I've been thinking a lot about tongues lately.
Last newsletter of the year!
This week’s flowers from my thought(am):
(It’s like the Malayalam thottam, i.e. garden, but it’s my thought garden. Hehe, it was funnier in my head.)
I’ve been finding myself becoming increasingly cynical about love. And equally hopeful. I don’t know. Your twenties are weird. I wrote about meeting a new version of an old love a whileee ago, in the style of classic young heartbreak prose. (Hehe).
[I shall strategically plug my Medium here so you can check out my (slightly less) angsty, more structured (ish) blog-esque writing 🥰]
A funny internal battle I’ve been having recently is whether to share or not to share my dating stories online. Because, haw, imagine a 24-year-old dating! It’s not like my amma doesn’t know what I’m up to (or does she), but there’s still something a bit strange about sharing such an intimate part of your life out in public.
Sorry, amma, I swear that the ‘or does she’ line was only for comedic effect. Or was it? Sorry bye.
It’s weird acknowledging publicly that you’re 24 and quite single. But I’ve realised that I did promise to write about everything I usually write and think about. And I write and think about love. A lot. Because we’re human beings, and we fall in love. It’s one of my favourite qualities about us.
Anyway.
A whileeee back, something a passerby in my life taught me was the word Itminaan. It’s a word that stuck with me for a while, and it’s more so for the meaning I attached to it than the meaning of the word itself. From what I understand, the Urdu word, in its limited English translation, means a sort of mix between contentedness and tranquillity. A sort of heightened inner satisfaction, if you will. Think of how you feel when you zoom out for one second, mid laugh, surrounded by people/a person you love and think ‘yes, maybe this is the meaning of life’.
Anyway, Itminaan. The reason why this word always stays in the back of my head is because I’m constantly amazed by how much our lives are defined and redefined over and over by all the people who come and go. And I cannot seem to separate people and Itminaan.
I also remember that when I first heard the word, I sat down and thought about how many of our languages are borrowed. And I don’t refer to the history of languages itself, but the history of our personal languages. The history of our daily banter. If you examine your tongue closely under a microscope, you will probably find traces of every person who has ever made a cameo in your life. You laugh like your mother. You roll your ‘r’s like your Montessori teacher taught you. You enunciate like your best friend. Your punchline is borrowed from a friend turned stranger. Even your knee-jerk reactions are borrowed from brain-rot Instagram content sent to you by your brother on a daily. If you sit and dissect your tongue, you’ll find people who’ve stayed, people who’ve passed by and people who’ve left. It’s fascinating.
How is this connected to dating, you’d ask? As another year comes to an end, I can’t help but reflect on the people who left. The people I outgrew. The people I hurt. The people who hurt me. The people with whom everything was right except our clocks. While moving on with our lives, something we often glaze over is letting go of people’s tongues. Letting go of habitual words and expressions that lie comfortably in our mouths. People come and go, but they leave their tongues behind.
So this New Year, when you sit down with your reflections, take a moment to sit with the traces of people you’re made of. It’s an interesting exercise, I promise. It’s warm, it’s fuzzy, it’s comforting, and it’s also quite uncomfortable. But sit with it.
Or use a tongue cleaner and have a fresh, minty start to the year. You do you. Hehe.
Screenshots from this week:
Weekly hard and not hard-hitting lessons/something that popped right out of a book/my Instagram feed and reached into my head
What I’ve been humming:
(An ode to constantly starting over and dating in your twenties)
Thought this was the most apt song to end this particular newsletter with :)
For those of you who don’t know Lizzy, I’m glad. Once you go down a Lizzy songwriting rabbit hole, there’s no escaping. For those of you who do know her. Hugs.
This newsletter is dedicated to another chaotic year.
To have such messy, joyous, heartbreaking years is truly a privilege.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Big ummas and hugs,
Always, Ameya.
💖💖💖