Spirals?

January 13, 2026

Replacing 2025 with 2026 has come easily, naturally. I guess I desperately wanted to move out of 2025. Though I realise that I am taking too much of it forward into 2026. More on this another time.

It’s the 13^th day of 2026 and I’ve been ill with flu since the 4^th. The spouse got it first just before the new year. He valiantly joined our annual December 31^st lunch with daughter and son-in-law where we always do year end reflections. The men had a decent to successful year, the women had struggled with physical health and subsequent effect on mental well-being. All of us had learnt something that we hoped might help in the new year. 

I wanted change. My ‘New Year’ dream propelled me forward. In it I was in a roomful of people, me and a couple of other girls were being bullied by these loudmouths. There were loud people and quieter people all around the room. I got triggered and grabbed the mike. I said, shut up everyone. It’s not only you loud mouths who know things and are smart. The quieter ones have a lot to say. 

I thought the dream was about finding my voice in the New Year. It made me happy. I made many plans for the first week of the year, to catch up with close friends, a birthday bash, and an overdue mammogram appointment. 

Cancelled – every single appointment of the first week. The flu was/is horrendous. Continuous cough with phlegm explosions, drippy nose, drained body. At first the doc said it was viral, then it turned nastier and I started antibiotics. They may be healing the respiratory infection, but the tummy is weeping. My body and my New Year’s Dream feel at odds?

Maybe the dream is about listening to the quieter voices within?

The nice thing, the only one, about being ill is reading. I started the year with On the Calculation of Volume I. It’s about a woman stuck on the 18^th of November for a year of days. The themes struck a chord. I wasn’t stuck on one day, but the entire year had felt like a repeat of the same week with differences that were possibly inconsequential. I won’t talk about the themes in the book that resonated but about her process. At first settling into the sameness, taking into confidence her spouse. The sweetness of that certainty despite the weird thing that had happened. Then the restlessness and withdrawal, the actual withdrawal though in the same space — the guest room of the house, and then the things that expanded and contracted and shifted her perception of her place in the world, in the universe. Then trying something new, moving out. Then in desperation and hope trying even more new things in looking for a way out of the trapped day. Almost attempting to shock the system into revealing a crack.

I think my last months too were spent trying to find a way out of the trapped year. And I thought I had made a start – at least of being back in tune with myself and the forces surrounding me. The illness seems to be saying nope – it is a disruption. The first of the year. I know not the only one. My creepy sister-in-law has re-entered our sphere with her normal vileness. Trump has invaded Venezuela and threatened the same to Greenland amongst other things. Chaos in Iran. Gaza and Ukraine stand forgotten. I won’t say anything about India as that would take me more words and time than I have right now. 

Personally, I have known only two people who I consider evil. I wrote a story about one and thought I had let it go. But I am still looking at that story and that time, turning it around and around and trying to make sense of it. The other is my sister-in-law. 

Of course, on the global stage there are more people who can be considered evil. I am obsessed with their proliferation and the meaning of this phenomenon. It is so huge it is hard to contain and sometimes I numb it out. 

Anyway the year began in this disruptive way. I have learnt something from that – that a lot of (my) life is disruption. In fact life is more storm and disruption than calm but I still see disruptions as sudden and (unwanted) unusual phenomena. Both cannot be true. 

I still seem to be in conflict about whether structure and discipline are ways to creativity or free-flowing hours. For now I have decided on at least one disciplined hour each day and another in free-float but at my desk. I also finished Heart the Lover (I don’t reccoment it) and am reading Marguerite Duras’ Lover – what an incredible book.

How did your new year begin?

The Year of Failing Spectacularly!

December 31, 2025

            The good news first (not that failing is bad news)!    

            My kidney function stabilised. It feels like a miracle. After a sudden deterioration which normally is a sign of kidneys beginning to fail, they seem to be recovering. One thing that helped could be stopping the ayurvedic powder I has begun to take in October for my digestive issues. But I think the major change came after a deep dive into naming and trying to remove the psycho-spiritual toxins from my body-mind system. I hadn’t done this seriously, almost as if I thought, nah that is voodoo and it won’t help, but then the spouse had an anxiety dream from which he woke crying out, I don’t want to be alone. Wake up call for me! I deepened the cleansing and it seems to have helped. Some reading this might still think it’s voodoo. 

            But the title of this post is ‘the year of failing spectacularly’. On the last day of 2025 I am making this list, which I hope is a reminder and an instigator for change in the new year. 

            I failed in improving the relationship with my sister. It is complex and personal in a way I don’t yet want to blog about. She is a private person, so private that she doesn’t talk to me too about herself. She says it is because she doesn’t know how to express emotions and that’s true, yet in the past I have been able to guess and make shifts that improved our conflicts. We still are sisters and there are very warm and supportive moments but there are moments of separation that are painful. I can guess some of the factors that might be creating distance, but I don’t know for sure and I have failed in making the relationship what I want it to be. 

            I failed in supporting my spouse enough. In fact, I left almost all the house-care — including weekly shop and cooking meals to him by the end of the year. When I noticed this, I tried to be more useful but as the months progressed, I became more and more usefless. 

            I failed in my creative pursuits. There is only one complete piece of writing that I feel happy about in this entire year. I wrote that piece in March for an online class. It is about the Pahalgham attack by terrorists on tourists in which they killed twenty-six men. All my other writing this year has been fragmentary and uninspired, and I haven’t been able to reflect on why. Maybe there is no ‘why’ and all I can do is notice it. I’ve been in a paralysis of bringing things together or revising things with promise. I also failed in my sketching pursuits, unless you consider simply doing the same thing without any improvement again and again ok. I’m not actively trying to improve but in the past regular practice had made my sketches ‘artier’ but this year my sketchbooks have only a few things that I feel pleased with. 

            I won’t write about karate because considering my knee I feel I might have done ok there. In fact, on the last Saturday of training ten of us completed the 108 kata challenge — a tradition I began in 2013 first for myself and then for the dojo. Four were ‘minty’ new white belts. Three others in our dojo also completed it at home. I couldn’t be prouder. The kyu grades and I spoke about it after and one asked me what I had been thinking as I did it. I can truly say that except the first five repetitions which I did in synch with the new white belts and during which I was focused on seeing if they needed help — I was in my body, present to the moment for the rest of the 103. My mind didn’t wander through the corridors of the year’s failures or future hopes. It was just there minutely following the movements and the stresses my body was feeling and recovering from by breathing. That is one huge success for me. 

            I hope I don’t sound self-absorbed or self-flagellating. I don’t feel the latter, though I am likely the former. It’s a record of 2025 and I’m ok about it today, though I have joined my inner critic in beating myself up about it often this year. If one must fail then doing it spectacularly is the way to go. 

            Would love to hear about your 2025 or your hopes for 2026. Happy New Year everyone!!

Time Rolls Forward

December 18, 2025

            On Thursday, while I was messaging with my friend in a faraway land she texted, It is amazing how the day can end so quickly when doing nothing. 

            It struck me that this was the way I felt about the year. I did nothing, it passed so quickly. 

            Later I watched a 17 min video of a young woman in Florida going into a café and drawing. She drew the café and the people, as they came and went. She drew some of the food she ate and painted it in bright colours. Yes, this is what I want to do with the last days of this year I thought.

            But then there was the other desire of filling the hours with things I didn’t do all year. Stop analysing the reasons why you didn’t do anything and do some of the things you wished you had done, this voice said. Like going back to that book – the only novel I have written that I must get out into the world before I die. The issue still burns for me and nobody else has written about it that I know of. And when this desire grips, I wake up at night and roll around with ideas and frustrations. And in the morning on 2 hours sleep I try to re-work some of the pages. 

            Drawing in a café is being present to the moment. For me a not-professional-artist, it is a task that doesn’t have a purpose beyond doing it then. I will never make it into an art piece and sell it or show it to the world in a u-tube video. And that purposeless time has much meaning.

            Wandering the streets or the forest also has the same feel. Maybe with the added feel that doing this might help me find the self I still feel I have lost in this year. It is true that I have lost it. Small things like not knowing what is in the box on my desk, which at the beginning of the year I opened and used every day tell me that something has changed during the year.

Reality is not continuous, is it? But sometimes I pretend it is. My thoughts at the end of the year come in fragments, which I try to string together into something whole and sometimes convince myself that I have done so. That I have solved the puzzle of this year, answered the burning question.

I don’t know what the question is yet. And that’s somehow ok. Because we don’t know the questions that drive us in life though often, we pretend to? 

I see now, after the blood pressure stabilised that the things in my life that regulated stress and perhaps with that blood pressure, had become distant from me as the year progressed. When the knee got injured, everything did change though I clung to the idea that I was managing well despite it. I trained less and when I did train it was always through pain and the fear that there would be consequences — like more pain, and swelling, and further injury. 

I wrote less because at one time writing and training were somehow linked so instead of writing more as I trained less I did less of that too. And both these help regulate stress and pressure. And I read less until September when some inner impulse urged me to read the booker list.

Every day, for the first week after I saw my blood test results I wrote in my journal — I felt lost (when I saw them), I feel lost, I might continue to be lost. And on the last day it changed to I felt lost, I feel lost, I will try to feel less lost. And I did find a measure of peace, until Friday. The organ that might be dysfunctional is the kidney. The kidney is one of the bodies filtration systems, it remove toxins from the body. It’s ability to do this seemed to be slowing down. In the last two weeks I journalled a lot about the psycho-spiritual toxins within — resentments and angers in relationships, anxieties and never-ending fears about the future. They had built up. I can’t say I have filtered them all from within, but the process begun has brought peace. 

Until Friday when the spouse suggested I go in for my blood test a bit earlier than I was supposed to. He said, we might know if things have shifted before Christmas, then. I fell into disarray, chaos. I didn’t want to find out that the numbers were worse. The inner-safety I had built, perhaps through some rigid routines, fell apart. I had worked in a steady groove for two weeks but again the lostness invaded. We did go for the test and then to the pen shop and got a shiny new pen and ink I didn’t need. It was comfort shopping. I hadn’t expected the upheaval to return but this is where I am today.  

But no, this year and the next are not separated by a boundary where some invisible magic will clear the difficulties of this year. They are continuous. I will not have a Hollywood ending to my year but I don’t have to frantically rush to finish some things this year so I can start the next year fresh, empty, hopeful. It sometimes happened this way in the past, like when I finished the first draft of the novel I referred to above right on December 28 in 2018 or when I got a health test result back with improvement like I did the year my potassium was high – 2020, I think. But it is ok to not have completion. It is ok to carry unfinished things into the next year.     

In 2026 I plan not to set challenges but breathe and get back to living in the moment whenever I can. More drawing, I guess. This year my sketchbook is full of faces. I like drawing faces, perhaps I can improve but I really want to draw trees and perhaps with a stronger knee I can walk more in the forest again. 

Thank You!

December 8, 2025

I woke today in my own bed after having slept six plus hours after several weeks of an average of five hours sleep per night. I felt different. Less like doom was around the corner and more like hmm… what is this feeling? Am I smiling? Is the headache really barely noticeable? Do I actually want to open my eyes and have the energy to make the bed? My pressure was normal when we measured it. 121/82. I can’t remember the last time I felt this OK! 

I want to thank everyone who read and responded to my previous post. I want to doubly thank those who shared that they have been on blood pressure meds for long. As I shared that I had begun to take them more people began talking to me about people they know who are on the meds, and have been for years. My NS buddy was taking them, our cousin takes a pill before brekky every day, my best friend, my son.... and so on…

Wow! 

I’ve had a hard time with my meds adjusting my pressure. It went low, it went high again when we moved to the cats home. I lay around in their living room coping with some of the side effects and feeling that it would never end. The pressure dropped low when I was outdoors and then my pulse raced and raced and left me short of breath and scared. When I measured later it was 96/53. Ok! I read sometimes it happens with the meds.

Anyway, hearing so many share that either they or someone they know takes the meds has made me believe that my body too will find a way to equalibrium and I too might feel normal soon. I would think — oh so-and-so has high bp and still does this or that, or so-and-so who has high bp has such hectic high flying days — they all live normal lives (though I don’t know the minutiae of what they/you struggle with). Thinking this is a nice feeling. For weeks I haven’t slept well, and then dealt all day with fatigue, foggy brain, and depression. Waking up to this and sitting here in my pj’s, past noon, watching the tress outside swaying in the breeze, which is gently blowing into my home too, is as close to heaven as anyone can get. 

I want to pull out my paints and experiment once more with drawing the trees outside, capturing shadow and light and depth and texture. Something I’ve tried before and never been able to do. My brain actually is looking at the vista of trees and saying, lime green here or ionian green there or a bit of grey to capture the shadow there and what is the blue I should use for the skies? Honestly, I yet don’t have energy to do get out my paints and try this today, but I haven’t even had this thought for weeks. It’s all been a dull blur, so this is welcome. I am grateful I can read and write. This is hope. 
            One pill. Ten days. And a sense that there is life to be lived. Heaven indeed. 
            Thanks everyone for helping me get here. 

Also want to say that my circle of energy still feels tight, like I still want to stay a bit withdrawn, like I still can only think of my body and a few close peeps — so even though a part of me wants to reach out to have a zoom call most of me wants to stay low. I will initiate contact when I feel able. 

With so much love.

uncertainty

 December 5, 2024

I wish fervently for the next year to begin with a return to flow. I’m so drained from the slow and intermittent trickle that life has felt like this year. I’ve felt more than mildly depressed, screeching-ly irritable, perpetually exhausted, since I injured my knee in January. The problems from 2024, 2023, 2022 had refused to resolve and followed me into 2025. As the year progressed new small things that would have felt manageable in ordinary times seemed like wide cracks that would swallow me whole. And the last quarter of the year has been particularly dreary — except for two events that have shocked the inertia most of me had fallen into. 

Shocks for me can be things that suddenly energise a sleepy system (can be great), or things that badly disrupt a functional state (terrifying). I had one of each.

December is a time to reflect over the year. This year I made three lists. Things I have done, things I wish I had done, and things I have coped with. The third was the longest, and the coping methods used have been revealing. The things I have done list is mostly made up of ‘passive’ stuff — like classes I’ve participated in, rather than those that create a sense of accomplishment. The things I wish I had done made me sad, but I also saw that I did attempt (unsuccessfully) to re-ignite some of those towards the end of the year. The only thing I really feel proud of doing this year is attending a poetry class in July, reading more poetry after, and signing up for a poem a day prompt in October when I did write poem drafts on 21 days. Nice eh!

When I was in Bombay this year, I met a friend who casually said in the midst of a conversation, Radhu you were always very self-aware. Meaning in tune with myself. Meaning able to see clearly what I was doing, good or bad. It shocked me, more so because a friend in Singapore had remarked on the depth of my being the week before. Neither statement was something I identified with anymore — meaning at one time I had yearned to be both and actively worked towards them. That they still saw me that way shocked me after this year of simply coping, merely existing, sometimes feeling like a parasite on this earth. (Yep, mild depression). But the statements ‘woke me’ and pushed me towards listening to the call of the self I had lost. Hence more depth journalling and attempt to resurrect my desires.

Last week after several weeks of terrible headaches, nausea, and brain fog, I visited my GP. My last blood test from Bombay had some aberrant values and I wanted to consult her about those as well. She ordered a blood test to retest the values and asked me to monitor my pressure three times a day as it was inordinately high — beyond that the ‘white-coat syndrome’ causes — when she measured it. 

To reward myself for going to the doc, I visited the Central Library, browsed and borrowed some books, sat in the café on the 3^rd level, drank iced tea, and sketched my surroundings despite the pounding headache. Then walked over to my favourite pen shop and bought a deep indigo blue, textured, (supposed to write colour after texture) pen after trying out a few others. Ya, these are the things that make me happy and I am so glad I indulged in them that day just a week and two days ago. 

For two days later when I revisited my doctor after realising that my blood pressure values were very high and were probably responsible for the way I had been feeling, I discovered something that makes me feel paralysed. She hesitantly offered me blood pressure meds. Hesitantly because each time she had in the past told me to take meds for blood sugar or high cholesterol I had said, let me work on it for three months before I start. She had always agreed and though I need a low dose statin (bad genes), I have managed other issues with diet and exercise. I immediately said, yes please. Anything to stop that awful sensation, and at 65 I didn’t want to work hard to balance out my body. 

The blood tests she had done showed further problems particularly related to one organ of my body and I must get my values re-tested on December 22^nd. Even as I write this, I feel scared and sad. I did tell a few people that my blood pressure was high (and different reactions showed me something about the people I confided in) but I haven’t been able to talk about the other more anxiety producing issue. Something that might not be very serious after all or might alter my path in this world perhaps. I won’t say what it is until I am done with the test and have my results, post-Christmas. It took me two days to absorb the numbers I had seen and get past a mini-denial stage.

Waiting is hard. The same friend who had mentioned that I had always been self-aware had shared how a friend who had been waiting for results for a cancer test had felt enormous relief once he got them even though they were positive. The waiting had been killing for him. And it is for me. I start to do something, to read, and suddenly the thought about the tests invades. I suddenly wake up from sleep with fears and tears. It feels so isolating and I find myself withdrawing from my surroundings. But then suddenly reaching out for connection. 

What is that about — the so universal reaction of not wanting to see, the not wanting to tell, and the anxiety around waiting? Life is uncertain. Every new day, new year is shrouded in the unknown but there are moments (or weeks) when that uncertainty, the sense of not knowing is more intense than ‘normal’. Does everyone see-saw between wanting to be alone and needing the right companionship?

I’m not surprised this year is ending this way, the whole year has been about wondering, hoping, wanting, but never feeling fulfilled or even semi-resolved.