There are times when I feel lost in festivities, even while surrounded by celebration. I feel joy being completely sucked out of me. I try to make sense of everything I have been doing: my work routine, keeping my websites alive, my YouTube channels, my Instagram accounts, learning music, reading, gaming, editing, so much writing, so many posts. All these endeavours, all this effort to lift myself out of bed and do something that might matter.

Then I wonder why and how any of it matters in the vastness of things. Nay, how do I matter? What difference does my being here make? I don’t feel as though I affect lives. Perhaps my doing anything only bothers people enough to make them think, “Here’s that guy again on my feed!”

I see too many festivals celebrated one after another, especially in Gujarat, a land of festivals. People have fun here. They’re always on a roll, always finding another reason to rejoice. It’s a land where the party barely stops, as the official festival calendar of Gujarat makes clear, but somewhere, I find it all too exhausting. Almost as if I don’t belong.

Perhaps I just want to bury myself in a quiet room, under the weight of my thoughts. Honestly, I don’t see my place here, or anywhere. I don’t know if I will ever belong.

With every festival comes another chore. You are supposed to do certain things, follow yet another pre-planned path. I looked at the previous year’s celebrations, then the year before, and realised that nothing changes. We are still walking the same cycle, over and over again.

It bleeds into your life and makes you feel you have to be a certain way, even when you don’t want to. What if I just want to step out of the cycle for a while and look at what I’ve been doing all this time? What’s the point of it all?

I have always carried this feeling of looking at myself from somewhere outside my body. This bizarre physical being, following a pattern, God knows for what possible reason. He’s floating in the middle of nowhere, tied down by strings of physicality, dictated by causality. He always looks as though he’s onto something, but by the time he tries to understand the meaning of it all, he has tired himself to sleep.

Then the same cycle begins.

He’s caught in these wires, tugged by his desires, unable to figure out that he’s never playing. He’s always being played. When will I get my time to myself if I always feel I’m walking someone else’s path? This force steering my legs makes me feel as though even my roads are being laid out by someone else. I have to do this. I have to do that. But what about what I want?

Sometimes it feels as though nature reinforced that sense of not belonging by handing a disease to an already depressed guy. As if saying, “You don’t need the joy. Why should you be handed that? You’ve never really wanted it all your life. I’ve seen you drift more towards tears than smiles.”

They say it’s about finding morsels of joy, collecting little wins. I don’t comprehend this advice at all. Why, and what for? Where are we going with this? What next? What if I don’t want to seek joy? What if I like sulking in the corner? What if my peace lies in melancholy?

I can’t smile, both literally and figuratively. It feels like a bitter joke played by the hands of fate, as if it knew exactly what would make me feel better and chose to take it away. As though it catered to my self-loathing by being absolutely cruel.

And then I find myself unable to blame it, wondering whether it simply heard and delivered what, deep down, my heart had grown most comfortable with.

With time, I feel the weight of all my pointless charades more heavily: my reasons for putting on a smile, my attempts to remain calm through chaos. I am failing to find reminders to keep doing what I have been doing, to believe that it is all for me and that I should not care if there is zero audience for my craft.

Creation itself gives me happiness, just as it perhaps did God when they created us, each of us with different personalities. Maybe they lost interest too, after a while.

I see the world pass by, forgetting the rationale behind anything they have been doing, the cycles they have been pedalling through without questioning it. Doing things for the heck of it, or following suit because they have nothing better to do. Completely lost in their false sense of being and their minuscule import in the world.

And I can’t see myself being a part of that mob.

Not once, not ever.