2014: Another bright sandy beach stretches before us

A new year is about to begin for those of us following the Gregorian calendar. 2014 rolls off the mouth smoothly, unlike 2013, which required effort for some of us. Most of us appreciate the potential changes and transitions that might come in with the new year's tides. (I'm writing this as I listen to the sound of gentle waves greeting white sandy shores in tropical surroundings on YouTube.)

We sigh at the relief of being blessed with the opportunity to say goodbye to the past year and welcome the forward-moving motion of the coming year. Our sighs echo those gentle waves as they renew hope in our dreams. And our dreams are plenty if we can imagine each dream representing a tiny grain of sand. When we put all those dreams together, it's quite a beautiful landscape to behold - the watery blue sighs uniting with the bright sparkles of hope. No wonder we like to walk barefoot on sand or get buried in it.

The end of the year is always a time for reflection, a way of appreciating how we were able to fit the grandiosity of our resolutions within the realities of our everyday lives. Compromise and flexibility are required to meet the challenges posed by circumstances beyond our control. And this past year, if you read the news like I did, you'd know just how much hardship some people faced around the world, and in our own backyards. Sometimes shrugging our shoulders and accepting defeat is the best way forward. It doesn't mean we give up on our goals; instead, we can use the lessons to re-fashion these goals so we're running (or walking) at roughly the same pace as our daily agendas.

Part of keeping with our resolutions is to know how fast or how slow to work on our goals. Half the battle is in knowing how much we can handle, but also how much we're willing to adjust to make room for the unexpected. That might take a lifetime to figure out as we learn to nurture an appreciation for and understanding of our bodies and our capabilities, the unpredictability and moodiness of nature, and also for the people whose lives constantly affect our own.

Life doesn't have to be a competition. We can locate our own Start and Finish Lines, and not worry so much about the "win". Every self-help guru I know keeps saying it's what's in between those two poles that count. I agree. People who come to that knowing and are patient with the ebb and flow, in my mind, are the ones who can go on to accomplish great things in their lives, never losing hope for what they believe to be their intrinsic purpose.

Happy New Year to my family, friends, colleagues, and the few stray readers of this blog. Thank you for giving me a wonderful 2013. No new dreams for me in 2014, only a renewed commitment to the ones I already have, the ones I will re-explore like a bright-eyed child grasping the sparkly sand as it cascades through her fingers.

Happy Hearty and Safe Halloween

I found a lovely stock photo that encapsulated some of the magical qualities of Halloween for me.  It's not a scary illustration, but one that shows the warmth, radiance, and mystery of this time of year.  Who lives in that lonely house on the hill?  Will kids be able to go there for trick-or-treating?  Are those fairies flying off into the night sky to shine a bright path that will lead Halloween night owls to the house's door?  

One more day before my favourite day of the year!  It's Halloween everybody and instead of feeling frightened, my feet are restless in anticipation of a walk through my neighbourhood to see all the kiddies dressed up as miniature ghouls and storybook characters.  It's always lovely to watch the little tykes dragging their already full pillow cases of candy up the stairs of homes with gleaming jack-o-lanterns and dollar-store decor!  Even better when the doors open and I can take a peek into the warm light of a family home that's alive with laughter, music, and colourful bowls filled with the Mars bar series, and other assorted goodies.

I remember having had only ONE opportunity to go trick-or-treating.  I was in the 8th grade, and my best friend and I decided to dress up in Elizabethan dress for men.  We wore tights underneath these heavy, but very fancy, velvet with gold trimming tunics.  All we needed was the Henry VIII facial hair - well I already had some of that being a brown girl and all!  It was a cold night, as to be expected, but we were warm underneath our royal refinery.  We had pillow cases, too.  It was like a dream come true for me!  I remember years before when my sister and I used to pray that we'd be allowed to go trick-or-treating someday!  When our mom overheard us, she was dismayed by our desire to participate in such a superstitious Western custom, and told us it was rather sinful of us as Muslims to pay homage to ghosts and witches.  We weren't thinking of that, of course, we just wanted candy!  So, finally, I got my chance.  My mom had eased up a bit on her puritanism, and my dad wasn't around to keep me tethered on a leash.  I was actually FREE for the night and ready to roam!

When Jenn - my best gal friend at the time (she was awesome! and still is!) - met up, we went all around the Cole Harbour and Eastern Passage area of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.  I got a chance to see the long-haired red-head dude I was so obsessed with.  He even recognized me in my get-up but yawned when he saw me and then got into his gray camaro.  My eyes sprang out of their sockets when I saw him, and if it weren't for Jenn to pull me back to the mission at hand, namely to score as much kiddie sugar as possible, I would have spent the entire night chasing after my luscious-locks Romeo as he drove that 80s motor machine at his usual slow n' steady speed so he could check out all the "action" on his block.

Well, back to the present...

Since I live in an apartment, I can't really welcome any kids and give them treats, but I think this year, I'm going to step out for a moment to take in all the excitement, listen to the laughter all across the streets, and the screams too when scarecrows on porches suddenly become alive!  I'm going to walk through the smaller, cozy streets, see the candle flames dancing in the frame of small stained-glass windows, hear the creaks of heavy doors opening, and smell the sweet, beckoning fragrance of freshly-baked apple pie.  Maybe some folks might be enjoying a glass of wine as they sit on their porches, wrapped in woolen shawls, waiting for their neighbours' kids to come by, or maybe waiting for their own kids to come back!

I guess the best part is when the kids do come back and nearly rip those pillow cases to shreds as they pick through the loot to select those one or two delectable pieces that would be permitted as a snack before it's time to vigorously brush those candy-crusted teeth and get to bed.  School the next day would bring even more excitement as the kiddies think about what treats they could exchange, share with, or even just give as gifties to their classmates.  There needs to be more giving and sharing, I think :)

Halloween always rounds up so nicely, every year, and maybe one year, I'll spend it with my niece back in Vancouver as we explore her neighbourhood, collect some good treats and some not-so-good-seriously-unhealthy treats, and maybe create some sparkling, fairy-dust adventures along the way.  Here's wishing all of you, your families, and the kiddies in your lives a Happy Hearty and Safe Halloween!

The Note That Was Left Behind

PHOTO BY SI

Suicide notes.  They give loved ones an idea of what might have gone through the suicide victims' minds in their final hours.  Some of them are filled with sad goodbyes to all the people who brought them variations of joy and pleasure or recollections of happier times from a dream-like distant past.  But others are written with a heavy angry heart pointing fingers at all the individuals who made their lives miserable: the bullies who sought their demise, and succeeded.  Then there are the ones that are filled with regret over what could have been.  These notes are portals, a way inside the soul's distress, a way to understand the profound isolation a person living with severe mental health challenges, such as depressive mood disorder, is forced to suffer through, or someone who has experienced insurmountable bullying and alienation from their peers.  In their reality, there is no longer any trust in their thoughts, as their thoughts keep pushing them towards self-destruction.

The overall societal reaction to people who take their own lives is often revulsion, without any understanding of the mental, physical and emotional distress of the victims, because well-adjusted folks who neatly fit and succumb to the systematized matrix of modern society are supposed to be the norm. Do we even have a 'norm'?

People who commit suicide are called cowards, self-obsessed or narcissistic because they were selfish and did not consider the effects of their decision on their loved ones.  Another criticism is that the victims' suffering was not as bad as they thought because there are so many people out there who have gone through "far worse".  Therefore, these victims should have appreciated what they had in their lives instead of complaining about and focusing on what was not working.  Well, it's never as simplistic as that.  One person's response to their life circumstances is always different from another's.  The constant comparison of our lives makes an assumption that somehow we're all the same, similar temperaments and brain development, similar childhood histories and environments, and so, we should all be able to keep our chins up, march forward with hope and confidence. Yeah, right. 

The uniqueness of human suffering is exposed in all the different ways our spirits react to tragic life events.  It is no fault of someone who reacts in ways that bring her greater vulnerability and harm.  It is the body's chemistry, its millions of interactions among cells, and the external forces that complicate its nature that contribute to the soul's demise.  Even current scientific research can not completely explain the phenomenon of suicide and what goes on in the brain that might initiate self-destruction.  And certainly, my blog post here does not have all the answers as well.

In the book Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, Kay Redfield Jamison shares many case histories of clients whose mental health challenges became too unbearable that not even the treatment concoctions that Big Pharma mixed in its laboratories could prevent these people from taking their lives.  Redfield espouses a more compassionate approach to understanding suicide, and has struggled with suicidal tendencies throughout her professional life as a professor of psychiatry.  Staying alive is an everyday struggle for people who are "living with suicide", and normality is when the mind is only filled with thoughts of just self-harm like cutting or mixing booze and drugs rather than planning and visualizing their death with their own hands.

Of course, so many people who have gone through similar struggles do survive, but our biological affinities can not protect us from the sui generis of human behaviour and intellect.  Precisely why we need to nurture compassion for the ones we've lost and the ones we might lose.

Mental illness can comprise a broad spectrum of disorders with some of us possibly being at the cusp of a potential mental health issue, while others are already enmeshed in some of the more serious conditions that can precipitate self-harming behaviour.  Dealing with people who manifest some of their challenges in public spaces or at social gatherings can engender a confused range of emotions among family, friends, and colleagues.  Many of us do not have the patience to support someone who is experiencing a breakdown.  Instead, the tendency is to stand back, watch, and judge due to our ignorance of the person's issues.  Then some of us might explode ourselves at the person, which will aggravate the situation and add fuel to the rapidly spreading flames.  Without understanding the complexity of the human mind and its vulnerabilities, we question why this person is being so "problematic" and why they can't seem to just "suck it up" like the rest of us.  It is that very attitude that creates so much of the stigma around mental illness, and prevents people from seeking help. Alas! we are back full circle.

So next time we hear of someone who took their life - whether it be a celebrity or your neighbour or the community activist you rubbed shoulders with at a recent demonstration - let's show them compassion instead of berating them for making such a painful departure.  If we knew the impact of psychosis, we would be aware that it was not really a choice, but an act of compulsion and desperation to escape the ongoing thought cycles in their heads or the threats and oppression they faced from our societies that are bent on upholding restrictive and exclusionary norms and standards.  Please, let's honour their struggles, celebrate their achievements, value their goals and talents, and finally listen to their voices and the things they've been saying all along, things no one really paid much attention to while they were alive.

I dedicate this blog to a friend who lost his life to suicide.  May he rest in peace, and may the memory of his compassion, commitment, and care to the people who loved him serve as an example of leadership and resilience to all of us, and may his spirit live forever in the work we each do to lift others.

May we all develop the knowledge, insight, and compassion needed to help save lives from suicide. For more information on suicide prevention training and workshops, please contact the Canadian Mental Health Association at 416-789-9079 or visit their website. 

Sorrow for Bangladesh, immigrant guilt

The Bangladeshi flag - the red spot symbolizing the blood of the millions who died during the war of independence against Pakistan in 1971, the green background representing the richness of the country's natural landscape.

The bodies covered in dust with limbs crushed under a corporation's concrete are arresting images to shock the world into silence, into confusion, into indignation.  But they provoke a more profound kind of sadness in me, a Bangladeshi who fled her country of birth at the age of two with her family. The country was in tatters, just emerging from the bloodbath that ensued when the country had ripped itself from the choke hold of Pakistani governance and Urdu-speaking elitism.

These images are not from the murder and mayhem of the independence struggle, but from the modern-day exploitation of Bangladeshi garment workers, who are forced out of economic necessity to work in unsafe conditions underneath faulty roofs, and under the glare of supervisors cracking their verbal whips snapping with threats of firings if quotas are not being reached.

I look at the Joe Fresh t-shirts hanging in my closet, and I'm reminded of how far I've strayed from that "old" identity of mine that I had long forgotten in the rush to be raised "Canadian".  Guilt overcomes me as I think about how much I have here, what I spend my money on, and how little I know of the culture and customs of my native land.

I would often turn a blind eye to the chaos happening in Bangladesh to avoid asking myself why I'm not there, in the thick of things, to assist, to support, to help my comrades make change happen in the country.  I certainly assist, support, and perhaps, make some change happen here in the work I do with the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention.  But my conscience prevails, exposing the (ill)logic I live by.

I've never experienced living in Bangladesh and don't remember my early toddler-hood there, but visiting the country (Dhaka) for two weeks as an adult was enough for me to be thankful that my parents left when they did.  I wasn't permitted to walk the streets to explore the neighbourhood around me due to the possibility of being harassed.  The beautiful dwellings I stayed at overlooked the shantytowns, and though the walls around me were sound, they could not prevent the aura of longing "down there" from permeating these privileged sanctuaries.

My parents opened up countless opportunities and privileges to me and my siblings by making the move to Canada: the free healthcare, the relatively stable political climate (though not without its Canadian brand of corruption), the education system (minus the ever-increasing tuition fees with loan re-payments that seem to stretch over a lifetime), the perceived freedom to be as we were without having guns pointed at us, the materialism that was accessible, albeit by credit, and the general sense of comfort and ease of movement within a vast landscape with so much to discover.

Growing up in Goosebay, Labrador and then Halifax/Dartmouth, Nova Scotia drew me further away from the language and customs of what now seemed a foreign country since all brown folks in Canada were seen as a homogeneous whole.  I learned to see us that way, too.  I listened to my mom and dad speak in Bangla, but I always talked back in English.  Soon, I just tucked away my humble beginnings altogether.

My race and ethnicity created a lot of confusion in school when I started making friends with black kids living in Cole Harbour. There weren't many brown kids here either, and my friends were curious to know exactly what race I belonged to since I didn't seem neither black nor white. I told them that I wasn't sure myself and that I'd be happy to be part of their community if they accepted me.

By this time, with the exception of my parents knowing some Bangladeshi couples in the South Asian community, I really didn't identify as Bangladeshi.  I was just a chubby brown kid into white pop culture.  I didn't want to be the "other".  I wanted to identify and connect with everyone, especially with white people. In so doing, I forgot my cultural heritage, my people's history, their art, their struggles, and their suffering.

But in the early 90s, I met a group of strong, socially-conscious brown Muslim women when my family and I moved for the third time to Vancouver. I became a part of this circle of friends, and was inspired to embrace Muslim feminist interpretations of Islamic practice and Quranic verse. But being Bangladeshi never entered the realm of identities I took on as I grew into adulthood.

My loyalty was to Islam and the Arabic language at the time.  I prayed the obligatory prayers five times a day, sometimes spending longer than usual on my prayer mat listing off all the people I wanted God to send blessings to. My friends and I staged "occupy the men's section" protests by disrupting EID prayers in mosques or by entering through the front door of the mosque instead of the back where women were supposed to come in through, or by taking part in board meetings to demand inclusion of women in governance and decision-making in the mosques.  We also challenged Western media for its constant racist constructions of Muslim women as passive, oppressed victims of Islam's brand of patriarchy and misogyny.

But where was the Bangladeshi in me?  It reared its sometimes when my parents took us to potlucks and parties hosted by Bangladeshi folks. During these warm, high-spirited gatherings, we could hear the language being spoken and taste food prepared the Bangladeshi way. And yes, there were always lots of fish dishes! That feeling of being Bangladeshi surfaced again when I left Canada for Japan to teach English.  There, I met some wonderful people from Bangladesh who encouraged me to reconnect with my language and culture. I felt in that particular ex-pat community the strongest sense that I was not being loyal to my "true" identity.

Merely speaking the language, eating the specialty dishes, or socializing with other Bangladeshis did not make me feel any closer to my country of birth.  In the wake of tragedies in Bangladesh, from massive floods to building cave-ins to political demonstrations and unjust detentions where hundreds, thousands perish, I am once again reminded of those long-forgotten roots as I feel the crushing weight of my own indifference/disconnection.

I often wonder how all my aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces who continue to live there do it.  Where do they find the courage to live in a country that is constantly on the brink of political and economic turmoil, uncertainty, upheaval, and natural disasters?

In the journalism program at Humber College, I've been fortunate enough to have met two young women who identified as Bangladeshi.  One went on to pursue her love of writing fiction.  And the other wrote about the politics and devastation happening in Bangladesh with fervour, passion, and despair.  I envied her commitment to her people, and wished I could feel as she did.  But I had moved too far away from it, in heart, in mind. And in memory.

I believe though my reasons for choosing a profession in the service of marginalized populations was an attempt to remind myself to never take life for granted. I wasn't looking for happily ever after. I wanted to continue working in solidarity with people all over the world who were deprived of a living wage, a safe and secure home, the freedom to express themselves, the freedom to move where they wished to or had to in order to escape persecution and violence and to voice their political views without fear of detention and/or torture, the right to organize and attend public protests and demonstrations, and the right to be who they intrinsically were without harassment.

I could take stock of my lifestyle in order to play some small role in changing things for the good.  I question how I spend my money.  I question the way I live - do I really need so many material comforts?  Can I survive on a minimalist lifestyle that doesn't demand so much from the earth, the factories, the animals, and the people?  Can I continue living in this small space, and never ask for the hedonistic "more"? Can I re-learn what it means to identify as Bangladeshi?  Can I reconnect with my his/herstory and the artistic temperaments and talents, the linguistic humility and cadences, the food, the mannerisms and customs, the traditions, the green hills of Chittagong (my birth home), and most importantly, the blood, sweat, and abject deprivation of the more than 30% of the population living under the poverty line?

"My brother has died.  My sister has died. Their blood will not be valueless," said one protester during the May Day demonstrations in Bangladesh.

Blood runs thicker than bottled water and the $15 shirts we "Canadians" can buy at Joe Fresh in the Loblaws conveniently located near my workplace. All readily and colourfully consumed in Canada. But painstakingly made in Bangladesh.

Hundreds of Bangladeshi garment workers lost their lives after the collapse of  a factory in Savar on April 30, 2013. COURTESY FRANCE 24

Winter Wonderland by the Eurythmics

I remember when I sang this song at a kindergarten to a backing track that me and my good friend T.Y. put together in his home studio in Tokyo.  I was dressed in a Santa Claus suit, and was singing with a chorus of Japanese children with about over 100 parents and their babies looking on at one of my favourite kindergartens.  I taught there for about a year or so.  I worked for a company called E.S. Consulting that connected EFL teachers to an organization that had English-language programs at kindergartens.  The organization was called J.A.C.P.A.  Don't ask me what the abbreviation means.  It's the experience I can talk hours and days about.

I worked for this one kindergarten (among several others) and they took really good care of me.  The headmaster, his wife, and their gorgeous son were really supportive and encouraged the kids to practice their English with me.  They would bring me a cup of green tea every morning before my lessons started.  All the teachers would participate in my lessons with their kids and they'd help me get the kids into all the English-learning activities and songs.  There was one student who didn't speak a word when I was there...but she participated and received love, care, and support from the staff, and the other kids. She responded diligently to all my prompts, pointing at that picture or the other, and taking part in the movement exercises.

For Xmas, the kindie kids held a concert for all their parents.  One after the other, each class took its position on stage and sang some lovely Japanese songs.  Then it was my turn!  They gave me the mic, and I stepped out in my Santa dress, black fishnet tights, and high heels, long curly hair streaming out from underneath the Santa cap.  The backing track began and I started singing!  I was actually in tune this time because my friend T.Y. made sure that we recorded the instrumental in my key!!  And the kids on the stage chimed in.  It was a lovely moment!

I have to thank T.Y. for taking the time to help me put the backing track together.  I did the keys, and his brilliant musicianship took care of the rest.  As a matter of fact, T.Y. helped me find my voice at that time.  I wasn't much of a singer then though, but he had faith in my potential.  And that was enough.

I miss those days in Japan.  There were so many wonderful moments like the one above.  I met new people almost everyday.  I loved the warmth and friendliness of the communities I interacted with, not just Japanese!  I met my own country people there - Bangladeshis, Canadians, and then Scottish, Brazilian, English, Australian, African, North African, Indian....so many amazing people!!

Thank you Japan.  The city, the country, and its people sure gave me a lot to be thankful for, including the opportunity to find my musical voice, even though it wasn't quite polished!  Thank you for your warmth, hospitality, friendship, and love.  It was a most beautiful of Winter Wonderlands to walk through.

Ask the Dust

Ask the dust
It will tell you where you can find me

It will gather up its one hundred lost souls
Whose hearts cracked with the wind's whispers
It will not turn their cries away from your ears

Listen, listen

Ask the dust
It will tell you where you can find me

For so long, I have looked through these dirty window panes
Watching my rose's petals wither with hesitant kisses
Now the dust collects in order to be swept away
Now the dust spreads in order to be polished clean

Listen, listen to those hands moving, moving,
moving along the silence between us...

Ask the dust
It will tell you where you can find me

As the dust swirls with the storms,
Storms of change,
Storms of change,
So my heart as it hangs by a thread
With no permanent shelter as 'love' drips winter from your uncertain smile

Ask the dust
It will tell you where you can find me

And if you find me,
The answers will be apparent
I am imperfect

I am as I am
Ask the dust...

By Shaz

The Enfield

This is a poem about India's first war of independence against the British, but it's also about the rebels in all of us. 

For more information, check out www.indialife.com/History/1857_revolt.htm

TO LOAD

STEP 1: Bite the cartridge
STEP 2: Pour the gunpowder into the rifle
STEP 3: Stuff the cartridge case
STEP 4: Load
STEP 5: Aim
STEP 6: Fire

Those are the steps.  Follow those steps. 

Bite.Pour.Load.Aim.Fire.
Bite.Pour.Load.Aim.Fire.
Bite…

Pork and beef were not the main dishes. 
They bit hard into the over-sized bellies of their captors,
Fattened with seeds from the pillaged soils

They bit hard to put a hole through which all the plundering could fall out
And behold the wealth that spilled forth, cum-drenched,
those white rivulets stained with blood-red rubies, fiery orange harvest, crimson-coloured riches...

Monies

Fire.

The bullet's trajectory triggering resistance like the pinball wizard.
From east to west, the chewing away of excess became ravenous.
But it did not stop there. 
It went through the glass ceiling…

Piercing the heavy air of freedom-fried complacency
The fires that go on raging from the mountains to the deserts,
The detonators that go off in our restless hearts,

These hearts that can not sit in silence,
We feel the agony when we bite the bullet of our identities,
The revolutionaries, their anguish gone from all those centuries of just saying NO

So when the bullet punctures a hole in our modern-day traps,
Those traps that remove us from our radical struggles,
Imprisoning us in brightly-coloured idealistic bubbles,
We must take a step back to the torched villages when fear had no place in the hearts of the conquered, but consumed the greed of the conquerors.

Bite.Pour.Load.Aim.

Fire.

By Shaz

Be Still

The corners of my dim-lit world this morning pull me in
They tell me that I don't have to decide today
They tell me I can sleep in their arms till May
That I could waste my numbered days in pools of gin

I hear the voices of my Allah-fearing sisters calling
I hear their cries and the clamour of their cursing

I bury myself in the warmth of words, in the romance of a note
Their glittering rhythms and melodies lull me to dream
But they are no match for the elegance of a scream
It leaps out through the snarled wreckage of a strangled throat

'tis better to be cursed than to be blessed
You never know what you might have missed

All these questions to be answered, they splash, they sing, they dance their jig
I drag my feet in quiet surrender in search of an honourable solution
But all there lies ahead is the stillness and the silence of voluntary isolation
I look beyond the rejection-reflection and see once a healthy sprig

He once whispered love, but, aye, there was much hatred in his kiss
And so this is the fateful foe and friend I choose to miss

Be Still, o raging mind, o fearful heart!

Let the quiet light drag my chary soul under the covers
Where angels breathe peace and Jesus' hand hovers
When each dawn breaks, and the others wake for their daily drill
I will rest my head in shame and sorrow and be still.

Be Still.

THE KARMA OF UNREQUITED LOVE

Movie poster of the most recent Hollywood version of Tolstoy's ode to unrequited love starring Keira Knightley as the tragic heroine

Love hurts.  People will say that it's not love that hurts, but it's all the emotions, choices, and decisions we make for love that creates the painful chaos.  Well, this commentary is not about defining what love is or what love can do to people.  It's about karma and more specifically my personal ever-changing cycles of unrequited love karma.  

In a nutshell, I have discovered that I am caught in an endless loop where in one phase, I am in love with someone who isn't in love with me, and then in another, I am not in love with someone who is actually in love with me.  I have revisited these phases ever since I was a teenager obsessing over and chasing after long-haired redheads.  

My first introduction to unrequited love started in Grade 6 when one of my classmates took an interest in me and went so far as to give me a hallmark card to notify me that his heart was smitten.  I remember that day like the back of my hand.  We were in the classroom just after recess.  He approached me and handed me the card with a sheepish grin on his face. He was a cute little guy, but I won't mention his name here out of respect for his privacy.  I took the card and opened it to find a short hand-written poem that used some words from the hallmark song.  I felt an overwhelming fear combined with that 'eww, gross' feeling.  I then proceeded to rip the card in shreds as the poor bloke watched in shock, along with some other nosy classmates guffawing behind him.  I threw the nearly evaporated card back in his face and told him never to humiliate me that way ever again.  He was visibly hurt.  I didn't care.  

So that was probably my first meeting with unrequited love (UL) and probably when the karmic cycle was triggered.  Because I had rejected someone in such a despicable insensitive manner, I'd get a taste of that myself.  Karma is not really a form of punishment, but a learning cycle.  All I can say is that I'm still learning and therefore, the cycle continues.  

What followed after my initial ill treatment towards another human being was a long and often lingering line-up of rejections, broken hearts, obsessive poetry, stalker-like behaviour, and so forth.  I was the one who kept experiencing the rejection over and over again.  Thankfully, the tables would turn every now and then and I would be at the receiving end of some poor lovelorn soul's undying love, devotion, dedication, and possibly self-destruction, his, not mine.  

I know the intensity of that rejection well.  My friends do too because they were witness to the number of times I went on the hunt for the men who I felt were born to be mine.  I wrote devotional poetry better than Rumi because I thought it would convince these lotuses of my eyes that I was a true winner and that my quirky, eccentric exterior was really a protective shield to cover the divine goddess within.  

None of them fell for it of course.  I was left with an acidic taste in my mouth and a heart pierced with splinters of glass, stones, cigarette butts, whatever was lying on the ground as it got dragged through the muddy trenches of Pat Benatar's  song "Love is a Battlefield".   My mind was a raging battlefield as the heavy artillery of possessiveness took hold.  I wouldn't settle for anything less than victory.  But the harder I fought, the more I lost: dignity, self-respect, money, time, friendships, and a lot of other things important to my health and well-being.  

But that was then, and this is now.  And now, now I'm once again at the receiving end.  This time, I'm exploring carefully what lessons need to be learned here so I don't end up hurting the other person involved in this faulty equation.  I'm steering clear of giving any signs of hope that the relationship might solidify into a more permanent romantic partnership but at the same time trying to infuse my responses with the knowledge that I too was once in that place.  But it doesn't make the sting of rejection any less painful for anyone on the other side.  Alas!  This is life!  

So I feel for the Anna Karenina's of this world.  I know how hard it is to cope with UL and find the courage to let go of all the effort we put in to win our heart's desire, to let go of the dream of being with that person for the rest of our lives, to let go of caring for and supporting that person through their challenges, and to let go of our own need for validation from this person.  Many of our reasons for chasing after folks who don't love us are linked in some way to early childhood experiences of being rejected or having to prove that we are good enough to be loved.   Many of our childhood experiences taught us to always give ourselves wholeheartedly to that other person like they're our saviour and we, their servants, and sometimes that behaviour also shows up in many of our other non-romantic relationships with friends, peers, and the public.  We fear that we will lose "love" if we don't serve, but we don't realize that the "love" was never there in the first place.  Some of us never realize that and hope and pray for the rest of our lives that the object of our affection will someday come back to take their rightful place beside us.  And so we continue to toil in vain.  

I for one have stopped toiling and have accepted all of the experiences I've had with UL.  The good that came out of it was that I learned to write lovely poetry  and a couple of nice songs, learned to sing a bit, and I reconnected with my passion to learn piano.  Most importantly, it really created many opportunities for me to explore and learn about compassion, rehabilitation, healing, and gave me an acute awareness of just what it takes to give people caring and loving support.  I'm not perfect though.  This is my journey through the UL karmic cycle.  

For all the folks struggling with unrequited love, there's always hope because there are billions of people in this world and no shortage of paths we could follow and create ourselves.  We were made for so many people and so many people come into our lives so that we may learn from our interactions with them, good or bad.  It does get deeply bad at times and you might feel totally alone in that space with no one to talk to or no one to understand what you might be going through.  If you're contemplating suicide because of being rejected by someone your heart desired, please get help immediately.  This website might help: suicide hotlines

There is also a yahoo group specifically for those who are struggling with unrequited love: Unrequited Love

A friend of mine once said, "follow your bliss".  Yes, do follow your bliss, blindly or with eyes wide open, but also be open to the lessons you might have to learn on this journey of love's pain and glory.  

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