“Okay, we are so not looking at Instagram for another 12 hours.”
I push my phone deep under my pillow, it’s 1:00 a.m. I roll over on my side and contemplate my life choices. I even pretend I’m on a celebrity talk show and impart insights into my life as the crowd goes wild. But there’s one living thing in the audience whose attention has drifted. Bored, this being is listlessly scrolling through instagram – and you guessed right, that thing is my right hand.
Lodged between my legs, I have no clue when this sneaky little b*tch made her way under the pillow to get my phone to begin with.
Next thing I know, I’ve abruptly left my fantasy talk show. I’m 15 instagram holiday stories down and doing mental math fast enough to make both my Abacus teacher and my dad proud. I’ve calculated how many leaves I have, opened tabs on Make My Trip looking for the cheapest holiday, another tab has my amazon cart pilling up with skin care products, another has my bank balance out – I’m frantically over-working my brain.
Congratulations idiot, once again it’s 3:00 a.m. on a Tuesday night. “That’s right Ritika, good job.” My inner self-chastising alter-ego is now fully awake. “You spend weeknights awake, planning and plotting your grand escape.” “You’ve been awake (and irritable) working (im)patiently towards the weekend, the one that’s glowing, like a comforting light at the end of this gloomy tunnel – when slam. That beacon of hope was just the sleep train, waiting to knock you down on Friday night. It’s now 5 p.m. on a Sunday and you’ve done squat.”
The rebuke continues with some more yelling and high-pitched drama from myself to, myself. “The nerve of you – to cancel Saturday night plans to catch up on sleep THAT YOU’VE BEEN MISSING OUT ON THE WHOLE WEEK BECAUSE YOU WERE TOO STUPID TO SLEEP? Get your shit together.”
But when I’ve finally put the phone away, and pulled my blanket over my head, I feel like, maybe I’m too afraid to fall asleep naturally. There’s thoughts in my mind that I don’t want to address, so I replace them with things from the internet, a book or even the product leaflet of a face cream.
They’re not deep, dark, repressed thoughts – just the basic shit.
I hope to find the courage, to ask myself, “what did you do to get so brave. What changed, that made you stop crying over the things you spent days mulling over. What day did you decide that you were no longer scared to speak in public – and when did you stop caring about what people thought when you showed more skin, waxed less often, stopped drinking, stopped smoking” Not just the good stuff, the bad stuff too, like, “When did you become so impatient?” “What stops you from sleeping on time?”
My hope is to find courage, and not ‘find myself’, I’m not really lost. I just want to learn who I truly am, beyond the filters, the stories and that instagram life. So that next time, the next social media or dating app asks me for a bio, it won’t be that hard to crack. 😛 jk
Comments