How to know that you belong even when you feel like you dont
[Music]
i
am born out of conflict
what i mean to say is that there is
nothing in me
or around me that is simple
or solved or easy
and in the 21 years of my life i have
become
the perfect puzzle solver
i am organized anxious
and i have this irrational urge to
figure everything out
sometimes way before it needs to be
figured out
until recently the conflict in me was
like the last
burning torch i had while i was running
away from the basement of my ideals
turns out it was the only light i needed
to find my way
life has really confused me it has made
me fail
and fall it has made me believe
that i’m in a race with everybody i have
fought so
hard to not become
life has left me eat myself whole
bras never let me look back at who i was
life has made me act against myself
do a disservice to myself in fact
i have betrayed myself so many times i
can write a book about it
and i will in that book
i will realize that this world is mine
and nobody else is going to be able to
experience it
no matter how hard i try so i’ve decided
to not solve anybody else’s puzzles
anymore
and even though my own world is not
simple
or solved or easy i know
that there is nothing in my life that is
not
worth it hi
my name is forum and the piece you just
heard is a little preamble to what my
talk is going to be about
almost four years ago i co-founded an
art collective called spill poetry
and ever since then my entire life has
revolved around it
but before i go too far to further let
me go a little bit back and tell you how
all of this started
back in 2016 the poetry community in
mumbai was unfortunately only designed
for those who could regularly afford to
pay to perform
so basically an artist had to work hard
creating their art but also pay someone
to show it to the world my co-founder
didn’t think this was right
so we started our journey there we
started with one open mic
which is funded by our pocket monies and
one simple motive in mind which was to
make art completely
free of course for the artist
we want to make a place for people
people who really feel like they
belonged
and as two young artists who founded a
monthly open mic
we put a lot of thought into how this
would turn out
all we knew is that we believed in the
art and the artists that we wanted to
make sure
that artists don’t grow out of privilege
but because of talent and hard work that
they put in
within the year 2017 we grew and how
we started a youtube channel we toured
all across the country
we poured our hearts out to little
complete strangers and most important of
all
we bought so many unique people on our
journey with us
having co-founded split 17 i have had
the luck
to meet and grow with some of the best
people and artists from around the
country
and in that process i realized that as a
human how important it is for us to
belong
let me give you a simple example
margaret med who was an anthropologist
was asked by the student many years ago
what she thought was the first sign of
civilization
now the student expected to talk about
things like
clay pots or religious artifacts or
tools for hunting but
instead met talked about a 15 000 year
fractured femur
that had healed this might not seem like
much to us right now
but in those days occupations were
hunting and gathering and if someone was
injured the rest would most likely have
to abandon them
without modern medicine a fractured
femur could take six weeks to heal
and if at that time a fractured femur
had healed
it meant that the person with the injury
had people around them
people who took care of them who tended
to their injury fed and defended them
until it healed
one male fractured femur was complete
evidence
that someone somewhere had belonged to a
community that helped them survive
even when they couldn’t on their own
communities always give a sense of
direction
and while my co-founder when i built a
community of lakhs of people
i personally made a lot of changes to my
life
i was studying in pune the year we
started spill i had to
constantly move back and forth and back
and forth from meetings or shoots or
events and as a person who doesn’t like
travelling at
all it became really hectic for me
so i took a decision to leave a college
i had worked so hard to get into
and come back to bombay
once i came back to bombay i also tried
to schedule my days in a way that i
could give
maximum time and effort to building
still as a brand and a community
but in all of this i got so busy making
an organization that was home to
thousands of people that i completely
forgot what it felt like to belong
suddenly building this community came
with the extra cost of forgetting my own
needs
i think this tends to happen to us if we
stay in one place for too long
for me personally that dissident started
about a year ago and it
hardly ever stopped the entire time i
was worried there had been two careless
if i had let life throw things with me
and accept them without question
or walked in the path that life had
created without paving my own
i was so confused had i actually
let life dictate how i lived my presence
without ever having a chance to explore
any
other option my mind was riddled with a
puzzle
that was bigger and tougher than i’d
ever seen in my life
i felt like i was succumbing to the
rationality that
i should stay in a place only because i
have reached there in the first place
i felt like this community i was
creating have become bigger than me
more important than me and then i just
would not
belong there anymore
after so many months of feeling desolate
with my own art a friend helped put
things into perspective
it happened last december i was in delhi
for an event
and i spent the past weekend surrounded
by some beautiful art and even better
artists than usually that would make me
a really really happy person
but it wasn’t the case this time as i
was heading to the airport i felt this
certain uneasiness in me
and i had to get it out so i figured i’d
call one of my closest friends and i
knew he’d bring me back to my senses
so i called him up i told him listen
i don’t think this poetry is working out
for me
i think i should try something new i
don’t feel like i belong here maybe i
should just start distancing myself
and i was saying all this because i was
so afraid of being pushed out of a place
i had called home for the past four
years
within two minutes of me ranting in this
conversation
you shut me up and say forum no
the thing is you’ve been giving and
giving for
way too long without ever thinking about
what exactly you’re giving away
he said what if the things you’re giving
away are
exactly the things that you need
he continued to see that this wasn’t
even about being an artist anymore
he said you have lost your happiness and
the only natural reaction to that is to
try and find it again
and if in the process you have to
rediscover your agency then that’s okay
but make sure you keep it with yourself
once you find it
and i started thinking what was so
important about my
agency so the thing is
in whatever we do all of us have
something or the other at stake
now the stake can be our talent our
personality and maybe in my case it was
a time and effort they had put in
but this stake is our agency
it is what defines us and relates to us
in that space
so what was my agency
was it about poetry was about the time
and effort
was it about being an artist was it
about running this art collective
and it was accumulation of all these
things
it was a simple act of realizing that my
life
was going to be so much more than the
cluster of experiences i had accumulated
and that was it belongingness had become
about
taking my agency back
and i’m not just telling my story here
most of us have felt left out in some
situation or the other
it’s so important to understand where
that there are times where only
we can resolve this conflict we forget
that we’re giving away
our agency so easily to people and
things that have got nothing to do with
our satisfaction
let’s look at it this way the longer you
don’t
believe in yourself the more time it
takes for you to start to
and if you have lost your agency you
have to get
back as fast as you can
ever since the day at the airport i have
been working towards figuring out
where exactly i belonged and i know it
sounds like some technical
self-actualization level stuff and
sometimes it was
i had to make really hard decisions
about my future and my career
and some of those included breaking the
notions i had about how
my life would turn out well in the past
few months i’ve also realized something
that has given me the mental karma i had
been craving for so long
i was not failing or
falling for that matter i was just
growing the past four years have given
me only one kind of experience
in one area one field with only a
certain kind of people
and somehow that automatically led me to
believe that i
couldn’t succeed anywhere else
but now my mind is finally began
exploring his capabilities
and its interests because it was not
happy being where it was
i was moving out of my comfort zone step
by step
i gave my spoken word career a bit of
rest and started studying things like
screenwriting and design
some things i was really good at and
some things were really
not meant for me at all but at least i
gave myself the opportunity to
let myself see what exactly the world
had in store for me
my mind had been begging for more
it was my responsibility to satisfy that
craving
and honestly i feel it is every person’s
responsibility to themselves
to let your mind be free and let it roam
wherever it wants trusting it enough
that it will surely reach a place that
is best for you
feeling like you don’t belong in one
place doesn’t mean that you don’t belong
at all
life is not a man on a stranded island
belongingness is not about
what you have done or what you will do
but about where your satisfaction leads
you
because you see to get somewhere you
have to make your sacrifices come for
something
you have to know that to pick up
something you might have to put down
something old
even if it’s for a little while i had
been wondering
all this time if i wasn’t meant to be a
poet
but what if i wasn’t meant to be just a
poet
nobody is just one thing yes sure i was
a poet
but i could be so many other things like
a painter
who was told by her 9th grade art
teacher that she didn’t paint well
enough
or a dancer who only danced for herself
or
a girl who constantly gave up hobbies
just to pick up new ones
and that would be okay because i
am in my own world no matter the rise
and fall of belief i have in myself
i have convinced myself that i
am going to be so much more than what i
have done or what i will do
and now i finally know
that i belong even on the days i feel
like i don’t
[Music]
you