Words

June 14, 2026

It’s hard to restart anything after a long break. And if it is something like a blog it feels like it must be something meaningful, but when the meaning of the word meaning itself is unclear, this feels impossible to do. 

I am aware that I no longer want to write—a blog, or perhaps anything. And I remember that a blog has helped get through dense times when meaning, focus, memory, joy, all hover floundered and drowned in icy waters under thin ice. 

I don’t know how it happened. I guess slowly, like a frog being boiled in cold water? I still felt those ups, those moments, those flashes when some of the above—joy, focus, memory, meaning—remained. Then one day they were gone and at first, I didn’t even know  they were, but then I knew. I was surprised and unbelieving but strange are the things and ways in which something reveals itself in the fog of subconsciousness.

It was last week or it could have been the week before, that I felt how leached I was. Blank, void, white on white, dark, empty, speechless, blank… 

Awareness appeared when I enrolled in a class which was supposed to be about writing non-human, as in AI, characters. Or so I thought the class was about that. It excited me. I'd never written AI characters. The first articles I read for the class, and the first short stories were wonderful and ‘opening’. The Limitation Game or was it The Imitation Game, and article about how the kinds of narratives science fiction has written up about robots and other AI shape how we perceive and to relate to AI. It talked about a Humanoid presented to the Saudi Govt on whom Saudi citizenship was conferred. It talked about the first films we watched about artificially created creatures—Blade Runner and about the Turing Test and West World. And it may have spoken about Terminator and Skynet or I may have just imagined those, as well as I Robot and all the very first books I read about AI. Many of these had used AI to explore what it means to be human.

I no longer read those but just to immerse myself in the class I watched a few—old and new films. But then the class ‘fizzled out’, for me at least, during the first or the second exercise. About writing about my avatar. Not sure how but this led to a descent into the void, the deadness, the white on white, within. And all that I thought I still was unravelled. 

It didn’t help that I woke every morning and reached for my ipad to find out what was going on in Iran and spent the first half or whole hour of every day watching some podcast or the other about it. 

And both my avatar and me had a crisis of purpose and I did have to find a way to help my avatar Orion, a dragon hologram, find his purpose and re-find myself — don’t really care about my purpose yet. And I turned to AI to do it. And what I am discovering is fascinating me.

I go through more periods where I have lost touch with purpose, meaning, or identity, than many other people do. A Blog has helped me make sense of meaningless periods. It functions differently from journals, so I am turning to it for help. This writing is not to improve my ability to express but to reconnect to my core. And this is all for today. All my brain-fogged self can type. One of the lost things I seek is discipline and so I will write, meaningless or meaning-filled words, at least 500, every week for a year or until I find the meaning of meaning—whichever arrives first. 

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?