Blaming Literature.

I lost myself somewhere when I set out on the journey of finding myself.

Having no idea that I was somebody to someone, I decided to fly my wings and test the uncharted waters.

Inside, I thought I had no identity, or maybe I just didn’t know I had one, which was associated with some semblance of me.

I set out doing what I love, and it changed me, it changed me for the better or for the worse, I am yet to find out, but in the journey of attaining my love, I lost everything else.

I went through an unexplainable, unacceptable change with no return. I heard people calling out for me, screaming my name. Despite trying to hold myself back, I couldn’t. I got lost in the sea of wonders it gave me. Every day seemed to me like a new adventure, a new perspective, an eye-opener, and it just charmed me into its trap deeper and deeper.

And now that I am well trapped with nowhere to go, it has instilled a sense of loss in me. It has left me in the middle of its depths with no life jacket with which I can save myself. I am drowning in the pools of my own passion. Do I regret it? Would you ever regret love?

When Hester Prynne didn’t regret loving Dimmesdale despite being publicly shamed, do you think any other women will? Women are passionate creatures, ready to sacrifice it all for the sake of it.

We are ambitious and created in a way that we want to achieve all that we desire, even if we lose some on the way. We justify it all inside us, inside our minds, and have an internal justice system that is governed by what we learn as moral values and what we pick up from the society around us.

I have turned into a woman who is nowhere close to who she wanted to become; she is in a process, a work in progress. Maybe she always will be or maybe she will reach a destination where she will take a breath of peace but right now, in this present moment, she is as lost as the boat and the mariner in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner who was punished for the sin of the mariner committed without even knowing.

Literature does that to you. It has that power. It has the power to manipulate you in a cave and leave you there with no guide to finding your way out of it, and that is when you start understanding Plato’s theory of the cave.

Literature gives you that little light from time to time, but never makes you feel limited, you are free as the Skylark, yet as bound in the passions of literature as those in the cave due to the fear of what lies beyond.

You have immersed yourself in literature so much that now any other light terrifies you but you need to step out and explore that light since what I have learned is that light is just a continuation of the passion, that light will envelop you from all around that you will feel literature embrace you and guide you through it.

And if you find yourself in a position like mine, with so much love for literature but no way to express it, then just let yourself go and pour your heart out in a blog like mine, since literature is life, and life cannot be limited to a few hundred words.