Breaking The Walls Of Your Mind

In the last few months, I pulled the plug on social media: I deleted my Twitter account, removed Reddit from my phone, and blocked Google News on all my devices. I wanted to buy back my time from the pawnbrokers of the Internet I had mortgaged it to. It was a brutal fight. Muscle memory would trigger, and neurons would coordinate and command my fingers to type in URLs that would not load, bringing in the awareness that I had blocked them. Or sometimes, the same fingers would be commanded to go to the location on the phone screen where a now deleted app used to be, bring a post facto realisation in a second that the mind is fighting back.

I was not used to having time to pause, the thehraav (ठहराव), and my mind was utterly confused. It brought back memories of older and recent times, emotions of embarrassment, shame, surprise, and weird and funny experiences.

I decided to speak to my therapist about this. When my therapist asked me if I regretted something, I went on and on about how I don’t think of it as regret, and I usually had no regret; I would simply take note and move on and bank up the experience.

He then asked, subtly, if I thought I was in denial. I took a moment and asked him what these terms meant - regret, denial. I had no working definition of these words. He was a professional; he should have a better idea, is what I thought.

Words acquire meanings for people based on their lived experiences. My understanding of these words is linked to moments from my life. Not one particular moment, though. It’s like a blur, a palimpsest, a superposition of different interpretations over time, gaining shape into some interpretation of the word.

While I was philosophising about all of this, it took all but one second for my partner to remark: But you do regret it, right? You did it last time when you told me about X and then when we discussed Y…

It was tough for me to convince myself I regretted something or that I was in denial. There was always a reason I thought I was really not regretting, a justification for why it is not denial. In my case, the mind does not want to see reason, but it is very efficient, perhaps a bit too much, in identifying these in anyone else. The subtlety, nuance, and limited perspective are reserved for personal use and not a courtesy extended to others. And this is not unique to me too. “You may be special, but you are not unique”, I read somewhere, and that stayed with me.

It is so difficult to break these walls. We build them as a defence mechanism to shield ourselves from “others”. We stand on top of them and fight the anxieties, insecurities and fears. We build models for what we think is right and wrong. We fight the dangers from the invisible “outside”.

But the moment awareness sets in, the wanting to be aware, to be mindful, it forces a rethink. It asks some uncomfortable questions. This time the attack is not coming from outside the walls. It is a meek voice as if someone has thrown a small but sharp stone from inside the very fort, on the walls of which you stood to fight the enemy. The voice is easy to ignore, difficult to understand and almost impossible to reason with without breaking the wall.