Comfort In Confession

As a child, one of the perks of having an elder sibling was that I learnt something new everyday. I must have been only seven when I first heard of ozone depletion. I remember I went to school the next morning and enlightened all my batchmates with my newfound insight. Probably did it wrong, but I felt empowered nevertheless. That's when it must have started, my proclivity to expand my knowledgebase.

There was a time when I loved studying, at least for a while. I couldn't wait to get my hands on concepts I'd never heard of and read all about them. It didn't hurt that our textbooks back then were so easy to browse through, I went through them like novels. And it didn't stop there. I looked up things all the time. Nature, science, literature, anything that fancied me in the moment.

All that changed quickly. Shocking, I know. I'd love to blame it on something, anything other than me really. Say something like life got in the way, priorities changed, time slipped away. But, for once, I'd like to call it as it is. I always imagined that the little girl with her nose in books would grow up to be one of those podcast-listening, course-taking student of life. Instead, at this juncture, I'm a rerun-watching, music-listening anxious non-doer, a characterization that makes me feel like shit.

Now, I'll be the first to oppose the notion of constantly chasing productivity. Having said that, I'm also against an indefinite span of indolence. See, the part that I hate most about this is that I'm fully conscious of my lethargy. I wake up every morning, ready to turn things around. I sleep every night, or don't rather, preparing myself to make an empty promise the next day all over again. Ignorance would've been pardonable, inaction, not so much.

Introspection is useful only when the gathered intuitions are extrapolated and utilized to make a difference to the individual. While I cannot yet pledge amelioration, not in good faith anyway, I'd like to remember how it felt to always be in the know. Nostalgia can be a powerful catalyst, or so I hope for my sake. For now, I'll accept the small win of facing up to my shortcomings. Onto the next step.