Freedom from the other
April 2023
Suma Varughese traces her journey from being in thrall of the other to the point of not minding what the other says or does.
Yesterday, I met a couple of friends for lunch, both of who were quite devoted to me. Or so I thought. However, I found one of them addressing all her comments almost exclusively to the other. She hardly addressed me except when I addressed her. I was bemused but not reactive. Since then I have wondered why the other seemed so much more important to her than me, and whether she really was as devoted to me as I had thought, but there is no anger and no withdrawal. My regard for her is unchanged.
And that is quite a shift for me. It has always been very hard for me to be neutral to what others said or did. If someone was nice to me, I was nice to them. If someone was indifferent to me, I too ignored them. And if I ever felt put down or made less of by someone else, then my withdrawal was quite marked.
I remember loving this line from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets: “Love does not alter when it alteration finds.” But how hard I found to emulate it. When someone seemed not to like me as much as they had done earlier, I would move into reaction mode. Why had their behaviour changed? Was there something wrong with
me? I would then beat up on myself and come to the conclusion that I was not good enough. But the other was not spared, either. I would feel rejected, angry and hurt. The emotional charge would never really leave, and the equation would never be the same again.
It was almost impossible for me to set my own standard and hold on to it even when the other departed from it. And the reason was my perilous sense of self-esteem. I took my cues from others because I was too unsure of myself. And thus I gave away my power.
There was a brief period, though, when I had acted very differently and that was when I had just had my enlightenment experience. At that time, I had felt absolutely replete within. I was my own master and I would effortlessly lift others to my level, instead of being reduced to theirs. At the once-dreaded high society parties I was compelled to attend by virtue of being the editor of Society magazine, I would feel completely at ease, engage with the most forbidding celeb, and on the strength of my own ebullience, cause them to relax, unwind and open up. I had interesting conversations with most people, not because they had changed but because I had changed.
That period lasted for a year and after that, I was back to where I had started from, uneasy and unsure about myself, but with a burning determination to change and become the person I had glimpsed I was in that year. The intervening years have enabled me to free myself of a lot of the baggage that crippled me. My self esteem, particularly, has risen to respectable proportions. It may not be perfect, but I am getting there. And I can envisage a time when I can finally free myself of the influence of others and be myself in all situations.
In this state of perfect ease with ourselves, we no longer mind where the other is coming from because it has not the slightest influence on us. On the other hand, our composure, our smiling amity, may actually unfreeze the other and cause him or her to climb down from his hauteur. That is freedom, my friends.
Suma Varughese is a thinker, writer, and former Editor-in Chief of Life Positive. She also holds writer’s workshops. Write
to her at sumavarughese@ hotmail.com. We welcome your comments and suggestions on this article. Mail us at editor@lifepositive.net