Pick Your Poison

If life is just various ways of killing time, then at least we get to pick our poison.

It's been almost two months since I've been living with my family friend in Bangalore, and while I'm beyond grateful and privileged to have a safe place to stay and a consistent stream of food to fill my stomach, quarantine and living in uncertain times comes with its own set of questions.

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When will this end? What if I had stayed in the dorm with my friends? What if I had gone back to the US? What do I do when this does end? Does everything just go back to normal? Do we pretend that the whole world didn't go on pause for half a year? Ok, so say that this doesn't end anytime soon. What do I do with all this...time?

Minerva is the deliberate and complete opposite of a quarantine. They tell you to go out and explore the city. Don't stay inside, meet new people, spread those pesky little ideas. And now, even though our academic classes didn't really change, the consequences of that kind of life definitely did. Now we have to stay inside, we shouldn't meet new people, and as if a global pandemic wasn't bad enough, it seems like the ideas that are spreading fast are more often than not the ones that are not helpful or not fact checked. Or both.

Ok. But it is important to stay informed, I tell myself. But the more I read the news, the more frustrated and angry and lost I become. I know it's important to stay informed, but when the whole world is scrutinizing this one, huge, seemingly insurmountable thing, I can't help but start picturing the apocalypse or the plot of some frustratingly ridiculous YA utopian novel. Ok. So don't read too much news. What else can you do?

Well, I could just watch tv and ride it out. I can work through those movies on my list that I didn't get to because of the busy student life. I mean they're saying it's only one more week right? Let's just wait it out, I naively thought to myself. So I watched a couple movies, and then a couple episodes of a show, which incrementally became a couple seasons of a couple shows, until I found myself consistently staying up till 3 or 4 or 5 am because the longer I stayed awake, that harder it was to quiet the noises and ruckus in my head. I guess that's not thaaaat bad, since I don't really have anywhere to be and school ended a couple weeks ago. I have no one to answer to but myself. Who would've thought being your own boss sucks though. Ok. So this is not sustainable. You can't just watch TV all day, Amulya. Besides, those eyes are burning for a reason.

HHnnnggng....ok so maybe I can be productive. I can stop moping around and staring at the wall and trying to w a i t this madness out, and I can do something about it. But what? What do I want to do to be productive?

A lot of people are saying that this quarantine is what the world needed right now. A reset. A pause button so we can all catch our collective breath and reevaluate how we ended up in this mess. Putting aside the socioeconomic implications and the long term psychological havoc that this will wreak on society after we deal with the virus... maybe this is an opportunity to reset.

I've been doing a lot of reflecting, (honestly probably too much reflecting than is good for me) and found this lack of certainty as an experiment in picking poisons. Humor me for a minute.

Say one day you wake up and find yourself trapped in a room that you have never been in before. You try the door and try to pick the lock, but no luck. There's no way out. Littered around the room are various objects that serve as weapons of distraction. Some even align with your interests. There's a TV with unlimited shows, mountains of junk food that replenish themselves in a blink, and other more benign tools like a guitar, some books, a blue yoga mat.

There are things that you know and things that you don't know. You're here, you either will or will not get out of this, and you have all this stuff lying around. You know that. You can't really change any of that. You don't know how you got here, and you don't know what you'll do when/if you'll get out, and honestly you don't know how much of this you could take. You can't really change any of that either.

Whether you see it as a curse or a gift, chaos or an opportunity, all you're really left with are choices. You could watch TV till your eyes bleed, depending on what you watch and for how long, it might poison your brain and dull your mind. You could bang on the door until bruises seep through your skin, but what's the likelihood that someone will hear you or help you. All you know for sure is that it will hurt you. Honestly, you could choose to be more productive. You could instead take advantage of that yoga mat and finally get into shape. Build some muscle. Prepare for a war. But you can't just incessantly workout 24/7. You have to let your body stop and breathe. Recover. Rebuild. Anything in excess will turn to poison. And the only person stopping you from poison is yourself.

I know that's a little dramatic, lol, but my point is: you have to pick your poison wisely. And drink only so much as it won't kill you. That's all we can do.

Strategize. And in the beginning, take the time to properly panic. I think that is very necessary. It is important to recognize the gravity of the situation and the depth of the uncertainty, because how truly different is this moment from the rest of our lives? We have an unspecified amount of time to live with unspecified objectives and millions of guidebooks filled with conjecture about the outcome. How different is the rest of lives from a room full of distractions? After all, aren't we simply filling the time with careers and families and drama, just so the sheer meaninglessness of it doesn't crush us every moment of every day?

So what you do is this: Much like if you were trapped in a space ship or a room or your houses or this painful yet excruciatingly beautiful existence, you survive by picking your poison. Which you then use to kill time, not yourselves. You take the four prison walls and turn them into sacred grounds for different sacred purposes. One for your daily yoga. One for your chill TV time. One for sleeping. Etc. You create a routine. There is no night to tell you when to sleep and no mother to wake you up in the morning, so create your own time. The guitar that you never really had time for in your "busy" schedule now has its own place carved out in your routine. And it's not only a part of schedule, but a part of your sanity, a part of your purpose.

There are so many things in life that I worry about. Who I am. Who I am going to be. Am I doing the right thing? Am I letting people down? What if I don't make anything useful? What if what if what if?

That "if" is what is tormenting us. The possibility that the world will reopen and resume functionality as if this pandemic was merely the pause button on a Black Mirror episode. That "if" is what planted seeds of uncertainty and confusion in our minds, seeds that we unknowingly watered with "staying informed" or "waiting it out".

It took me a while, and the first couple of weeks of quarantine I definitely did spiral, but I think I'm getting the hang of it now. Slowly but surely I'm starting to realize the incongruency between the distractions I choose in normal life and the distractions I make time for in quarantine. I'm questioning the difference between the people I used to lean on and the shoulders I'm seeking out now. And yes, it SUCKS to be stuck inside for an indefinite period of time with unpredictable consequences and undefined purpose, but I'm confident I've found the right cocktail of poison for myself to keep the anxiety at bay.

It has a little bit of working out, a little bit of movies, a little bit of writing songs, and a little bit of dancing. It's got a dash of writing and learning a new language. And a dash of talking to new people and reaching out to old ones. It's got just a pinch of philosophizing, cuz we all know what to much of that can do to a person. And lastly, it's enjoyed chilled, in the relaxing corner of my room.

There's no secret to sanity, and honestly, there are days I wonder if picking between poisons is even a choice. There are days when all I can do is lay in bed and watch the ceiling fan spin and spin and spin until my head swirls enough to numb the chaos.

But for now, we have one objective: Make sure that the Amulya that comes out of Quarantine is a better Amulya than the one that went in. No matter the cost. No matter the poison.