Kill Your Well-Wisher

And in times of despair when you look back you want to blame people for the decisions they took for you. You obviously believed in their love for you and played along despite loathing their decisions. You didnt wish to upset them and neither did you have the energy nor the inclination to confront them … So you adhered to what they said … You allowed them to be the masters of your destiny! By doing that, you let them know that they are important to you … that their opinions mattered and so did their happiness, even if, at times, it meant you chose their happiness and dreams over yours. You had secret conversations in your head in which you managed to convince them to see your point of view. But sadly you couldn’t even begin such conversations when they were around. So basically you choked on your inability to convey, your compulsion to please people and your unfulfilled dreams. You were there … But you weren’t there. You wanted to scream but only your insides reverberated with silence. Nothing ever really came out. You just stood there with a smile plastered on your face which didnt even manage to reach your eyes neither did it penetrate into your soul. It is what I call “the pet lamb syndrome” … A pet lamb is just what it is. Because it doesn’t scratch like a cat or bark like a dog, you assume it’s okay to play with the lamb whenever you wish to. What can the poor thing do anyway? It can’t attack you and has absolutely no ways of expressing displeasure. Hence you have the liberty to take advantage of its failure to emote outwardly. This lamb can always be slaughtered the day you feel it has outlived your love and thus the proverb, the sacrificial lamb is my absolute favourite for it defines the sole purpose of a lamb’s life. The proverb emanates from the rational that a lamb was not made for any other purpose … That, when you are born as a lamb the only thing you can do is run away from those who love you else they shall slaughter you for their hunger or superstition… That, no matter where you are, you will be satisfying those around you … That you are meant to serve …

I have been a pet lamb to so many around me. People around me saw me incapable of having thoughts, opinions, dreams, desires and aspirations of my own. For them I was a pliant lamb who couldn’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t lead a life in accordance with her own thoughts. My life had to be lived on the basis of a user manual designed by them and a calendar which showed the dates and schedules of their life and not mine. From what I wanted to pursue in life, to the person I got married to … everything for me was predefined. When those decisions were being taken for me, my opinions were never sought, my plans were not taken into account and for them my dreams could only exist in my sleep. I blindly accepted those decisions because they were being taken by my ‘well wishers’. My well wishers had absolutely no clue about what I wished for. My well wishers were people who never stopped to inquire about my wishes … Today when I suffer on the account of those decisions, my well wishers absolve themselves by citing their “noble intentions” being the basis of those decisions. It’s so simple! You took those bets for me (and on me of course) because you are my well wisher and now that those bets have not paid off, you wash your hands off those bets not once caring about the insurmountable debt I am under. I pay for those debts every single day, I live with the losses, and the broken glass of the opportunity cost pierces me every time I see someone else hit a jackpot on the bets I wished I had taken.

I can’t hold my well wishers accountable for I am supposed to understand and move on … Make do with what I have and try all over again. Take a few more bets and this time they don’t come forward because now suddenly I have become “old enough” to take my own decisions … When the real reason is I have lost all sheen. I am the horse who once won Darby and now is too old to bet on. My well wishers now are genuinely concerned about my “wishes” since it is now enervating for them to spare a thought about my apparently dismal future. Suddenly my wishes become the epicentre on which many an earthquake came … Suddenly it all became about my happiness and my dreams because now they can see the futility of their dreams being realized through me. Till yesterday I was a source of their pride , power and prestige and now I am a woman who has but lived a life less than ordinary and who can’t be held as a beacon of their success any longer … They can’t brag about me any more and of course the next best thing to do is to find out what I want because clearly I failed to deliver what they wanted. So now their last attempt of feeling successful through me is to ensure that I am happy … My well wishers truly care about me! Don’t they?

If I were to meet them on my way back to God, I will kill them. I want to kill them because they ruined the only life I got … I will never get it again. I will never be 20 again. I can not go back to my dreams because my reality has changed. What my eyes could see back in my 20s, I can’t see now … What I could feel as an unmarried woman, I can’t feel it as a married woman … What I couldn’t achieve as a young passionate kid, I wouldn’t be able to achieve as a cynical adult who struggles to meet her ends meet. I will never get my idealism back neither will I get my zeal ever again. My well wishers ensured that the wherewithal I could ever need to succeed in my chosen field doesn’t stay with me.

Today after 33 years when I am compelled to redefine most things in life … I am but forced to adopt the definitions I was fed with and those are precisely the definitions I am fed up off. However, at this juncture my apparatus is extremely feeble to experiment with newer definitions and thus I am forced by the sheer convenience to adopt their calendar and live according to their timeline for they are now default settings in my case. The joy of living on your terms eludes me for I don’t know the terms I want to live by. The only terms I knew have been long forgotten. My well wishers indeed turned me into one of their kinds …

It’s unfortunate that I have absolutely no idea about what I want. It’s unfortunate that I lived to make others happy. It’s unfortunate that those around me took it for granted that I shall place their interests before mine. It’s unfortunate … Very unfortunate.

My well wishers turned out to be the biggest back stabbers … They behaved like rats on a sinking ship for they abandoned me the minute they realized that I am meant to go the Titanic way.

I am filled with immense anger and I abhor all those who wished well for me for they only wished well for themselves through me.

I have forgiven them for being selfish but I can’t forget how their selfishness has irreparably damaged my life. The vengeance in me wants to destroy theirs but the wisdom in me advises me to not go back and dwell on my losses. The woman in me wants to hate them with every fibre but the blood in me reminds me that I came into this world because of them. Till now, blood and wisdom have prevailed but I am sure in another world, those ties will snap … Snap for sure they will! And if I meet them on my way back to God … I will kill them.

Angry Sugarsatchet!! No wait … Pepperspray