Tag: New York City

#30trust, #trust30, Writing

Fear: A Blog Post

Sanjay Sabarwal
Cover of "Fear of Writing"
Cover of Fear of Writing

Fear by Lachlan Cotter
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is fear holding you back from living your fullest life and being truly self expressed? Put yourself in the shoes of the you who’s already lived your dream and write out the answers to the following:

Is the insecurity you’re defending worth the dream you’ll never realize? or the love you’ll never venture? or the joy you’ll never feel?

Will the blunder matter in 10 years? Or 10 weeks? Or 10 days? Or 10 minutes?

Can you be happy being anything less than who you really are?

Now Do. The Thing. You Fear.

I knew it would be difficult to take on the 30 challenge more so than anything  else because it would require me to face my fear of writing regularly and perhaps on some sort of schedule.  The stories sit inside me cobwebbed, yet I feel great anxiety when I start to dust off the past to write about it mainly because I have not dealt with the emotional consequence as well as having a turbulent present.  So where do I begin? That’s the question I am stuck or similarly whenever people ask what I want to write about, I say Ziba but to be quite honest, I do not if that’s the first story I want to tell.

As I witnessed a good friends wedding from UCLA, and being around other UCLA friends, I realized how much I miss that perfect time when all that mattered was scholarship and friendship.  It was a perfect time when writing came to be easy and words just appeared when I sat in front of the campus desktop computer.  Yet more than anything else, I was not alone.  I remember spending nights on my friend’s couch when I had no money for dorm housing, and benefiting greatly from the generosity of true friends who I see now 15 years later, and it is as if nothing has changed.  We all have spouses now, and we are older but just for that one night, we felt like we were 21 again, laughing and giggling about the dumb things we did at UCLA.

Yes the insecurity returns when the 39-year-old me sits here and wonder what to write about and it hits me that more than anything else, I am fighting about my own story.  I do not who I am anymore.  Years ago, I had a defined personality and name away from Ziba Beauty but now I am just a co-owner and while the opportunities are endless, there is a sense of betrayal to my sense of what I should be doing: which is writing.  So more than anything else, as I sit in this hotel room in New York, I am determined now to keep writing regularly and hopefully have something published next year.

Divine Idea by Fabian Kruse
Imitation is Suicide. Insist on yourself; never imitate. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write down in which areas of your life you have to overcome these suicidal tendencies of imitation, and how you can transform them into a newborn you – one that doesn’t hide its uniqueness, but thrives on it. There is a “divine idea which each of us represents” – which is yours?

Currently, I have a tendency of copying and pasting my own old writings and not really creating anything new so I need to stop “killing” myself and just sit down and write.

 

 

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Day of 1/1/11: I am number 1!

Sanjay Sabarwal

 

by Jemal Yarbrough

 

Too many unanswered texts, too few call backs, too much selfishness. I picked the picture to the right because it illustrates to me that there are many who will just continue with their lives not really concerned about friends or family.   I can’t but help be fascinated at the raw emotions I feel as those who I considered close to me once have left me to languish in the toughest battle of my life.  Others have surprised me at their tenderness and care and still other’s I cannot fathom their immaturity.  The reality is that friends come and go, family does the best it can, but only I can make the life I need to live.

So today, I celebrate letting go.  The 1’s being of particular important because at the end of the day I only have myself to rely on.  I no longer want to be dominated by disappointment, hurt or worse, Anger.  No longer will I give lip service to the ideal of being here NOW.  No longer will I dread cancer, chemotherapy, radiation or any of the myriads of  side effects we will face because the reality is we can either be overwhelmed by it or live day-to-day.

Moreover, I cannot expect people to be the way I want them to be.  They are going to be only true to their own nature and while some pay lip service to the ideals of great friendship or family, I just have to take it with a grain of salt.  I want today to be the only day I vent these sentiments because in the past 2 months alone, I know who my real friends and family are.  The rest just acquaintances who once provided fond memories and now just need to be relegated to old photo albums as reminders of a great past.  Some need to be removed completely, others left at a distance, and a few to be politely fake too because it matters to her so much.  So to some I say hello and to others Goodbye, it was nice while it lasted and thanks for the memories.

So 1/1/11 help me today to let go of the past, not worry about the future and just revel in the present.  That’s my gift to myself.

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Perhaps

Sanjay Sabarwal
Jemal Y

Perhaps the window to my soul closed a long time ago.  perhaps, I have been dreaming a long time, and now I am awake.  Perhaps what I thought to be my world, my life was nothing more than a string of moments and memories put together so I can say I lived.  Perhaps I am the homeless man on the right, fantasizing I am the writer on this post.  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

 
Those 7 letters have become ingrained in me, telling me nothing, give me no direction just a vague vision of what is to come, but perhaps that’s all an illusion.
 
I sit like that man, looking down half asleep, hoping, wishing, prayer for perhaps a better day, life or illusion  or perhaps not.
 
I do not know where I want to be.  I do know where I shall be.  I just know that perhaps it will all work out
 
Perhaps
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Fraud: A Blog Post

Sanjay Sabarwal
The Secret Life of Words
Image via Wikipedia

I have a need to be read so I know I exist.  These are my words, and I need to share them.  Too long, they have gone silent, and worst of all ignored by me.  I had convinced myself that writing was enough, just like breathing.  But after a while, you need more than air to live.  Life isn’t just a series of breathing exercises yet for a while that’s how I treated my life.  Something I just had to do.  No vision. No motivation.  Just passing of the day and really just being lucky enough to be around people who loved me for existing and providing me with everything.

So why am I whining because I know I am a fraud.  I know that the words coming here now are just so simple and don’t even come close to the poetry in my head.  It used to be so easy and now I am lazy and dull.  I stopped listening and hearing what the words were trying to tell.  So now I just sit here, listening to amazing religious songs with a cold cup of coffee trying to convince myself at 38 that this is what I want to be.   Yet every moment feels forced, made up just so I can say I wrote. 

I am a writer.  It’s what I tell myself when I wake up every morning, and the first strokes of the words comes easy.  Yet after a minutes, I find myself tweeting/emailing/posting/reading/searching/paying bills all throughout the precious time I have managed to find to write.  It’s as if my body is telling me to get real and go back to my superficial life. And I oblige.  That’s the sad part.  I know I am failing myself and yet somehow I still continue on the path. 

I am a fraud, but at least I know it.  And knowing is half the battle, Gi Joe reminds me.  But wait, I feel like a fraud but does that really make me one?  It’s the question that nags at me.  Who am I, really?  Am I the thoughts in my head or am I to be defined by actions?  What is it about slamming these letters down that makes me feel like a light weight heavy lifter?  Is it the guilt that the joy I felt when I first learned to transform my thoughts into reality seems buried, muffled underneath the chorus of doubt and guilt? Or is it just not meant to be? 

Should I remain a fraud or for once be the man I said I wanted to be?

And then there was silence…

My Past, Myself

Leaving

Sanjay Sabarwal
Aerial view of Niagara Falls, showing parts of...
Image via Wikipedia

The idea seemed simple enough. Got a new BMW, Drive to New York. Got a map, and my eyes glanced over the country and I wondered why just New York…

A Recently broken up fake marriage, lied to for almost 4 years, I wanted to get away from LA fast but no so fast that I didn’t experience anything. Why drive? Simple enough answer: Why not? Nothing was stopping me but honestly I wasn’t sure myself. It just seemed to fit and make sense since not much else in my life really did I think I just wanted an adventure. I felt locked up and had been indoors too long. Behind bars of a loveless and sexless marriage, I no longer wanted to do the normal thing of travel by flying. Truth be told, I didn’t even know what normal was.

I met her when I had just turned a quarter of a century, felt like my gas tank was quarter full of experience, and it would be good to share 75% of my life with the company of another. She was, pretty, Punjabi and in school. She filled out the mold I had set in my head and so we began dating. No sex of course, but we are indian and we don’t do those sort of things. Some sexual foreplay and plenty of time with each others’ families well actually more with hers because she lived an hour away and me being a gentleman, I didn’t want to make her drive so I would go visit her and since she lived at home with he parents (as I did), I thought it appropriate to be the designated driver to her life. A mistake I would pay for the rest of my life.

San Francisco was added for obvious reasons since it hovered about us, and it made sense to pass it as a launch point also because we wanted to touch Utah (for skiing), glance over Wyoming, set up briefly for some steaks in Nebraska (had heard they were famous for them), and then plunge through Iowa to finally get to a city and state where we actually had friends: Chicago, Illinois. After getting our breath back by shoving it with Crown Royal for 3 days, we would then stumble onwards to Cleveland (for a Bhangra competition) and then finally make it to our original destination of New York. However, the thought of going back the same way we came smacked too much like my demolished nuptials so we planned to forge ahead to see the Niagara Falls on the side of Michigan (something I wasn’t aware of until we opened the map and talk to the Triple A agent), gently stop in Michigan and then open ourselves to Lexington Kentucky, a town I called Blue Balls instead of Blue Grass because thats exactly what I had for the year that I spent there. The pattern of our visitations become as vague as our reasonings for going there, we just wanted to keep going, my cousin never questioning or wondering why the hell we want to go anywhere really. The next states happened in a successiong, Atlanta and then Florida (the first place where I was to meet a girl and perhaps no longer be blue balled, and then for some fine dining in New Orleans, Louisana. Finally, we would hit the biggest state in the nation and it would take us 2 full days to cross it so our stops became Houston and San Antonia, and we hop onwards to Phoenix and Tuscon and finally return to Los Angeles, a mere 3 weeks after we began.

The plan seemed sane enough. To be continued…