it was conference season in delhi. I had set myself three difficult tasks: initiate conversation with three specific people, each much older and more senior than me, each a somewhat awkward conversation, one a purely professional "are you aware of my existence" that might be a future tap for a recommendation, the second a very personal "how are you" after the loss of a spouse that I don't know why I kept feeling persuaded to ask because the person left behind is genuinely very nice, and the third a somewhat acknowledgement of my tangled feelings of awe, intimidation, attraction. I am proud I kinda did all three, not very suavely, with very few words (and more body language), but with outcomes that would pass a binary assessment. I feel strangely and simultaneously light and satiated. today, unlike all other evenings post professional/social meetings, I don't think I will be regaling him with post-analytic tales of every wrong word or sentence I blabbered...

I'm reading Virginia Woolf; feels like I couldn't possibly have read her works at any other time in my life but exactly now. 

A few weeks ago I just felt like therapy wasn't helping us any more, especially not teaching me anything more. Coincidentally, things have been feeling more like our early days and years, not because of therapy but just because. I felt like the need to go to therapy, or that to fix something, was possibly misplaced. Even though it taught us things.

Getting older has been more sobering lately. There have been more than 5 people I've had conversations and connections with worth reminiscing. But yes conversation, the idea of it, the potential it holds, is limiting or is limited. So much more is said by a look, a pivoting of someone's gaze or body toward or away from me, shock and embarrassment, chuckles, and involuntary bodily reactions, ...

There's a conversation without words I have been having with someone for about 6 years now, over rare sightings a year or two apart. What will I say if I could talk? Would anything be valid be true and be sayable? Would trying to put a form to that inexplicable thing kill it in the process? There is a restless anxiety to talk and to communicate, and yet the past has taught me that I have wasted it and that it dies it's death after a futile bout of time.

There were times I wondered why he wasn't insecure of my affections, why never jealous. He said it was because I always told him things. Once he did get angry, frustrated. Makes me smile today when I think of his lack of insecurity regarding me, as he sleeps peacefully while I lie around restless in the middle of the night, reading and writing. We have both been sensible, patient, and loving, even when we couldn't make love, or I couldn't desire him. 

But also sex is more and less than everything people attribute to it.

I haven't had the time to write about many things. about our panic and failed attempt at snorkeling in La Jolla caves in the cold pacific ocean in July. about visiting the US after five years. about mexican food and people, and swimming in cenotes - the cave pools created possibly by the impact of the meteor that erased dinosaurs from earth. about our visit to Ghana (erstwhile Gold Coast) and how the tragic history of slave trade and the opposite of anger that I saw in people's faces there has changed me, made me more humble and compassionate. how we made friends with a local cat in Elmina - the place that reminded us of Goa, both Portuguese colonies around beautiful seas - and how the owner said that locals look at you funny if they see you trying to make pets of animals. how I've started to also recognise the beauty of the glow of darker skin; how I was mistaken yet again for an Ethiopian; how I roamed about alone and random people showed me things; how some flavors in their fermented foods and meat stews were way too strong for me and made me smile while I couldn't continue to eat them. about how I felt my life's journey was taking me to places that felt like pieces of a jigsaw that told the story of America and the world, of the intertwined fates of humans, and how now I want to visit South Carolina to dig into the Gullah food and culture.  

about the apocalyptic levels of air pollution (about a week of 400plus pm2.5 and a couple more weeks forecasted) in Delhi this Oct-Nov where people are walking about without masks making you wonder whether their belief of you believing this to be harmful and hiding from it behind your masks and air purifiers is in fact your fragility and your woke-ness. about transitioning to flowy skirts as I grow older. about a slow acceptance of having aged, while airport officials in Accra still marvelled at my age (and also told me that Indian brides are in demand there because they pay good bride price; technically African ideas of bride price imply the groom's family paying the bride's, quite the opposite of dowry in India).

A realization has been perplexing to me, but it persists and is pressing to be more concrete than I at first thought it might be: people often say exactly the opposite of what they want to say.

Sex education is a very good TV series with beautifully thought out characters who are complex yet consistent. There are actors in it I can never like in other roles, they feel so true to their characters in this show. 

And I started reading Alain de Botton's How Proust can change your life. It is funny, amusing, revelatory and engaging.

Both are reinforcing my realization. 

I dig ideas, and values. And I admire them in others and am attracted to them. Psychoanalysis doesn't quite admit such statements as stand-alone. It reduces every action every behavior every habit and personality characteristic as arising from a need or a need to alleviate personal distress. It wears it's own convenient blinders, and uses it's own convenient language to twist meaning to suit it's perception of succeeding to explain. "a higher need". which I call ambition, because one can easily survive without it but chooses not to in pursuit of a goal. Maybe one 'needs' a goal, you could say; maybe one needs ambition; possibly because without it one perceives life and this world to be pointless and hopeless. But you couldn't say that the ambition satisfies the need for hope then. Or would you? It is somewhat similar to how economics has reduced altruism to 'warm glow'. In both philosophies, one wouldn't do something unless it made one better off, satisfied some need or gave some reward or alleviate some pain or personal distress.

I am reading Sherry Turkle's Empathy Diaries. I was struck by how she says the youth of the 70s, politically conscious and active and idealistic, rejected psychoanalysis' diagnoses of their idealism and actions arising from self distress. That's how I felt when my admiration for and attraction to courage was reduced to my need for the other to listen to my point of view; my need to interrupt and argue against patriarchy taken to be arising from personal distress; neither made sense, neither satisfied me. Unless you argue that I have a need to feel and be different, from others around me; a need to feel non-ordinary.

Turkle also talks about how her work was initially rejected because it seemed unlike the establishment, even questioning it. I remember telling the interviewer who came some months ago researching the question of gender in economics academia, that possibly women collaborated less with other people because the nature of research was defined by men into these tight boxes into which women's ideas, thoughts, methods, and work probably didn't fit very well, and that this might lead to a reluctance from women to collaborate (with men).

And then today I read Marilynne Robinson, "There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival or procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. .... We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and too small."

when I was younger I fell for confidence, even a bit of swagger if I'm being honest. now I realize I am attracted to an open mind that is also somewhat self aware, an openness that is not completely lost, that has the courage to be vulnerable and show it. apparently, Jung said we spend one part of our life trying to prove ourselves, and only after do we understand ourselves and our shadow. 

It is strange that courage and vulnerability are two sides of some same thing. Contradictions that are lock and key to each other. Somewhat like how inoculation is the key to contagion, or how acceptance of anxiety is that to an eventual triumph over it. I feel as a species we have been brave to embrace our vulnerability, and thus cracked some of the secrets of nature.

water makes me feel like a child. at 40-41 now i behave like one when i refuse to get out of the pool every day even after an hour. this summer, whenever i am not swimming i am watching youtube videos about swimming, obsessively. i am found walking between our home and the pool imitating free style arms and imagining improvisations. i still cannot tread water. but i can swim in many ways. and i can flip from back to stomach and back again, again and again, inventing my own style to tread in place. i can do handstands, while the water keeps me upright before swirling me around and throwing me back up. and i can finally go under, crawl along the floor of the pool, deaf and oblivious to the world and the instant i raise my head i find it being led upward gently and magically till i almost hold and push the surface down and gasp for a big breath of air. how did i live this long without knowing this world, this lack of solidity, but which catches me reliably like a friend a mother a playpal whenever i fall in it, and that cradles me like a loving hammock on its surface. i love its density, its resistance, it counterintuitiveness, and its silence. its now even started to get back out of my ears easily, softly and quickly. how is it that i've gone from fearing i will sink when i fall in it to realizing how hard it is to sink? how do my mouth and nose instinctively now know not to breathe in and to start giving soft bubbles out soon as i submerge my head in? the water isn't just teaching me how to swim and float and dive, it is also teaching me who i am and how my mind and my brain learn to be in this world. its teaching me that drills help me make new connections in my brain, new ways of moving that i learn through repetition, and that which felt impossible a few weeks ago becomes elemental almost on its own.

people feel like possibilities.

and i went from feeling friendless to feeling missed and remembered..

therapy is teaching me that people's response to me is often not about me but they themselves. and thus the realisation that there is often no need to feel embarassment or offence or frustration or anger. I'm feeling more magnanimous with this realisation. if people have galoshes or blinkers on because they're just protecting themselves, then I can be the one to extend an arm out and to smile, even if often they don't notice it or are unable to smile back.

and I'm discovering a lot of music. Rosa Balistreri's voice, reminiscent to me of Chavela Vargas', and through the former, the world of Italian folk (try Cu ti lu dissi), John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards because Mubi happened to have Stranger than Paradise on its movie of the day list y'day (one of the cutest funniest movies ever), some i am already forgetting but Spotify will keep in mind for me: Mose Alison, Screamin Jay Hawkins. 

our therapist asked each of us one day to express what we meant by trust, what made us trust people more or less. my answer was long and descriptive, harping on 'honesty' which she later summarized as focused on 'authenticity'. his was mostly "i don't know, its instinctive", but before he said that he also said almost apologetically, "my answer is not as pretty". that sums up a lot of our thoughts or rather our expressions on things. we were watching 'the banshees of inisherin', and at the end he asked me what i thought it was about. "what is it about? i think it has at least a few themes running through it... why, what do you think its about?" "i think its about how people can never really forgive each other." "maybe, but its not just about that. i think it has 2-3 themes: one, is something on the lines of 'posterity' and what you leave behind and what matters to us as human beings; two, how different people value different things and whether it is okay to classify people as one thing or another; third, if there is a third theme, it is probably something about 'niceness' or more generally what do we owe each other. so yeah, as a whole its probably about what it means to be a human being, how we are different, and what we owe each other. there, even here my answer is prettier than yours." both smile. recently i've been on a women's writing spree. Mary McCarthy, Tove Ditlevsen, Toni Morrison, Hannah Arendt, Emma Forrest, Janet Malcolm, and a Magda Szabo that my friend gave me but I couldn't bare to keep reading cos it was disturbing. and today i came across some book review on nytimes where the words "why women need to read other women" caught my attention.

the cup of my desire to write has not been filling up. yesterday, two old men told me that some of my work would not count toward the tenure decision without bothering to specify the line that separated what counted from what did not and without assigning weights to individual items. i succeeded at not expressing my anger and frustration at them but of course broke down after. it took me more than half a day and a night's sleep to wake up with the realization that my reaction was very like that of the apes who express anger at not being treated fairly, about who I was telling my students just a couple days ago in reference to explaining 'fairness' both substantive (outcomes) and procedural (rules). at least i can still laugh, ex post, at my anger. we were watching the portuguese movie 'The metamorphosis of birds' on Netflix the other day which had poetic narration and a strange experiential theatre-like presence. somewhere in it i heard that before we started to understand that birds migrated, people had believed that they had seasonal metamorphosis such that birds seen in one season were believed to have changed into those seen in another season. thus the title of the movie. today we were sitting on our terrace eating lunch when something about the birds around made me mention that aloud again - how cute and interesting it felt/sounded/must-have-been. K didn't quite get it and kept saying that if people saw birds fly in one direction in one season and fly back in the opposite direction in another season, how could they have understood it to be anything other than migration. i tried to explain that birds don't systematically just fly locally in one direction in a season; they usually hang around making travel stops wherein they fly and eat around for days etc such that people wouldn't have necessarily seen them fly only in one direction. and that it seemed very plausible that if people saw one type of bird in one season, then given their ignorance regarding their migration, they might have interpreted the sightings as arising from the metamorphosis of the same birds such that they took on different forms in different seasons. it was hard as sometimes it is hard to explain ideas to someone, esp him. i gave him an example to illustrate the limited knowledge that comes from local observation/information-collection: how early humans (before the ability to fly; sorry, before math proved otherwise) believed the earth was flat cos from our perspective we could only see as far as our horizon of vision which revealed nothing of the spherical nature of the planet. he still looked half convinced. and then the perfect example came to my mind, bringing the idea closer to home, to the birds. the male sunbird changes color only in mating season, and because we see male sunbirds as green the rest of the year and shiny purple in mating season we understand that it undergoes seasonal metamorphosis. similarly if we had never followed birds' long distance flights and our only information was local from place to place, then if blackbirds were seen in spring and some green ones in fall, we might have simply thought that the blackbirds turned green in fall, or vice versa. i really dig ideas, logic, thought, epistemology, ... and i still very much like the person i have grown to become.