Sitting on my sofa with my parents fast asleep in their room, I waited for the TV presenter to start the countdown to New Year 2020. This wasn’t my first 2020 New Year. I rang-in the 1st of January with Australia, then with India and now I was waiting for the ball to drop in New York’s Times Square. I am not a party animal, I was stuck to my idiot-box like glue.
The endless New Years I go through to just make myself sad
Countdown begins, the TV presenter pans the camera out and I can see couples looking into each other’s eyes waiting for their New Year’s first kiss. I do such things to trigger myself. I watch people ring-in 2020 with their partners, kiss as the clock strikes 12 and then jump up and down with joy, as if this is not just another day.
I am not bitter, I am just un-kissed (if that is even a term). Well, this is factually incorrect, because I did kiss back in my third year of undergrad college. But that was one sloppy kiss, where I knew as little as the boy. Our lips were all over the place, his tongue randomly hanging in my mouth and saliva down to our chins. He never hit me up after that, not that I was waiting for it. I hadn’t kissed before that day and haven’t kissed after that day. So other sexual experiences do not even figure in my life.
As a woman in her late twenties, my bucket list lies untouched in a corner just like me
I am a 27-year-old woman living with her parents with just a sloppy little kiss to call her ‘tryst with sexual experience’. I don’t ‘blame’ anyone except the fact that I live in a family which has tried to indoctrinate me into the thinking that you can only ever have ‘the one’ in your life. Anyone apart from that is not permitted to touch the sanctum that is your body. *Also save your virginity for your husband*”
Somehow all this has hampered my social interaction with men, as I am always conscious to not give them any ideas. In my head I am constantly dodging male attraction because my parents will never approve of any guy I choose and will eventually present me with a groom themselves one day.
My parents ideologies have forced me into a cocoon despite being educated and a working professional
This has brought down my confidence and self-image. I am scared to even self-pleasure myself because of the guilt that overpowers me after I am through with masturbation. It feels wrong and I am not able to reason with my own sensibilities post midnight in the dark of my room. It is exactly how Amitabh Bachchan put it in the film Silsila, “Mein aur meri tanhai, Aksar ye batein karte hain… (Me and my solitude, often have such conversations).”
Is new year, new me even a thing if I wait for miracles to happen
I might as well just get married this year to free myself from the overthinking that I have subjected myself to in line with my family’s ideology. Or maybe this year will prove otherwise and help me come out of the invisible shackles that I have tied myself down with and enter my 28th year with a bang, quite literally.
LEAD Courtesy: Unsplash (representational)
Inside Images: Pexels and Unsplash
