Being You: Inside and Outside, And Embracing All Moments of Life With Love
I am Saj. My closest call me Sajju. My given name is Sajatha, with all the "A"s pronounced as short vowels. I am an artist. Self-proclaimed. No one called me one and turns out I don't need to be called or labeled by someone else to be who I am as I define myself.
I have been writing since I am very young. Under 10 maybe. Reading longer than that. Everything I am today, I have to give my gratitude to these two actions. As I read, as I wrote, I built worlds and characters inside my mind. I lived more inside my head than outside. The outside world was unforgiving and unkind to different ones. So, I built my own world. And I still live in it from time to time.
It took me 35 years and a lot of therapy to accept that,
I am not an anomaly.
I am not a misfit.
I am not a mistake.
I am me.
A flawed, wonderfully misunderstood, caught, and conflicted between two worlds, loving and caring creatures just like everyone else.
It took time, patience, lots of going back and forth, denial, refusal, and finally acknowledgment to accept myself.
The narrative we get since we are minutes old often define the majority of who we think we are. The truth is, we are not. We do come with innate characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. But rest, we build based on the life we live, through mistakes, failures, success, love, loss, grief, through experience. But we, most of us do not get to that state. It's easy to live someone else's definition than define and hold yourself accountable to live by that.
At 35, I decided to step away from the narrative that was given to me. And slowly brought out the 'me' I had been carrying around hidden. It cost me a lot of things and people. But gave me liberation. Writing, expressing openly what I thought was an absolutely necessary part of breaking the barriers of fear.
When I started this page as part of writing publicly, I did for myself. I never expected anyone to read or get these many people added to it.
What I wanted to do was simple. Tell the good, the bad. And the ugly.
After all, life does have everything.
As I wrote, it started evolving into sharing real stories or snippets that others could use to not feel alone.
Life is beautiful. I believe that with every cell of mine. True love, love that flows from the heart can fix most of the broken things in this world. I think that too. But we don’t love anyone anymore. I think some of us took the self-love a bit too far.
A friend’s message made me think a little and then write this. Yes, I struggle. But so does everyone else. All I do here is to speak up about it. So that we stop suffering in isolation.
I have 1000s of happy moments and as many sad moments every day. It’s life. Finding it's on balance.
As I let the night come in, I leave you all with hope. A hope that you love everyone and everything as dearly as possible.
"Life waits for no one.
You either exists or Live."
Luv
Saj
ps: I wrote this yesterday night, half of it. And finished the other half now. But I am leaving the last half as it is because it is what my heart wanted to say.
