a little pep talk

Do not assume anything.

Do all you can with what you have. Give it your hundred percent and never back out. If there's even a bleak chance... a glimmer of hope... if the door is just slightly ajar, go for it and push your way through. Do not just sit back assuming that it's all over and you can't do anything about it.

Do not assume that even after trying, you are going to end up failing. If you do have to assume, assume it to be positive. Do not be pessimistic about it. Do not cover up for your laziness by doing so. Anything and everything can be done if you want to do it. It’s not the laziness. It is fear. Do not hide it behind your facade of indifference. Instead, stop being afraid. The first step is the hardest to take. Stop coming up with excuses to avoid confronting challenges. You have the motivation. And you have whatever else it takes to do it. Do not let the fear overpower all of that. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take".

Stop playing the victim. It’s very easy to pass on the blame. Don’t say that it was destined to be that way. Take definitive action to correct whatever's wrong.

Don’t shit yourself into not believing in yourself. The course which your life takes is in your own hands. Stand up and take responsibility for it. Don’t just let it pass you by.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

“Invictus” - William Ernest Henley

Of stress, randomness and everything that’s wrong with me

I don’t know why I keep going back to it. Right after I do it, I promise to myself... never again. But then, as they say, the thing about promises is that they are meant to be broken (so clichéd isn’t it). But what if these promises have been made out to your own self? It’s easy lying to others, but what one should try to achieve, is to always be true to oneself.

wait a minute… what am I doing..? Why do I always start out to write something and then drift off to these vague philosophies of mine, thus ending up with something totally different from what I had set forth to write in the first place. Why can’t my mind just focus on the job at hand.. Actually, that’s one more problem that I need to address. There’s just so many of them. I can never seem to get ahead of them. Anyway, I should learn to rise above these trivialities.

I’m sounding too random now. Time to snap back... remember that thing I mentioned earlier. The one after which I promise myself that I’ll stay away…

I’ve realized that sadness or stress doesn’t make me give in to it. In fact, in such a state, I tend to be more of a fighter (or at least that’s what I’d like to believe) and put in that extra effort to see myself through the rough.

I guess I do it when I am bored. When I have nothing good to do and see everyone else around me buried in useful productive work, I flip (and that is one more thing about myself that I need to change). That is when I try to create this illusion of happiness and importance around me.

I’m sorry that this whole post has turned out to be so arbitrary that now even I can’t understand what I wanted to write (another thing that is wrong with me, and this is the biggest one – I don’t know what I want). So just to inject some semblance of sanity into all this gibberish, I’d just say that this “thing” I’ve been talking about… it could be anything. It can imply different meanings to different individuals. It’s anything you perceive to be negative in your life (yeah, more of my philosophical crap).

And as for me, my name is Kartik and I’ve been clean for a month now.

“what do you do when you feel stressed or sad?
 

I pretend I'm a little kid again and I'm sneaking through my childhood home. I try to remember how doors opened, how closets smelled, how floors squeaked.”
 

(from 'pearls before swine')