I feel rejection should be quite normalized and at least be neutralized if not made into something positive. Rejection is after all not the end of things, most often it is a beginning! You hear those stories right, of film stars, sports stars, writers, and influencers about how many rejections they face, and yet they kept going and achieved something, yet we fail to position rejection as something understandable and normal. There is also the ugly side of rejection, it hurts, it burns your heart many times, no matter how positively you try to take it. And for every one story of J.K Rowling rising to fame despite rejection, I think there would be thousands of stories of writers who got buried in time at the hands of rejection. So rejection shouldn’t even be glorified I suppose. The ideal way to understand it would be on the line of what Thomas Bruce and Alfred did when Bruce Wayne was confronted with pain and his fears first as a child first and later as Batman, his father and later Alfred say this to him: “Why do we fall? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.” This is what I feel ideally should be the lens to see rejection. Rejection has great power, it can either save people by igniting something in them and pushing them to be the best version or it can simply crush a soul and kill people, not metaphorically but also literally.
Now, after a heavy dose of gyaan on rejection, I guess I can’t avoid any further from coming to the personal. So I feel I have been quite blessed to not have faced many rejections in life, at least none major be it in romantic life, academic life, personal life, or my recently launched career. This makes me feel quite good and all but when i sat down to give it a deeper thought i could figure a probable reason for this and my god it was a bit unnerving. I realized that I have not been trying a lot of things to have failed or been rejected at them. I am the kind of kid who has mostly played safe in life and even there tried to do things quite perfectly all the time. This reminds me of a quote (that I read in another newsletter called ‘Anticipating the unintended’) by Brene Brown from her book “The Gifts of Imperfection” and it did hit hard:
“Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be your best. Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfectly, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame. It’s a shield. It’s a twenty-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it’s the thing that’s really preventing us from the flight.”
I feel I have been hiding behind this shield for a larger part of my life, I still am kind of behind it. It takes some courage to do something and fail, to do something you know you are not good at and might fail. Rejection comes when we try, but most of the time we don’t even try! I know I am confusing you by putting rejection and failure both together but I think both are entangled a bit. Failure might still be personal sometimes but rejection is more likely to be from an external source and the running BOGO offer on it also gets you humiliation at no extra cost.
Having written this there are two things that evolved in my own thinking, first is to normalize rejection (not glorify); and the other thing is that do not let the fear of rejection stop you from trying. That sweet girl/boy/individual you’ve had a crush on for ages, go tell them. The course that you always wanted to enroll for but never actually did, go for it, and the job you want but feel aren’t qualified for, just apply to it for heaven’s sake. Do not reject yourself even before the world rejects you! At least let the poor entertainment-deprived-and-humorless-world have the pleasure of feeling good about themself by rejecting you if and when it comes to it.
Let me stop right here before it becomes a novel, also I don’t want Harsh to go crazy editing my meanderings.
A nice little post about rising beyond doubt, fear, judgement, and rejection.
A fun video about a puppet’s frustrated conversation with moon:
That is all from our side for this edition! See you all ! Happy Janmashtmi and have a great weekend! :D Like, share, comment, subscribe, send kabootars, throw your devices and computers, and make us famous! :P
Worth the wait.