I often wonder how the external recognition of grief, mourning, pain is time-boxed. How we go through this life: mourning the departure of a partner or a friend, coping with the loss of a family member, experiencing the pain of someone we care deeply about, and still carry on with life? Showing up to work every day, sending emails, replying to texts, going to birthday parties and events. How can this contradictory reality exist? How can I go from crying in my car at a traffic signal when I see a raw footage from Gaza, to looking at Monthly Active Users metrics for a social app 15 minutes later, when I’m home. How can I go from crying in bed as I read more about the pain in Ukraine, in Gaza, to dressing up for Halloween? How do I carry the weight and pain of the world with all my heart, and why am I expected to not be consumed by it? Why is it still business as usual everywhere in the world when thousands of innocent people are dying? Why is ‘compartmentalizing’ normal?
How do you switch off your heavy heart and switch on your mind in the morning as you step into the office? Work and education were concepts made to serve us, not the other way around. Why then, in moments like these, do we compartmentalize our humanity away, and serve what was made to serve us? But then, again, where would we draw the line if we didn’t compartmentalize our humanity away? What pain threshold would qualify for compartmentalization? Everyone would draw the line differently, and *that* is probably how we’ve come to live in the world as we know it today.
I’ve often read that feeling deep feelings – both of hurt/ pain, and happiness/ joy – are the true meaning of life. In a world riddled with so much pain lately, I’m tired of constantly fighting the depth of this pain, with the compartmentalization I need to do, in order to survive. I wonder, how do you go through this life? The only thing I remind myself every night “do not go gentle into that good night.. rage, rage against the dying of the light”.
Ipshita Agarwal 