Would I Believe Him?

[I wanted to start this blog with something like “The end of a year – and of a decade in your life – is always a good time for reflection on how you’ve grown” and I could not believe how old I sounded. Urgh. But I turned 30 on Monday and have generally been taking stock of where I am in life and I realized that I managed to accomplish some pretty cool things through the belligerent hellfire that was 2020 AD. I’m sure you did too. I’m writing this for myself – each of the things below could/probably should be blogs of their own – and so if you do end up reading, thank you and sorry for being self-indulgent. I will have some real writing for you soon, I promise. But you’re welcome to stick around. It’s a happy piece!]

I remember at the end of 2019 I met my best friend at her office gym to exercise together after work. It was 6pm and the view of the city at dusk from the Blue-chip Tech Company building’s penthouse was stunning. It’s the kind of view people move to New York for. I remember looking at her and the people around us and feeling like they had something I wanted. She seemed so secure in her career, making the money she wanted to be making, living in the apartment she wanted to be living in, satisfied with how she lived her life, happy with how she chose her friends and generally excited for the future. If our mid-20s had been about understanding what we wanted, her late 20s had seen her go and get those things. She had a base from which to grow; she had arrived into adulthood in the most beautiful, convincing way. I said to myself, I would also get to that place in 2020.

And so I did. I actually did it. I feel like I am there now. It is something I am going to give myself credit for. To be sure, I was already in a pretty good place – in an incredibly privileged place – and there is lots I did not do in 2020. I did not finally get a US driver’s license, I did not get speech therapy for my stammer, I did not marry Mary Hatch, I did not solidify my long-term immigration plans – or reconcile my disillusionment with India, for that matter. But here are five things I did do – five things I managed in the midst of a global pandemic. Five things I am happy about and proud of myself for. Five things that make me feel like I’m worthy of my 30s. If 2020 Shravan went back in time to that meet 2019 me at the gym that day and told me where I would be in life, would I believe him? I don’t know. It was possible but not probable. So here are my Christmas presents to myself:

1.     1. I got my dream job

I knew it was time to leave journalism at the end of 2019. I had a great boss and a wonderful team, but I was not growing professionally, learning any new skills or making anything close to what I deserved. Then, when the daily rigors of old job – my last as a reporter – suddenly became too stressful relative to my pay slip, I began a lockdown job hunt amid a crumbling economy. I knew I had to step into my long-term career. I knew I wanted to go from writing about climate issues to actively influencing them. I applied to my current job – leading marketing at a climate finance NGO – in March. After rounds and rounds of Zoom interviews, I accepted a generous offer in May. After months and months of visa application stress, I finally began work in late September.

I can say with my hand on my heart that I love this job. I love this organization – it’s a caring organization, a healing organization. I love my boss, my boss’s boss, my team, the people who work in HR, the people who work in IT… everyone. The work is interesting and challenging and so I learn new things every day and I see a path for me to grow. This is my dream job because I can basically be my authentic self at work and so work doesn’t feel like work. This job change was… huge. I cannot even begin to describe how important it was in my life. It was so difficult but it made me have to strive and be the best version of myself. My relationship with my parents, who helped me in the interview process, reached a new level of closeness and mutual respect. I can’t believe I get paid to do this work. I’m in love.

2.      2. I found an amazing therapist  

‘Therapist dating’ can be harder than actual dating. You have to find someone who accepts your health insurance, who has time slots that match yours and most importantly, who you feel comfortable opening up to. It’s hard to differentiate therapists from their homogenous profiles online. Sometimes you’ll spend a week looking for someone, then you’ll spend your co-pay on an intro meeting and find them awful and then you’ll question if you really need therapy at all and then you’ll stop looking for help for months and months till life stress boils over again. This happened to me a lot. Then a friend shared a therapist hunting technique that I’m going to share with you: set up three appointments with three promising therapists back-to-back or all on the same weekend and just see who you best vibe with. You’ll be able to compare them easily and you can just commit to three sessions with the one you like the most. ‘Therapist speed-dating’, if you will, served me well.

I found my dude in March and went to his office exactly once before Covid lockdown moved us to nine months of Zoom sessions. I had a lot of unspoken, unarticulated feelings and internal conflicts writhing around inside me and Craig helps me untangle them every week by asking me the right questions. He never tells me what to do. He listens – really listens – and takes notes and then helps me find the answers that are inside me by reflecting my statements back to me. He notes down my ramblings every week and so Craig's list has become my Saturday morning ticket to understanding myself. Therapy is by far the best $50 I spend a week. Sometimes I’ll go into a session thinking “I’m happy! Life is good! Do I really need this?” and then within 20 mins I am verbalizing an anxiety or painful memory that I have never uttered aloud or shared with another soul! I stuck at it and now I'm reaping the benefits. For instance, he has helped me identify that I was living a profound mind-body disconnect, where I lived only in my head and saw my body as another person, another being separate from me. And speaking of my body…

3.     3. I lost 15 lbs.

I lost 15 lbs. in two months and now I know how to lose 1 lb. a week in a sustainable, fun way. (I can’t believe I’ve become American enough to use lb. instead of kg but the secret reason is that weight-loss numbers sound more impressive in lbs., so I lose weight in lbs. and gain it in kg.) Since I became conscious that my body was unacceptably imperfect – when I was bullied at age 11 – I’ve seen losing weight as simultaneously essential and impossible. Learning to love, accept and mold my body seemed like an insurmountable challenge. Then, this summer, all that changed when I got a hand-me-down bike from my uncle, primarily to help me get around town sans Ubers and the subway.

I never learned to ride a bike as a kid so I taught myself at age 29 at Sternberg Park in Brooklyn. It was scary but I said to myself “dumber people than you can do this” and in three rides I got the hang of it. Then I wanted to figure out how much exercise a bike ride actually gives you, so I bought myself a Fitbit. Then I said I wanted to measure these results, so I got a weighing scale. I was 189 lbs. and it came as a jarring surprise. I began doing either a 5k run (500 calories) or a 20-mile bike ride (1,200 calories) every day, six days a week, and using Sunday afternoons to meal prep. My daily diet is oats & almond milk for breakfast, a spinach, bean and meat stew for lunch, and pan-seared chicken & baked veggies for dinner – all punctuated by fruit and green/black tea. I allow myself 3 cheat meals a week. This is my life now and it's delicious.

I lost 10 lbs. in the first month and 5 lbs. thereafter and this regimen feels natural and energizing and has even led me to sleep better. Maybe the boys from middle school were right and I’ll never lose my hand-me-down love-handles but when I look in the mirror I like what I see and love how I feel.  

4.     4. I figured out what I want from a relationship

One of the more terrifying moments of 2020 – obviously aside from actual terrifying things like Covid cases in my family and Arsenal paying Willian £220,000/week – was realizing that my whole approach to relationships was wrong. I had only been thinking about what I wanted my partner to be, rather than how I wanted the relationship to feel. This is another revelation that Craig helped me both diagnose and remedy. I used to say – get ready to cringe – that I was looking for someone who was highly educated, “successful”, ambitious, purpose-driven, globally-minded, etc. I thought I knew my “type”. Then, this summer, I dated someone who was absolutely not my type and she made me feel more comfortable, valued and exhilarated than anyone had done in years. We realized I had to do a lot of work on myself so we ended things cordially. And so, I got to work. Big, scary, life work where you have to put yourself under a microscope and come face to face with your flaws and deficiencies.

I realized that my criteria were not wrong per se, but that they were merely proxies for how I wanted to relate to someone, to feel around them. For example, I wanted someone highly educated because I wanted to feel secure: I linked education with intelligence, intelligence with financial stability and financial stability with a comfortable life. I have a better idea now of what I’m looking for in a relationship, including things like being able to be my authentic self by connecting both at an ‘adult’ level (through physical intimacy) and at a ‘child’ level (through humour). I realized I need both. And I’m OK to wait until I find the person that makes me feel the way(s) I want. 

This has lifted the fog of dating desperation that long clouded my judgement. I just can’t wait for Covid to be gone so we can actually storm dancefloors, visit galleries, warm houses, survey museums, catalogue Taco trucks, christen AirBnbs, and perform all the other dating pageantry that helps you learn about a new relationship. Being patient will be hard. But I think it’ll be worth it.

5.     5. I stayed sober

This was my third year of being sober – my third year of being the best version of myself. All the accomplishments above were only possible because I quit drinking in January 2018 and used that year to figure out how to live a full, fun life without alcohol. To be honest, I rarely even think about alcohol any more and certainly never feel any pangs to return to it. Life is good; life has never been better.

With the life I’ve worked to build for myself, every year of sobriety gets easier and more fun. That’s why I need to keep reminding myself that I’ve achieved something worth celebrating – especially in a difficult pandemic year and a time of so much other change in my life. I defeated my demon every single day through 2020. I used to turn to alcohol to escape my reality, to escape difficulty, to escape loss. The gift of sobriety is that every day you do not drink, is something to celebrate. There is nothing to escape. You get addicted to winning. My life now has reached a sweet moment, where every day is a victory.

So there you have it. Maybe next year is a disaster and we look back at this blog and laugh. But for now, I thank you for reading this far. I would love to hear your favourite accomplishments this year, because I know there are many. I hope you take time to reflect on your own strength and success and you find comfort in sharing the happiness in the lives of your favourite people. Merry Christmas!

Disappointing Women of New York: Part 3

(This will be the last post in this series. As you can probably tell, these posts (Part 1 & Part 2) are more a reflection of my own insecurities and immaturities than any commentary on women in general or on dating the ones who live in New York City. I have disappointed my fair share of women - maybe I'll do a blog on that some day. Any flaws I’ve highlighted in these ladies and their actions are dwarfed by my own and by the galaxy of terror that men have wreaked upon the other genders on our planet. I was at fault in some way for everything that I'm going to tell you about. I’m sure "Disappointing Shravans of New York" could be a book unto itself. I wish all these women – all women in general – only success and happiness. On this dreary Saturday though, I just wanted to blog, to vent, to make myself feel better. So, without further ado, let’s finish what we’ve started.)

 

20 five-year-olds

Ever since I moved to America’s liberal Northeast in 2015, a dominant cultural narrative has been repeated to me again and again and ingrained in me: Women are queens. Men are trash. Women = good, men = bad. Men are boorish pigs who sometimes surprise you with tact and charm but overwhelmingly, they are the vicious aggressors in an age-old battle whose tide has only recently begun to turn. All my best friends in America are liberal women and these ideas provide the stars by which we navigate dating, workplace dynamics and other touch-points of gender interaction. Women by default are good and right and men are bad and wrong. This is the prism through which I’ve been taught to view the world – first at graduate school and then while working in New York. And largely, I have come to agree. It is a prism that serves me well because it can help me compensate for my many unconscious gender biases. But if you’ll humour me today, I’d just like to challenge the notion this one time. Just this once, and then I’ll go back to assuming the best in women and the worst in men, I promise. Sometimes – sometimes – women can be really, really mean. And for some reason, the ones who’ve been the worst to me have all been 25. So, I’m going to make a sweeping, silly, anecdotal generalization: Women in their mid-20s are children.

 

Ghosts in the System

We had been dating almost three months when I told her I loved her. She didn’t say it back and that was fine. We had talked about this. I think it’s fine to tell someone you love them just because you want to, rather than because you need to hear it back (for it to be real). We met shortly after I moved to New York and we went from 0-100 at a speed that surprised us both. But we stuck with it because it felt right. We would hang out often and have the most wonderful time together. We had met each other’s moms. We hadn’t made any long-term plans but we were really into it. She made life fun. For once, I stopped planning every waking moment and just lived every day. It was a joy.

When I wake up in the morning and I’m excited about the day just because I get to spend it with my partner, I know I’m in love. So I told her. And it felt great. She never said it back to me but she would send me long, drunk text messages late at night telling me how great I was. I felt fine about our dynamic; there was not an imbalance. They were three of the best months of my life.

Then one day she went to Paris on holiday for two weeks and stopped replying to me. 

I had never been ghosted like this before, especially not by someone I loved. She did not reply to me even on her return. I think it was more than a month of radio silence before she dumped me over text. “What a queen. YAS! Slay!”

Perhaps I had come on too strong. Perhaps our three-year age gap was beginning to tear at the spontaneity of the romance. Perhaps she had just realized she was bored of me. It doesn’t matter. You do not ghost someone who has told you they love you, who you’ve introduce to your family, and then dump them over a text message. You act like a grown-up. But alas, 25-year-olds are not grown-ups. 25-year-olds are children.

 

War Correspondence

It started on Hinge, of course. (I do not know how people meet outside of dating apps.) She was a consultant. She had gone to Yale too. She “checked all the boxes”. We talked for a bit and then she said she was traveling for work and would be back in a couple weeks. And of all places, she was in Bombay! It was her first trip to India and she was traveling alone.

This was a couple months after I’d been dumped by aforementioned Ghost Girl and so I think I had come across as a bit desperate to this new lady. In any case, the power dynamic was definitely in Check Box Chica’s favor. But as soon as I realized she was in my hometown and was working on a project that was close to my heart, I offered to help. I genuinely went into “help your friend visiting Bombay” mode. She gave me her email and we emailed each other every day. Aside from restaurant recommendations and site-seeing tips, I also connected her with my industry contacts and friends who would be best placed to advise her on her project. I remember writing honestly, “even if we never meet, I just hope you have a good experience in India” and she replied saying “Oh we will definitely meet when I’m back! This is amazing! Thank you so much. Etc.”

We never met.

We had exchanged 31 emails before she ignored me. An email a day between two strangers for two weeks; each message reaching across 11 time-zones. It was kind of nice to try online dating via 3 lines on an email every night. It felt like writing letters to a soldier on some front-line. Did my soldier die or defect?

Looking back on my emails, I was definitely too eager to impress and too anxious to show my virtues. But. I don’t think you ignore someone who has gone out of their way to help you when you’re traveling alone for work to their country for the first time. I don’t think this is how “YAS Queen Slay me” queens should act. At least tell them you’re not feeling the chemistry or make something up? I wasn’t ready for this kind of behavior. Weren’t women amazing, emotionally intelligent archangels of kindness and virtue? This is what I had been told. I guess she was not. What she was, of course, is 25.

 

5pm Checkout

I knew it wasn’t really “going anywhere” with this girl. She came into my life a month after “we’ll definitely meet” Check Box Chica. This new woman was fun but we were both very different. We texted a lot but would meet only every couple weeks for a few months. She wasn’t my usual type and I was not hers. She had taught English in Southeast Asia for a while and was now working at an education non-profit, but she was still very much finding her mission in life. Alas, she was beautiful and I was lonely and so I gave it a go. On one occasion, she even took the train out to New Jersey, where I was baby-sitting for some family-friends on the weekend, and we went for a lovely hike in the nearby forest. We kissed for the first time over a waterfall. It was nice! There were no “expectations” or ever any conversations about where this was leading. It was two people showing up for each other in a frigid November when the big, scary city had started to ice shut.

Though we did not see each other over Christmas, we texted and shared photos of our vacations. She sent me a photo of her holding her baby cousin and I sent her one of me in a Christmas sweater. It was nice!

We even met once in January. And I was starting to consider whether we could maybe work after all, if we could meet a little more often and invest emotionally in each other. So, we made a plan to grab dinner on a Wednesday. The night before, I’d suggested a place in East Village and she said she was looking forward to it. 6pm tomorrow, we agreed. I had made a reservation. The Italian joint was known for its lasagna and its cheesecake.

I texted her the next day at 5pm to let her know I was leaving work soon. She texted back... saying that she had been seeing someone else all this time and that she wanted to give it a shot with him. So, she said she would not be able to meet me and that she was sorry. I was “a good guy who deserved someone good, etc.”

Have you ever been dumped by text an hour before you’re supposed to meet for cheesecake? It’s a weird feeling. You kind of step back and ask yourself, “What…. What just happened?” How long had she been sitting on this decision and why did she wait until an hour before, to not only cancel the date but to cancel the dating? I could not imagine leading someone on like that and not being honest with them. But then again, I am not 25.

 

I think people in their mid-20s are inconsiderate because they are still looking to maximize their self-interest at any cost – and at anyone else’s expense. I know I was like that. When you’re in your late 20s, I think you’ve been through enough heartbreak to be gentle to people whom you’re breaking things off with. I think you learn decorum, etiquette, etc. Maybe all these women were ghosted and/or dumped by men in similar or worse ways to the ones above and so they saw nothing wrong with it. I feel sorry for them. It makes me sad that people on dating apps are so unkind to one another. There is never a fun way to end a relationship or let someone down easy, but there is a respectful way – a mature way. I’ve found women in their late 20s are generally kinder when they end things.

I think there’s a lot of room for kindness in dating. Who is going to teach us? The apps are great at matching us up but they are absent when it comes to helping us part ways. I don’t know if apps are going to help us get better at the hard bits, the messy bits. Only life teaches you that.