Nobody cares and neither should you
Tags: About Me, Dance, Acceptance, Self Love, Writing

Hi, this is Asmita. A noun as yet undefined.

For years a number of people have told me I should consider writing more seriously and they have been conveniently ambiguous about what it is they meant by ‘writing’. However, every now and then they have received a page or two of paragraphs of long, unending and convoluted sentences from me and foolishly encouraged me to entertain them with more such pages.

an unending convoluted sentence

This is going to be an attempt to do just that, except on a wider platform. I am not going to call this a journal of ramblings or diary of discoveries or assortment of fancies because I am honestly at a loss for such wholesome adjectives that haven’t already been used. I would also not spend the required effort behind it because bold of me to assume ‘this’ is going to get any kind of a readership, right? But that’s the beautiful thing about the Internet. We spend hours proofreading and editing something that means quite a lot to us and we put it out there for unsuspecting and sometimes uncaring strangers to stumble across but the truth, as Alexis says in ‘Schitt’s Creek’, is that, “People aren’t thinking about you the way that you’re thinking about you”. To us that caption or picture or that thing we’ve made and are putting out there is everything, it’s the whole world and it has to be perfect but to everyone else it’s just one more box that comes up with the scroll. This is not to say that people don’t care; they do, but not as much as you think they do which is a really comforting thought if you think about it. It allows you to make mistakes, it allows follies and gives you the permission, if you need it, to be yourself.

permission given

So, I’m going to be a little bit silly here and put a few crappy paragraphs out there. Sometimes it’ll be really mushy and gooey and mawkish and sometimes it’ll be downright unpalatable like a bitter pill. Often there will be long hiatuses. Sometimes the articles will be way too long and boring. But it’s okay. Because people do care but not as much as I think they do. So, in a way, this blog is more for me than for you. But I am putting this out there for people to read. How to explain this conundrum?

Hmm. To put it very simply it’s like going to a really crowded party (lol parties are always crowded asmita, when will you learn) and lingering with a drink in your hand. Some people are dancing and some are talking. And this song comes on that you really like. But you’re afraid to dance because you’re no John Travolta. I mean you literally don’t even know how to move your hips. When someone asks you to dance you feel like a stupefied cactus that is secured fast to its roots and just cannot move. You really struggle to get rhythm, to let go.

But then you wonder why it’s so wrong to look weird on the dance floor. Most people don’t have any formal dance training and that doesn’t stop them from flailing their limbs about like it’s nobody’s business. Because it really isn’t. Because if you look at it objectively, nobody’s really watching you and even if they are, they don’t really care. So, maybe no one was ever watching you. Maybe you were just watching yourself and I mean scrutinizing everything you did. Maybe you could be John Travolta if only you would get out of your head and do what you fear will embarrass you the most because really nobody cares and neither should you.

a trajectory of people dancing and colliding

Sadly, this realization has only hit me during the lockdown so I haven’t yet had the opportunity to test it out there but I have been dancing little by little on my own which is still quite an improvement. I have no idea how ridiculous I will actually look if I ever do manage to dance in front of people but I’m sure it’ll be the coolest variation of the futterwacken anyone has ever seen. Until that day arrives, I’m exploring different ways to dance my way out of my head and for now it looks like starting a blog on Medium. Let’s see.