Diary entry-January 19 -- a day after achchamma's orma divasam

Joseph Brodsky said in a commencement speech, that one must always look to words as a means to express yourself.
When I was a child, I was told by my teachers that I have a good oratory voice,
a voice that sounds very good when magnified, on the mic.
I know after being told that,
I put my voice to use by taking part in elocution competitions,
where I thought it is just the voice and the way you speak that captures the minds of all,
however, one time, I had practised so much before one particular competition,
that the day of the competition,
I was suffering from a severe bout of laryingitis, or I do not know what the affliction was,
but on the day of the competition,
I had a sore throat,
I do not remember, what the topic for discussion was, or how I had prepared for it
all i remember today is that on that day I did not have a voice
it was funny,
because in the middle of my speech, somebody brought me water,
and,
I knew then that I was not going to win this one.
Bloody hell.

So, not then, but later on many of my friends and well-wishers told me, you must write.
You are a great writer, my friends would say, though I had not written a single thing.

Joseph Brodsky's speech tells me, I did not think then that even writing was a way of expressing myself.
I only thought talking was,
as I had no other talents and could not express myself in any other way.

The period of my life when I stopped listening to teachers and friends has passed me by,
I did not do anything in that period,
because all I wanted to prove was that a human being can survive just fine, without having to make an expression of his or her life.

At this stage of my life, I wonder, if just survival is what a human being was born to do.
I feel I was putting myself through a situation of just survival at all points because there are so many of us who are going through that and hence in solidarity, I too must go through that at all times.
 But is that kind of solidarity helping anyone, I ask myself today.

Where one does not experience what he/she must, because the individual's experience must be sacrificed for the greater good.
Say, even when Marx wrote what he wrote, he was able to do so only because he was living his own life in the manner that life met him. He was not writing about solidarity or coming together in the way it has become today.

Why is it that we only remember the bad from everything?
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An infant only remembers, if it does remember, the good. Because it is only the good that has allowed it to survive.
As a child, one starts having the agency
to choose what to remember. The child can survive if he/she navigates through life in this manner
some of us weak ones, lose the agency when we are teenagers,
the period of romance robs us of our ability to discern things
An adult must invoke her infancy, childhood, and youth to be able to establish this thing called memory.
Is it good or bad?
After an adult makes his'her mind up, it is kind of done.
The game is over there.