Shibboleth שִׁבֹּלֶת

"I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin."  - Leonard Cohen

I sometimes feel as if I am living my life in reverse, as if existence is an exercise in infinite regression and I somehow missed the F-train exit I was meant to get off at to finally start moving forward. I have spent the past week feeling simultaneously haunted and hunted by phantasms of my own making. Family phantasms that I have amplified to ghoulish proportions that I now recognize are slightly silly. Ever wonder why there are certain people who have the ability to break you even in their absence? When, the mere mention of their name or a slight communication on their part propels you beneath the layers of ‘growing up’ you thought you had managed over the years. When it has you revisiting that terrified adolescent hiding from the world in a book; behind a locked door in a tiny box; hyperventilating in a pink room on the sixth floor of a house that imprisoned you for a decade and that your pretend you cannot spot every day from this vantage point in the post-independence Valhalla of your new self. I feel like I am locked in a self-perpetuating game of Boggle which I am constantly playing against myself. 

That’s what brought me back to this word. I recall coming across ‘Shibboleth’ when I read the Old Testament, and it refers to ‘a word or custom that a person unfamiliar with its significance may not pronounce or perform correctly relative to those who are familiar with it’. Essentially, Shibboleth was a sort of social-marker used to identify foreigners, because it was the Hebrew word they could never pronounce correctly. I feel it serves as a metaphor for my entire life in some ways. I have always felt like a foreigner, especially amidst my own. I am a foreigner in my family and I have never felt more foreign than I do in my own country. In the Book of Judges (12), the Gileadites employed the term to identify the Ephraimites preceding a military defeat upon the tribe. When surviving Ephraimite refugees tried to cross the River Jordan they had to pronounce the word correctly or their captors would exact a toll.

'Let me cross'

The men of Gilead would ask, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he said, 'No,' they then said, 'Very well, say "Shibboleth” If anyone said, "Sibboleth" because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell.-Judges 12:5–6, NJB

I suppose I can relate to those Ephraimites. Only my jailors are everywhere and most don’t even care to jail me any longer. My particular brand of Stockholm Syndrome has just taught me to appreciate the comfort of closed corners and the familiarity of bars and rules I no longer ascribe to. I never did. I suppose my ‘Shibboleth’ would be ‘Freedom’.

Sometimes I think that all I need to complete myself is a new word each day. On good days, I can manage a sentence and on better days I can write. Whatever that means. Five or more words that mingle together perfectly enough to leave me content with the fact that my life was worth the effort it takes to exist. That I have created something that is enough to sustain me through the remaining hours. It’s a small existence but it is fruitful. I was always that person…one who read the dictionary for ‘fun’ and poured through books of quotations hoping someone could loan me a mantra to help manage myself into an actual person. I suppose I am a fetishist. Only, my fetish is boring.

I have spent the last week feeling simultaneously haunted and hunted by my doppelganger; a parallel existence that seems to shadow me in this city. And that is what brought me to the realization that it was time to cut cords that did nothing but pull me into a pit I no longer even fit into. I refuse to live life in the reverse any longer, only ever moving forward in an incandescent waltz, which always leads me two steps back but still allows the illusion of whimsical progress. I am done pretending that people, who don’t matter in my life, ‘should’ matter in my life. It is a very odd, broken back-flip of the soul, trying to attain a version of yourself that cannot exist but you somehow feel ‘ought to’. My ‘other’ family recently tried contacting me through several venues and this sent me into a peculiar down spiral because it took me 30 years to scrape my way out of that morbid whirlpool of expectation, disappointment and salutations that constituted being someone’s daughter. It is a somewhat paralyzing realization that for every parent feeling ‘disappointed’ in their daughter; there is a daughter somewhere feeling disillusioned with the idea of parenthood altogether. I am finally allowing myself to reject those that have never accepted me. I finally forgive myself for not being able to forgive people who neither deserve nor ever sought redemption.

The sensation is immensely liberating. Yet I am slightly miffed that my coping crises has not altered one bit since I was eleven. The moment I felt the past creep up and rope me in again, I found myself frantically pouring over online quotes sites, listening to ‘Most of the Time’ and resenting the fact that I could not close the doors to my past by banging them. I am discovering that I simply do not belong to a generation that can register subtleties or cultivate propriety. I find myself being caught in analogous arguments because I do not have the courage to tell most of the people who deserve to hear it, to simply F*** Off and leave me be. It is an important lesson to learn to acquire an appellation of ones’ self and I have so far resisted learning it.

I always felt that a person could not afford to have a dramatic life and be simultaneously dramatic. It ruined the plot and there is nothing I like less than a poorly plotted story. There is a colossal either/or to choose from and one can’t have both. My genes pretty much made the choice for me and my parents pretty much wrote the script. It has meant living an 80’s style Bollywood, savitri-masochistic life that could not afford a Sri Devi to play the chest-beating-bleating lead. I needed to laugh at my life and so I did. What pisses me off about it ten years later is that other people presume this as an invitation to shit their life-woes all over you. There is nothing I hate more than people who assume their issues give them the excuse to make other peoples’ lives hell. As if we all don't already have our own hells to contend with.

Up to last year, I was surrounded by such people.

I am hoping to finally learn to cuss and cut them away.

I have recently conducted a personal plebiscite of sorts and I have decided to weed out the people in my life I don’t need so I might finally bloom, hackneyed as that sounds. It is the time for मोक्ष, Sanskrit for Moksha or Mukti. The process refers to a general liberation that cannot take place without some sort of life-living-death-rebirth cycle. In Hindu transcendentalism, it refers to surpassing your former self by cleaning the cobwebs of the soul, so to speak. Hindu Moksha is not necessarily a soteriological goal for redemption as much as an excuse for reinvention. A breaking of the ego and overall nama-roopa (name-form) to recreate yourself as you see fit.  I owe my Moksha to several people. To my parents, the one who broke me and the one who put me back together. My grandparents who just took each piece separately and loved it back to health and most recently...to friends.

It is the latter that has been the most surprising solace in a lifetime spent alone. Having friends this year has led me to conclude that family is such a defunct word and also, that it is a recyclable concept. I have learned that it is possible to recycle a bad legacy into a majestic legion and that it’s never too late to do so. I realized this, while fleeing my feelings in a black, survivor-mobile, sitting with a friend belting out ‘Break it Down Again’, chomping down on mis-spelt macaroons. This friend, You know who you are, is someone I owe my Elpis to this past year. For both silent support, loud confidence in my inabilities and for giving me an #201 island to cave into. I am brought back to that Frost quote ‘In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It Goes On.”

So ‘Welcome to the Land of Misfit Toys, Lost Boys and Broken Things’

It may be just the best place to get fixed.