The routine of life was interrupted as unconscious and trivial as it might sound. There is always a routine that everyone follows and if followed for a long period of time it gets embedded in your unconscious mind, under the thick layer of your brain. When the lock down started there was a clear disruption of this routine and it took me a while to adjust and make up a new routine, from my sleep, eating, exercise to work everything got readjusted.
As these unconscious changes were happening I sensed few conscious changes too. There are a lot of things that went wrong to contribute to this change that I won’t get into. Consciously I felt very anxious, depressed, demotivated and after a point very Existential. It took me some time to notice them. It first hit me when I realized that the 9 books that I had ordered to read during the lock down were untouched and then that I had stopped writing completely and also no Music.
It is amazing how the brain functions, how there was a complete shift in personality. There were just too many questions, why? For what? What’s the end to this? What’s next? When you start comprehending all these thoughts together you sort of lose purpose in life. One of the factor’s (coz I have to specify that there are other major incidents and factors too) in retrospect for these thoughts was that my mom started talking about my marriage and since I was home everyday there was some conversation about this topic everyday. Overtime I started thinking about these questions more and more, it felt like there was no purpose to life other than getting married and having kids and then taking care of them, their kids and so on. I have always enjoyed working, I love the feeling of being in control, being independent but these past few months I worked because I had to. I did not have the will do it like I used to and that was probably the worst part of this lock down.
The more I thought about it the more I felt like nothing matters as I will just end up as a wife and mother with no other purpose to my life and it was a clear road to depression. As I write it now it feels like a silly thing to have worried about but at that moment it felt huge.
Thankfully for me I realized early that I was too young to feel this Existential or probably this was just me giving reasons for my laziness but nonetheless it was a dangerous road. I changed my thought process and tried to see the positive of that situation and in a way understood that I might have been other thinking.
When you are in such a situation your brain functions change, the decision you take might turn very wrong in the long term. In times like this you feel threatened and that alerts an area in your brain called Amygdala which affects your decision making skills and then that in turn affects basically everything else in your brain.
It took me some time but I did get out of that Zone. As they say there is always a positive to take away in every situation. I re-discovered Chess (Thanks to Samay’s streams) and also I became so fascinated by the way our Brain works, once I started thinking realistically about this I wanted to understand what goes on behind the scenes, in our brains when we are going through this roller coaster of emotions.
I’ve started reading again, started by this book called The Brain by David Eagleman(Review coming soon) gave me very very good insight into the world of Neurons and watching YouTube and streams of Tanmay Bhat helped me a lot.
I’m still amazed by the fact that we are basically ruled by the Neurons in our Brains, everything that we do, from picking our noses to falling in love is because of the electrochemical signals carried through our Neural networks in our body.
We are ruled by the Neurons in our brains making those decisions for us even without us realizing it. After reading about this Neural world I’m just amazed by the fact that these Neural structures result in our consciousness. At one point I was wondering about why do humans even have consciousness, why do we have a sense of self, if what we are is a result of a highly evolved and a developed brain why should it result in a consciousness? After a while I thought I would again go back to Existentialism as the question of consciousness is again linked to the question of purpose of life but then I realized this a beautiful question to ponder about and possibly one of our purposes in life. .
There is a purpose to everyone’s life as long as you find one or want to have one
Well, this is probably a good note to end on before I start ranting more about brains. I’m just happy that I can get back to writing again and I might be writing more about Brains. One more thing I noticed is that a few years back I wrote for myself, regardless of who read it but as more of my friends started reading my blogs I started censoring myself. That is going to stop now for sure. I started Blogging not expecting anyone to read them and the way I used to write was so different back then and I want to go back to that when writing felt easy. As I write now I’m loving the feel of free flowing words that are pouring out which was impossible to do a few months back. So cheers to that!!
Adios!!
© Vaishnavi
All Rights Reserved
Image source: Google (Image of Brain)
Image Source for Book: Vaishnavi
My Thoughts In My Words 
I bought that book in 2011 when I was working in Bangalore. I got to read it only in 2018 during a similar crisis. It’s a synchronicity. Thanks for stopping by my blog and appreciating so many of my posts, Vaishnavi. 🙂
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True that!! It really puts things into perspective.
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