I used to have sudden, violent urges to be free. I wasn’t at liberty to parade my perspectives and judgments. Let’s say, I was rather inhibited by my social milieu. I met people who were absolutely and relatively free. I, on the other hand was relatively enslaved. I stayed inhibited since my teenage years where I had my share of run-ins with drugs, high life and incoherent family values. These restrictions made me yearn for freedom and I used to imagine that to be free was to be able to say no to family life. I abhorred family life and societal values. I still do to some degree. My family wasn’t a conservative one but when your daughter is doing drugs and hanging out with prodigies for her classmates who in spite of their nomadic life and drug use were destined to succeed in life. I on the other hand had no idea what I was gonna do. I was a fuck up.

Little conviction, even less talent and big dreams was what I had to my name. A day dreamer, a nihilist, an atheist and a rigid moralist. My sense of propriety was so gluten free that once in school I told my teacher that a high mark in one of my papers was erroneous and I had only earned second rate marks. When that Department recalculated my paper, it was true. They gave me a point for my honesty and I gleefully accepted the gift. My friends made a mockery out of me that day. I still feel like an imbecile. In soothe, I was a hair-raising hippy from the 60’s. I don’t like the hippies, but since we human beings tend to brand everything, I was an unreasonable hippy adrift in the purgatory of spiritual cum hedonistic measures.  Anyways, I said fuck to humanity during my adolescence when a girl I had been having an affair left me like she’d left her truly yours. The whole roller-coaster of an affair turned me into a savage. I became a Patriot.

As a jingoist, I wasn’t a brilliant one. But I wasn’t bad either. It sounds ridiculous to measure patriotism but everyone measures it anyways.

‘What have you done for your country?’

‘Fuck you, I eat local momos daily to support the local economy’.

For my part, I deliberated a hunger strike to call into attention the misery of my fellow countrymen. It turned out to be miserable for my friends instead. Well, I can proudly say that I once hadn’t eaten for three days and nights straight. There in hunger, my patriotism faded.

Now, there was a sense of purposelessness and great ambition at the same time. I didn’t know what to do with life anymore and yet I knew I would turn transcend into greatness at the same time. When one is so free, one is in delusion. Well, I developed a Delusion of Grandeur and a psychiatrist put me in medication for Neuroticism for a year.  How people with Borderline Disorder can love and loathe themselves at the same time!

Still my self-loathing and ambitions hadn’t ceased entirely. The same vanity became evident and in a paroxysm of guilt, I turned into a writer. By then I found that in life, freedom is just another word for something left to loose. I had something alright. It was the depiction and adulation of my vanity. How vain of one’s life when one doesn’t live in vain.  Don’t all our karmas shrink into the tiniest speck of vanity at the end of the day.

(Guest Blogger has turned into a vegetarian and thinks that Veg Momos are better than Buff Momos. She’s a humanitarian worker and thinks that humankind will go extinct due to an insomniac plague.)