I Forgot

I forgot.

I forgot how much I loved painting.
I forgot how much I loved designing
Sitting until the wee hours of the morning alone in the dark, with just one light, my iPod and painting without even realising how tired my eyes were. I forgot how much I loved creating beautiful things out of nothing.
Out of empty walls. Out of haphazard corners.

I forgot how much I just loved dancing.
How much joy it brought me.
How much I enjoyed reading and writing.
How much I would re-read my own work over and over in silent but sheer pride
How much I loved listening to music, singing completely off tune to White Flag by Dido, or worse
Get Busy by Sean Paul.
Death. Truly.

I completely forgot.
I completely forgot me.

I was so caught up in being the wife, the mother and this caretaker of everyone except myself that I completely lost sight of who I was.

Although barring some bizzaro fashion choices growing up and the ridiculous tone deafness of the reality of life around me (what my mother for instance was probably going through as a single mom of three), I have no real regrets.
It’s all made me who I am today.
But finding out who that person is today has been its own new journey.

I realised that I do have all these roles to fill that I can’t do anything about really like - wife, mum, caretaker, manager, the bloody bhabhiji (which just instantaneously aged me to some fat old hag) but I also have the roles that I want - the young woman, the artist, the business woman, the witty, sarcastic one and the one that has ALLLL the answers to everyone’s problems/questions. Minus her own.

But this year has been about that.
I can still totally spiral if my son sneezes or if a client doesn’t like the work I produced and question my whole existence but just having that awareness has changed the game.

I also realise that I’m segueing into various branches of my ‘one’ mind possibly with no real point - but that’s also the new me.
Correction. The new ADHD me.
It quite possibly could be a blog in the style of a book I tried desperately reading recently but segued into this blog instead - Everything I Know About Love.
God alone knows from where to where she was writing this book. By the time you understand everything she knows about love, you’ll know zero.
If anything you’ll know about hate. Annoyance. Impatience. Or in my case more about my ADHD. I cannot begin to tell you how many paragraphs I re-read to only forget it halfway and start all over. Now that I think about it, I think the author has ADHD too, someone should tell her.

Lookie lookie. Segued once again.

Pause.

Coming back to me.

Like I was saying. I suddenly had a mid-life reality check/epiphany early this year that made me realise I need to find myself again. I need to desperately bring back all that good that made me Me and re-introduce it to all the good I created ever since.

At the speed of light, as all impulsive ADHD’ers are, I magically created my own space in my house. A space for me to do art, to listen to music on the loudest volume, to occasionally meditate, to escape to when things got too overwhelming. (Didn’t get very far, because my older one magically found a desk and chair to sit just adjacent to mine, ‘sharing’ all my supplies, while my younger one thinks the Apple Pencil is an extension of his own arm and my husband, who has his own office also sits here on calls) So I can’t truly escape. But still. It’s still a space.

A space that’s for me.

That’s where Design Bay was reborn. Brand new somehow in almost every way.

Despite being so immersed in this company, my first baby, for almost 15 years, I felt completely lost when I thought of coming back to it. Self-doubt crept into a department of life I was once so confident in. But without putting any pressure on myself, I did get into it slowly but surely.

I truly believe that when you open yourself to receive all the good from the universe it’ll come to you ten fold and I believe that’s exactly what’s happened here with DesignBay 2.0 (cringed as I typed that).

Every client that has come in has felt like a perfect fit and I’ve enjoyed every part of my new design process.

Before, I would wait to get to my office earlier than everyone else, get my cup of tea, sing in this quiet office at the top of my lungs, meet my team and design all day through.

Today, it’s the same but so so so much more.

I am woken up to the chaos - but the cuteness - of my two large rays of sunshine and we all go together to ‘our office,’
listen to our favourite songs,
have our cups of chai and decide what our hearts feel like designing today. There’s so much emotion and storytelling in my art today just like the rest of my life has become that it’s just all heart.

Total sukoon. Total gratitude. Utmost value.

Now what I forget are my regrets, my mistakes, my self-doubts.

I’m learning that remembering doesn’t mean going back.
It’s about letting the old you meet the new you and watching the two create something different, something truer - helloooo! (said that in bubbly British accent, fyi, you could too)

What I remember instead are all the things that bring me joy and hold on to them super tight.