Sacrifice or Joy.

Don't we come across one too many people touting the certificate of sacrifice and martyrdom they have faced in the name of relationships and love. If I were to give one piece of advice to them (Not that I am asked to give many!) it would be this - Don't!!! For the sake of yourself and the sake of those you think you are doing it for, please Don't. It is a very simple thing - if you see it as a great sacrifice that you do for someone else then it is making you miserable and that is making the others feel the same way as well - guilty and like they owe you something in return. These aren't really productive feelings when it comes to love and happiness.

I'll give my own example. When my kid was born I made the choice to not work for a couple of years. To spend that time with him. Now this is NOT a "SACRIFICE" I made for HIM. This is my life choice I made because I wanted to spend quality time with My Baby and that made ME happy. Why is this difficult? 

It starts from the moment people decide to have kid. Like it was a great sacrifice you made for the child to carry him/her in your womb for 9 months and bring him to this world. Really?  I thought it was a choice made out of wanting a child for YOURSELF. There are a lot many other sacrifices we hear about. For eg. one of the two spouses deciding to leave their jobs or change their jobs to move and be with the other. Again, if you see this as a great sacrifice you are making for your significant other, then you are making both of yourselves miserable for life and heading for some major troubles. However, if this is a decision one would make for oneself because for you being with the other is more important than that particular job in that particular city; Basically being with the family gives greater happiness than being in a job but away from the family; then you take that pick. Don't see it as a sacrifice and more importantly don't tout it on another's face all the time. If you know that leaving this job would make you miserable and unhappy then just don't do it. Seriously. The sacrifice value of that misery is really not worth the unhappiness and unpleasantness going all around.

I have always maintained that a happy healthy relationship is a selfish relationship, by which I do not mean that don't give a damn about the other person. The point I make is, if giving a damn about the other person gives YOU a sense of joy, then it is going right. If giving a damn about other person earns you, inside your head, only a certificate of sacrifices you've made, and you are planing to achieve your joy from knowing you are a martyr then it is just wrong. So bloody wrong. And so bloody sad.

Moral: Make compromises that make you happy to make them for the others. Not ones that give you pain and then you expect to feed off that pain and expect constant gratitude and super extra consideration from others all their life, cos you caused yourself pain. That just sucks to have to be around! 

P.S This one started off as a general observation post as nothing happened to piss me off while writing this. However, while I was writing this I thought of 2 - 3 characters in my life and just worked myself up to a frenzy. Hence the tone. :D

The Ill-wishers!

Why is there so much compulsion in the world to talk bad about others. 

Recently I have been reading conversations on a few whatsapp groups where everyone is super supportive of each other, helping each other when doubts and concerns are raised, complimenting each other on new looks, sharing recipes and movie reviews, being a support group when needed and genuinely being good to each other. These are people who met about 15 years back, then got on with their own lives and as life always comes around a full circle, have now come back together to find friendship, solace and lots of fun in each others' company. Seeing this gives me a lot of faith in humanity. 

Then there are my own precious friends. People, knowing that I'm a right klutz in making an effort to keep in touch, knowing that I am not very good at sharing my deepest, darkest, have still been around and have always shared the comfort to pick up the phone after months, even years, and start talking like the last conversation was yesterday. People that have such huge hearts, they support their friends through thick and thin, stand by and never judge. People whose convictions in me and my decisions have helped me way more than I could ever express to them in my very limited vocabulary of expressing feelings. And they strengthen my belief in humanity and kindness that much more. 

And then there are these others, the ones that motivated me to write this post. The ones who have really no place in our lives except for being acquainted by circumstances. I have seen a few of these people around among all the other caring, appreciative supportive ones. Not only can they ever wish anything good for others, let alone actually helping, they seem to take a lot of glee from when something sad (read that as 'newsworthy') befalls others. And if they can't find anything really sad or negative to talk about and judge, they will make things out of thin air.

I have gone through stuff in life that have brought me to a lot of junctures where I'd have been judged and talked ill about. And I am sure a lot of these people would have had a field day (or a few years) of doing just that. (Thankfully, I have the friends I mentioned earlier and of course my family, who helped that sailing be not-as-rough as it could have been.) But what's even worse is when these people don't have anything new to say. The unexplained hatred and the need to fuel this negativity is so great that they would even end up saying something as random as "What's so great about the photos she shares of herself with her kid! I don't see why she should put photos of her and her kid on FB as profile photos" (!!!!!) when someone happens to mention in their presence that this person's photos on fb are nice or something random like that. Erm...need? I mean what is this intrinsic compulsion these people feel to HAVE TO be so negative and hateful and mean? Is it insecurity about their own lives? Is it pure jealousy? Is it the need to validate their own lives and decisions by showing other people's as worse? What could be that factor, that driving force behind wanting and having to feel only bad things for other people especially who they really have next to no direct interactions with? It beats the hell out of me the kind of negativity and filth these people's brains might be filled with to always have such things on the ready. And also, isn't this kind of negativity festering inside their own minds bad for them? To nurture so much hatred and negativity and always say bad things, don't their own minds have to be a sad, dark, vengeful place?

Let me also just say this at the risk of being hated and called an anti-feminist(!!!), most of them that I have come across are mostly who us Indian kids identify as "aunties", ladies of a/or a few generations back. No I am NOT generalizing. I know a lot of really cool, awesome, caring supportive ones as well. I am sharing what I have experienced. (Basically, I am only saying the apples I have seen are mostly red, NOT that everything red is an apple.) Anyways, the very cliche picture of kitty party aunties bitching and gossiping and wishing only bad on others and deriving oh so much happiness after that is, like all other cliches, come from too much of reality. It is just sad to see. But, once again ending this on a high note, it really is so so heartening to see more and more people of my generation going the extra mile to be nice and positive and make that bond. (Lovely thought!) I really hope this is a changing trend of humanity and not just another cycle where a lot of us will eventually grow up into being those aunties. (Scary thought!)