Shadows Of Youth Are Shy Kissers

In The Light Of Shadows

Nothing was light or dark. Ever after.

That's how grandma always ended here stories. Her frizzy silver hair would glow brighter when she said that. I was bored of it. But I never complained.

It was one of those phrases that I had repeated again and again through my chance at life. It was so much of a habit, I remember doing at the worst times. At her funeral, it took a lot of mental energy to restrain myself from not saying it.

I kept saying it throughout junior and high school. Even with my mouth closed, I kept repeating it within myself. Softly yet with stubbornness. People had grown irritated because of it. I often tried to get rid of it. The complaints of my few friends were too much for a heart diagnosed with puberty.

Yet, that phrase never left me. It stuck to my lips, teeth, gums, tongue and eyes. It was stuck like chewed gum sticks to the underside of fridges.

I got into psychoanalysis during my 8th grade. It fascinated me. My mind couldn't stop psychoanalytically profiling every other person I met. And every time a fellow made the grave mistake of even remotely asking me of this interest, the entire world, in tandem, considered hum to be the most unluckiest man alive. He was arrested in my custody for the next few hours and punished to bear me ranting about Jung's archetypes and their correlation to the personal unconscious.

Yeah, it is as nerdy and tedious as it reads.

Yet that was my daily routine. Sprouting about random pieces of psychoanalysis and morsels of zero-utility knowledge about the day. I was affectionately (mostly likely insultingly) called professor.

Professor was sad most of the day. He would keep overflowing his fountain of data, yet no one even wished to wash hands in it. The school counselor was called when I began skipping school. Most of my talk with her could have been summarised as such:

"Nobody gets me. Nobody understands me."
"I am laughed at and made often of."
"They shun me because of my interests."
"I don't like that my friends end up leaving their boring veggies for lunch to me."

So on. So forth. I hated my isolation then. I hated not having a single friend sympathetic enough to lend an ear.
But that was that. I may have coped better with it now, but back then, it was all chaos.

The counselor decided to listen through my ramblings, but I could see she was a bit unprepared. Among the students at that school, I was still an odd one out. I would talk about my loneliness nonstop but would occasionally take departures to talk about the socio-economic conditions of the modern society. Yeah, nerdiness was infused deep with my despair.

Somewhere, after much time of listening to the words of the professor, the counselor had thought of a good point.

"See, if you love to learn and speak about facts so much, rather than doing so for random, do it for facts of life. What I mean is, learn about ways in which you can help others who are despaired and sad like you are. Then use your words to heal them. Divert your energies to this task. Then people might be more willing to listen....."

She didn't let me speak much after that. I guess, even my rants were too much for her. She went on about empathy, compassion, ascertaining one's needs, Maslov's hierarchy
, etc. I will spare you the details. I don't remember a single word of it, anyways.

Some part of me, a staunch academic, hated the idea of learning something in order to help somebody else. Learning must be done for its own sake, it stated strictly as rules in the school prospectus. I gave that part as much value as you give to the rules in the prospectus. All of me was ecstatic then. It wouldn't stop as any such inhibitions.

I had found the missing puzzle piece in my life. I must help others. I must help those who suffer like do (and those suffer more and suffer nothing like me at all). I had tried reading Nietzsche on occasion. Never came out successful. Yet that day, I understood his lines, "One who has a why, can bear any how."

Nothing was light or dark. Ever after.