Sleepless in the night

Sleeping is a difficult task. It becomes even more so when you age. For the last eight weeks or so, I have been having trouble. Initially, it was postoperative pain, then it was aching of the operated limb, and then it was nothing that I could put my finger on.

Yesterday, I woke up at around 3 am and couldn’t fall asleep until about 5.30 am. I feel exhausted now and I think I’ll fall asleep as soon as I try to. But I am also fairly certain that I’ll spend 2 or 3 hours in the night trying to fall asleep again.

This is not something that you can easily fall asleep to.

The Art of Self-Promotion

“So what is it that brings you to me?” asked the performance coach after the first of four awkward silences. I mention them because I still have trouble with them, which at the age of forty-two and a half is somewhat embarrassing. We were about three minutes into the first free, thirty-min session.

We had exchanged pleasantries before. I had awkwardly brought up the weather as an ice-breaker after noticing the aurora borealis-laden Zoom virtual background and the sleeveless heavy winter jacket he was wearing.

He said, “I live in the foothills of Himachal Pradesh—it’s freezing here. I wouldn’t mind trading places with you right now.”

I guess he meant “Himalayas.” I realize that my frosty metaphor could have been literal if I had been there, which is something I might need to work toward. I’m not sure if I’m cut out for perennial cold weather, but the invitation of quiet is overbearing.

I eventually respond to the question. A long and winding answer, but I eventually manage to sum it up and wait for a response. That’s when I realize that I hadn’t finished my story.

So I add,

“As an artist, I think I am well-rounded in most aspects of creation and performance. What I find myself falling short of, thanks to my depression and social anxiety, is a sustainable way to get my art out there, exposed to the rest of the world, waiting for acts of judgment and critique from people, who may not even know what they are talking about.”

A couple of moments of silence pass, and I find myself marching on:

“I guess I’m talking about self-promotion and marketing that goes hand in hand with music these days. One can even argue that content and talent is not as important as promotional skills and perseverance. I used to do this for my band back in the day, so I know I can do it. But I somehow don’t seem to have the strength anymore. The act of creation has taken a step back too because of the inevitable motion toward self-promotional stagnation. So my idea of a coach is someone who offers support and who is an enabler and a motivator for me to do what needs to be done. Somewhere between the role of a manager and a coach.”

He returns with the elegance of a backhand chip return:

“I hear you and I can help you. I work with my clients in whatever way that I think would help them achieve their goals. Twenty-four-seven, I think about them. So my clients may even get text messages from me at three in the morning. If there’s something that I think I need to communicate, I will, regardless of time and place.”

It lands gently, but it sounded intrusive and dangerous. I’m worried that the juggernaut of drive and intent might even run me over. Feelings of alienation and anxiety start to gently wash over me. It was the second uncomfortable silence, much longer than the first.

I am grateful that there is no effort to break it from his end. He seems to simply sit there in the cold and watch my grainy 720p video. Is he sizing me up? Maybe my smile isn’t thick enough to veil my vexation.

I respond with some deflective conversation until I eventually find my way back with a question about his writing. After all, he has written and published books. At least one bestseller as far as I can see from his websites. I’d even checked the book out on Amazon. I now know that it is available for free on Kindle Unlimited, which I had recently started subscribing to. I guess I’ll download it and check it out.

“You must have also gone through phases of self-doubt and reticence while you were in the process of writing/publishing your book.”

The answer is a smash.

“No. I did not. In fact, I wrote my book without even reading any. Of course, I’d read books through school and college, but nothing worth mentioning since then. I decided that I wanted to write a book, so I found a book-writing coach—India’s premier one, in fact. I took lessons and simply wrote the book. I had to choose an attractive topic, and the rest was pretty straightforward.”

The audacity! Or was it just self-belief? What would I think of myself if I had done something of this sort? What would others think?

But that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

I remember my friend Dennis telling me on our way back to Medical College in his Maruti 1000. We had just had lunch at the Indian Coffee House after a morning of lectures in microbiology and forensic medicine. We had been discussing Asimov’s writing in the backdrop of The Foundation series. I had borrowed two of the books from the initial trilogy from him, but I had to pick up the rest from the lending library that my parents had bought me and my sister a subscription for.

Somewhere along, I must have expressed my desire to write like Asimov.

“You want to write?! For every book you write, you’d have to read at least ten. Maybe a hundred. Don’t even dream about it until you have read enough!”

He was/is right, of course. Reading a lot makes you a better writer. Listening to a lot of good music, written by talented songwriters and crystallized heart-felt renderings, has given me the information and inspiration to hone my musical craft too.

It has, or they have, brought me here. My as-of-yet insubstantial attempts at writing prose/poetry and producing/recording/performing original compositions stem from it or them. The mountain that is starting at me, or I’m staring at, is the process of getting it all together in a nice little package, getting it out there, planting it in the center of the cauldron of humanity.

This is the third silence, by the way. It gets broken by him this time. He tells me a story, the details of which I fail to recollect. But it did end with this thought.

“I believe in the philosophy of not worrying about what others think. It’s their job to think, criticize, and judge. It’s mine to not care about them or their thoughts. Simply put, I don’t care.”

This was the longest period of silence. I find myself immersed in a pool of awe and disbelief, shimmering with a thin layer of intimidation at the top.

Was it even polite to be this way? What about humility and introspection? I thought it was necessary to be painfully—but I guess not debilitatingly—self-aware, armed with the knowledge of one’s perfectly ignorable position in a world full of artistic pinnacles. Then again, I realize that they are propped up by artistic debacles that are more by orders of magnitude.

The conversation meanders to a close with discussions about fees and frequency of the coaching sessions. We hang up soon afterward, but my guard is up at the prospect of further monetary onslaughts, but I do have someone who can guide me about this. Another coach, in fact. A finance/investment consultant.

Hours later, what stays with me is this:

“He is either someone who I absolutely need or someone who I should stay far away from.”

The latter is already a reality, at least physically, but I think I need to move closer to him—while not being him, of course—and his state, not just physically but also cognitively.

So much to say

There is a lot of that I feel like saying. I don't know if I will be able to say them all. But I feel like I should give it a shot.

Over the last several months (during the COVID-19 lockdown), life has changed for me. Some for the better, some for the worse. I'll start with the better before moving on to the worse.

I have learned so much more in music production. Finished a course and I'm just starting my last in the series. Wrote some songs, produced several others.

I upgraded my home studio setup. I got myself a powerful laptop, monitors speakers, a good electric guitar, and a cheap MIDI controller (that's not working too well).

My home studio setup

 

My new guitar

I have at least two active projects, both of which might end up releasing songs to the world soon. I have been working on songs for close to two decades, but haven't ever released something substantial in a trusted platform. I had a couple shots at it -- one solo and another with a band -- but both didn't quite materialize the way it did.

Now, with about 50+ full songs in the bag, about 300 more rudiments that could be fleshed out into full songs, and the ones that I could write moving forward, I think I could start the process of releasing them consistently over the next several years.
 

One of the projects is with a band, the members of which are part of another band that I love dearly. Over the last several months, we have been working on these songs remotely and some of these are starting to come to life.
 

The journey forward is challenging for me because I think I will be exposing myself to social situations where I'll need to spend a lot of time working on this music as a producer and engineer for this band, which I think is not my strength. Plus, I'm decidedly an introvert at the core, and spending long periods with people (even if they are my friends) will be extremely taxing.

So overall, this seems ambitious but I think it is doable. All I need to make sure is that I should not burn myself out, which I have a tendency of doing.

I have watched a lot of quality content, both movies and TV series. These are the things that generally inspire me to be creative, and I have conceded to the fact that they are not merely entertainment for me. These things make me think in ways that other forms of communication and media don't.

Among these, I must mention my dive back into the wondrous world of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, and the charm of good-quality Malayalam cinema. I still remember the time that I started watching Stargate with my friends and work back in 2014 or something, and they ended up finishing the series (the whole pantheon) in a year or so, where I languished in SG-1 for several years until I picked things up earlier this year.

I have rediscovered my love for gaming. I have started off with explore Xbox Game Pass on my Windows PC, but I think I am headed the way of purchasing an Xbox console when I can.

But I haven't been able to read too much. That's something I want to fix. I'm still stuck in Judas Unchained by Peter Hamilton. I have managed to read a few hundred pages in the last few weeks.

Amazingly, I started this book on New Year's day in 2018. I haven't read much other than a few non-fiction books and comics then. I want to finish this off before I start something new, something that will inspire me.

At work, I have gone from the manager of a team to someone who is primarily involved in creating, ideating, and troubleshooting. I'm currently in the last phase of creating an online training course for copyeditor trainees who join my company. This involved a lot of creative processes (with a lot of opportunity for seeding, farming, and harvesting self-doubt, which has more or less brought be back to a phase of full-fledged depression and anxiety.

To add to the mix is the work pressure and stress. I love working but I seem to have a problem with taking care of myself. This sort of thing has been happening at work for over 3 years now, and I have contemplated quitting or seeking other opportunities (less stressful). With my music revenues drying up during COVID-19 lockdown, with very little hope of things getting back to how things were before, I need to have this job to sustain myself and to work on my music.

Working from home might be easy in the sense that I don't have to travel or meet people. But it is difficult to plug yourself off the grid. Plus, after a 10 to 11 hour day of tiring work, I have to spend time to do the household chores. Then there is the music work. This leaves me with not enough time of rest, relaxation, sleep. I am trying my best to achieve that balance by trying to take short breaks to do some chores in between my work tasks.

The one aspect of work that is challenging but sufficiently rewarding to balance the negative effects of stress is the talks that I give to students from various universities about the academic publishing industry and related topics. These tend to be the highlights of my otherwise productive, but stressful and self-doubting, weeks.

I have had a relatively steady state of therapy sessions over lockdown, and I have decided to step up the fortnightly frequency before to a weekly one, considering that I almost fell apart in the last few weeks.

During the lockdown, I spent a LOT of time holed up in my apartment with my partner J. Before lockdown, I never thought I could comfortably spend more than two days with anyone, especially J. We had a stretch of about 4 months together. We were with each other night and day without any breaks!

We were both surprised to find out that we could hold out for this long. Of course, we had fights and arguments, but we also had wonderful shared moments, with lots of wonderful food and shared TV/movie experiences. We regularly had our evening tea on the balcony, with the backdrop of mountains and clouds (on good days) and the cacophony of avian noises at dusk.

For this duration, however, I lost my sense of personal space more and more, and that also has contributed to my triggering of stress, anxiety, and depression. My apartment is tiny by world standards and average by Mumbai standards, and I need the space for my music and to feel free that I can do things I want to do when I want to do. When I am with people, I give away all my space to them. They become the primary beings of the shared space. This is probably why I could never be with people for over a few days.

During the lockdown, I gave up my bedroom and desk to J for most of the day, which limited my access to my recording setup. He might do the cooking, but the cleaning responsibilities were harder and took longer. There was less quiet overall, and J was more or less in charge of the auditory environment.

When I'm alone, I usually have a variety of states where I'll play loud music or have absolute quiet, and I listen to podcasts and talk radio when I am not concentrating on text-based work. This world is shattered when another person shares the space with me. I don't feel like I should destroy their peace by auditorily invading the shared space, which is something that I don't usually get reciprocated for. This builds the tension and anxiety of losing control of the space. I don't know how to get out of this or have the feeling of a truly shared space.

I have finally started finding YouTube useful, especially to learn more about technology, music production, and my niche interests. I often dive into the YouTube maze and come out with learnings and best practices. This also happens with podcasts. In fact, the fact that I'm writing this post is because of the simple strategy that a songwriter espoused on a podcast.

They recommended starting the day and working on something creative. Maybe listening to music or writing. Writing songs or prose.

Because of the work-from-home situation, and because I want to try and finish my work as soon as possible, I end up starting work as soon as possible, which leaves with less creative energy at the end of the day. Today, I wrote some lyrics for a song that I'm working on, recorded a scratch version of it (both for the course), and I felt like writing this blog post.

Some of the lessons that I learned from the things that I read or seek out is how to do music production better. But the problem with knowing more is to find it difficult to get more done with less time. You tend to get lost in what you think you should do instead of what you should do. I used to wrap up demos in hours. Now, that has gone to days, if not weeks. That's not good and I need to figure out a way to make things manageable in terms of time. The latest course that I'm doing has an exercise that mandates that you set timelines for finishing a project. I will try to implement that moving forward.

My therapist tells me that I should try and stare out at nothing (or something pleasant) for short periods during the day. During our sessions, I found out that this activity made me feel like a heavy weight has been lifted off my body. My eyes started feeling relaxed and I felt like drifting off to sleep. This morning, I did that by staring at the mountains for a bit. I need to make it a point to do this more often than I have been doing.

I have been finding it difficult to fall asleep at night, especially when I am with J. I don't know why it is that. I tend to feel sleepy if I'm reading something or watching something, but the act of needing to switch off the TV or put away the book and switch of lights wakes me up.

One of the reasons could be the anxiety/stress overall, but I think the frustration of not feeling like I have done anything meaningful in the day is a constant contributor. Thanks to my wonderful upbringing, I have a tendency to feel I'm not good enough for anything or that I haven't done enough to merit existing.

This is both for things at work as well as my music. I know that I'm doing good work, but I always feel like I am not doing enough or that I could have done way better. At work, there is hardly a system where such anxieties are considered and taken care of. Many have left the company because of the unaddressed issues, with more leaving soon. I feel for them, as much as I should be feeling for myself. But as I said above, I need this job at this time.

Over the last year or so, I have more or less pulled out of most social media. The only thing I check occasionally is Twitter. I have also stopped sharing photos. In fact, the joy of photography has somehow been sucked up from inside me. I guess I should treat this as a phase too. Or maybe it is because I don't get to get out of my house anymore.

I am planning to switch of 8-year-old Nexus 5 to something more modern. Something with a decent camera and photography software. I'm not sure if I should go for Pixel 4A or something more expensive and flagship (like the OnePlus 8T or some version of the iPhone).

During the lockdown, I have rediscovered my interest in writing (physical, literal writing) with fountain pens. I have refurbished the ones that I have and I have purchased a couple of good ones. Now, I can even write lyrics paper with real pens!

My not-so-good handwriting

One of the unsettling aspects of lockdown has been finding out that I relate and empathize with the heinous characters in some movies. These characters show psychopathic characteristics. They are murderers, cannibals, and sadists. I don't think that I have any of these characteristics, but I have the sociopathy. What they say about human beings, their sufferings, and how things should end resonates with me.
I'm talking about Dr. Hannibal Lecter (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins) and Jame Gumb (Buffalo Bill, played by Ted Levine) from Silence of the Lambs, Tavis Bickle (played by Robert DeNiro) from Taxi Driver, and the young woman (played by Jesse Buckley) in i'm thinking of ending things.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter

Jame Gumb

Robert Bickle

The girl in i feel like ending things

I haven't talked much about Blumenthal. She is as pretty as ever. As I write this, she has gotten under the covers after having had her mail meal for the day.

Blumenthal in all her glory

So that's where I will end this for the moment. This was fun. This was refreshing. Maybe I'll follow my own advice and do this more often.

I wrote about photography earlier. Since drafting the post, I added some photos to it. These are the ones that I feel I should share or I should have shared.

Welcome to my strange mind

Parties are something that most people with at least a shred of extroversion look forward to. Even I, with my combination of introversion and social reclusiveness lurking in the background, look forward to parties as special gatherings where you find may find avenues for conversation that won't be available in a much more intimate setting.

Three weeks back, J had his birthday party at his apartment. There were about 15 people invited to make merry on the occasion. I was, as is usual in such situations, caught in a dilemma as to how long I should spend time with an individual or a group of individuals in conversations. I guess I want to be always on the move, thanks to a a mixture of my overenthusiastic host-itude, interest to explore options, and my hesitation to expose myself in in-depth conversations.

So I took the opportunity to carry around trays of the famous J cheese/onion dip and the assorted chips that go with it. This gave me options to introduce myself to strangers with warm introductions "Hey, would you like to try some of this? This is the dip that you keep hearing about." This would followed by the obligatory "Oh, you are so kind to bring it to us" and "Oh, wow. This is a very nice dip indeed" comments. Perfect social lubrication, if you ask me.

After hanging out with any particular group for a couple of minutes, I found that it's easy to slither out and seek another group and repeat the social rewards and positive reinforcement. Of course, I also used lines like "Can I pour you another drink?" to repeat the exercise of pleasantly detaching myself from conversations and getting these social rewards in return.

At the end of the night, during a conversation with J, I realized that I had hardly spent any time with people who might have wanted to spend more time with me. People from my workplace were all together in a group, which I paid as little/much attention to that I did to other groups.

I don't often feel like I need to meet people (even my friends) and have conversations with them. In fact, many people, including my dearest friends, have expressed their disappointment at how I don't make time for them. However, on occasions such as this, I often am able to assign myself a purpose/role (as a host and a nice guy), and thus am able to lubricate/sugarcoat these otherwise-daunting interactions.

During and after such parties, I am able to convince myself that spending time with these people is fun. This makes me ephemerally wish that I would have a more prolonged interactions with them at the party on other social occasions. But when it comes to executing this, I make myself so busy with other things that I hardly ever get myself involved in such situations.

Welcome to my mind. It's confusing, I agree. But that's how it works.

How it all went wrong today

Today has been a bad day. It started off well. I woke up early enough, made coffee, had a quick shower, and headed to the office. Although it was dull and murky, it wasn't raining on my rickshaw ride to work. I had the usual roadside idli breakfast and reached work just before my reporting time. The first hour went really well, when I thought I did well to finish the work on an assignment. Then it all started to go wrong.

First it was the constant barrage of interruptions. Junior editors asking me doubts, the project managers constantly shuffling and changing work, people randomly coming up and stopping by, work-related e-mail and instant messages on your computers. I know multitasking is not efficient, but how the hell do you ask people to stop interrupting you? One could argue that being interrupted is a given in a work environment similar to mine, but I don't think that still doesn't explain why people don't think of ways to establish guidelines to streamline all of this.

And then the personal life interruptions started to mount. Messages and e-mails from my sister and Jay. I simply cannot seem to ask them to stop interrupting me. They probably are having an easy day--well, at least I know that sister was taking a day off to recover from an upper respiratory infection--and they want to share it with. Or so it seems like. I don't want to be rude, but it still does make me stressed and anxious. Usually, my afternoon catnap does wonders. It did today too. But after that, the constant stream of interruptions kept me on edge all evening. How I wish I could just block everything and just do my work.

Then the day became worse. Unnecessary wait for the rickshaw, heavy rain on the way with me getting partially wet, crazy traffic--all of this when I was trying to reach my apartment in time to receive my guitar amplifier from someone that my friend was sending it with. In the middle of all this, there was a playful, teasing Jay, at the other end of a Whatsapp chat. Eventually, I let him know that I would appreciate if he would be a little more understanding and less teasing when things are not working out for me. I don't think he completely understood but there was a temporary relief from the frantic texting.

Then I walked into my building to screaming kids, as usual. I walked into my apartment to find that the maid hasn't come in an done the cleaning. Eventually, I learned that my friend was not going to be able to send the amplifier after all! I was so edgy by this time, that I felt that I need to have dinner and go to bed early. So I dial the restaurant downstairs to only find out that there telephone line is engaged for almost half an hour! In between all this, some more texting with Jay. Eventually I got through to the restaurant and got some dinner.

I tried to read a book for a bit but the most annoying ads in between overs on the cricket broadcast and the screaming kids on the corridor did not let me concentrate. Then I had dinner and I felt slightly better. Jay tried some philosophy on the fucked-up-ness of the world on text. That's probably not what I wanted. Eventually, he asked me if I would like to have a phone conversation. A usual, I refused because I felt that we would have a very edgy conversation. It was hard to make him understand why I must go to bed early.

I watched the last few overs of the test match while sorting out my medications for the next few weeks, putting the cocktail of pills in my monthly pill box. I realized that I was relatively short of one of the six I was on. That means that I have to go get another prescription from the shrink and go to the pharmacy and beg for them to give the drugs to me! Aarrgh! The only other things that I can imagine that could have made this day worse are losing my wallet, getting dumped, and have multiple limbs amputated in a road traffic accident.

I want this day to end. Please.