Ep 10- New year

Hello and welcome back to Being Meraklis a podcast by Shwetha Sivaraman.

For those of you tuning in for the very first time, my name is Shwetha Sivaraman and Being Meraklis is a podcast about life through my journey of self-discovery. A reminder that we are not alone in this journey and on the simple things we can do to make this life a memorable and beautiful experience.

Hope you have had a happy holiday, indeed. While Being Meraklis took just a short break from podcasting, I could not wait to get back to recording my next episode. I usually try and spend a few days off social media every year and took a complete break this year from Christmas to New Years and it was beautiful. I will park talking about social media detoxing for some other day.

Today I want to talk about something I have been trying to achieve for myself in the last one month. December always makes you wonder where all this time has gone by. This year made me go further back in time with all the talk about the end of the decade as well. Looking back 10 years feels like it was ages ago. So much has changed, the 2009 me is almost unrecognizable from where I stand today. So many changes have happened, so many things never planned for. Mostly for the good. A lot of uncertainty I felt in retrospective seem to have moved in the right direction. I have evolved as an individual much more stronger, as a person who knows what she wants, as a person who knows what her boundaries are, and as a person who knows who has learnt to appreciate her limitations as much as her strengths.

But somewhere along this reflection I realized there was one thing the 2009 Me had that I no longer have. As a kid who had just finished her 12th with absolutely no plan on where I wanted to go apart from being a entrepreneur some day, I used to be happy-go-lucky. The Shwetha who never had a care in the world apart from what was going on right at that very moment. I was never hung up on what the future had in store, did not carry years of hurt and wounds, and felt much lighter emotionally. And the more I thought about it, I realized that’s how I want to begin the new decade, letting go of the unnecessary emotional baggage that we can do without and live and breathe a little easier.

As a kid I used to wonder what on earth adults meant when they kept discussing amongst each other about the baggage you end up carrying as you grow older. I used to wonder, why they never can just keep the baggage aside if it was really that heavy. Little did I know it was much more complicated than that. We walk around carrying so much remorse, anger, regret, guilt, fear, stress, anxiety, and shame.

Every single thing in life that does not quite go our way adds to the emotional baggage. Lost friends, messed up relationships, failures, and our own progress compared to where we wanted us to be. With every incident we only accumulate, the pile becomes heavier and starts taking a toll on our self-esteem, confidence, and holds us back from achieving our fullest potential.

More often than not they are just unprocessed emotions. Have you noticed how as adults we immediately have a coping mechanism for every negative emotion? If something unexpected happens we immediately say It was never meant to be. It was never good for us. Something better is in store. As adults we are capable of finding points to argue on both the sides and we soothe ourselves with empty words without allowing ourselves to feel anything negative. We succumb to the society’s demand of being a well-grounded person – who needs to always look good, feel good. An individual that is happy and always sorted does not have time for negative emotions like sadness, remorse, or guilt. And so we stride on, filling up the void of unprocessed emotions with something completely irrelevant.

Not just that, we refuse to show or tell what we actually feel as well. I have always noticed it with my loved ones, the greater number of times I ask the same question, the more truth that comes out with every answer.

So let me ask you, How are you feeling today? How are you really feeling today? I mean really deep deep down? 

As Adults we are always well behaved. We are trained to toe the line no matter how we feel. We might be a wreck from within, but just before we head out we pinch our cheeks, puff ourselves a bit, wear our masks and pretend like everything is fine.

We might be crumbling on the inside. Shaken with rage, ready to break everything within our hands reach. But we have been taught what to do in such situations. We give ourselves instructions, quietly, to take deep breaths count reverse from 100 to 1.

We are trained to never let our emotions surface, eventually we forget that the diplomatic face is not us. We forget that there were real emotions beneath

As children we were taught a language to be able to express what we thought and felt deep within. But as adults it’s like we learnt the language and were taught silence too – the wailing happened still but on the inside. Unseen by any and never unleashed unless probed deeper. And this buried silence weighs us down even more than unprocessed emotions cause we know what we feel but are not taking any steps to resolve that angst.  

While it may not be possible to shed all the baggage we have accumulated over the years on a single day, but we can accept the limitations of what we carry and strive to not add further to it.

As we step into a brand new decade, if there’s one thing I want for myself and for you, my listeners, is to be able to shed the burden of all the unnecessary emotions from the past and taking life as it comes.

To wake up everyday and give our utmost best in everything we do. To accept our mistakes when we commit them and learn from them instead of feeling guilt or shame. To critique ourselves a little less and be more appreciative of the milestones we achieve. To allow ourselves the liberty to feel sadness or grief in moments where things in our control could have been done better.

To feel free to communicate without fear of judgement our negative emotions and thoughts with our loved ones just as much as we share happy memories and achievements. To seek help without hurting our ego when we feel the need to be supported.

Let us open our hearts and minds to an all-new decade and live life bigger and better with no strings attached. Here’s hoping for a fabulous 2020.

Thank you for tuning in. If you like what you listen to, rate, review and subscribe to my podcasts, and be sure to drop me a Hello on my Instagram handle @beingmeraklis to share your feedback, thoughts, suggestions, or simply to have interesting conversations.