When history repeats itself…

What do you do when something unpleasant happens in life? That sickening sense of Déjà vu when you are hoping that it is just a bad dream and will pass away very soon… You carefully planned your moves, words, actions, behavior, picked your team, it should all work out THIS TIME, but no! 

History repeats itself… It looks like you are winning, you have reached the peak… but your path becomes a bell curve which keeps going down after the peak. You lost the war.

But of course you don’t let this bog you down. Everybody face setbacks and failures right. You can’t make this about yourself and be too hard. You just brace yourself for the next wave to hit you and handle it this time. Hence, you learn from these lessons and move on…

The next time you face a “situation”, you are ready now. You plan your moves, words, actions behavior, team + valuable inputs from your last failure. You have to win now. And it looks likely, because you have now gone beyond your last failure and reached new heights.

Unfortunately, it ends up being a bell curve.

This happens again… the same rigmarole. Get ready, plan your words, actions, behavior, team + Valuable inputs from last 2 failures… get higher than before, but then crash down… next attempt… yada yada yada, get higher than before but crash again…

Again, the bruised ego wants to protect you and says, “Awww… this wasn’t about you my dear. X Y Z went wrong and you did everything you could. Right? Open quora, get on Tumbler, Subscribe to dailyinsirationalquotes on Instagram to pump you up.. #nevergiveup. Do you know how many times Edison failed before… Do you know how many rejections JK Rowling…”.

This is my answer not to the many collective battles small and big (Heck, for me even uttering a word of “hi” to the person who sits next to me at work is a victory) which I lost, but to the ones which became a pattern. 

The ones which I lose time and again… passions that I never completely pursued, decisions that I was too scared to take… This one is for the relationships that I lost or people that I was too afraid to hurt and ended up losing them anyway. 

This is for holding on the things which don’t matter or ignoring the things which actually do. This is uneasy because they happen again and again. So what do you do when you hit some rock bottom? Get up and try again right?

Accepting failures and moving on to an seemingly unexpected but inevitable way down…  Not anymore. I am frankly tired of a bell curve. I don’t want to get higher than before. I want to become an exponential curve which gets to the top and stays put… saturation point!

What was the common unifying factor in all of the above? The individual themselves right? The cycle of “preparing for the battle” … planning the words, moves, actions… being careful. That cycle never changed much did it? We somehow always follow the same pattern thought from some level it seems to be all different.

A wise man once said that you cannot keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. Quotes like “Fake it till you make it” became my mantra. And it actually do help open up and get over inhibitions. But the point to be noted here is the word “fake”. At some point you won’t be sure where your real self ends and the fakeness begins. Some people are getting judged for being real, while others are getting all the love for being fake!

I have seen a lot of people who are nice, say all sweet words, super fun to hang out and get drawn to them… not being a true judge if their “niceness” was their nature or something which they were faking. This is my new magnet – Watching people just being real even if it comes off at the expense of not sounding so nice. Not being rude or hurtful – but being real, honest genuine and unapologetic about it. Polite and understanding enough to live and let live… but strong and confident in who they are. They don’t try to blend in at the expense of forgoing themselves.

I hope I have the guts to be that person who can be true at least to my own conscience. I really do. And I guess to make that shift from a bell to exponential, the only way to do it is to break the pattern. Do something different. That thing which shakes you to the core, but deep down in the quietest of moments, it feels right… just got to do it!

When history repeats itself, break free and make history instead.

PS: I just wanted to record this inner monologue. This might end up being a total failure of an idea. But if all works out well, I will be so happy to tell myself “See, Told ya!”! It all worked out well. If not, well… I should try something different.

Thanks to Deepesh for the images and for being a "curvy(Mathematical)" awesome designer and for being the cool guy that he is!!!