EMILY IN HYDERABAD

I stayed up too late a couple of nights to binge on the Netflix series, EMILY IN PARIS. I’m obsessed with it. It details the struggle of a young girl and her ability to leave her own city when she has no idea about language , systems that are set up to help her actually don’t. It explores the nature of “work”, particularly social work, but I know myself enough to know which kind of tiredness goes in which box. This feels like something else. Something familiar but I can’t quite put my finger on it. What it is has been elusive until now.

The moment a person enters a new setting in life, whether it be a new school or new city, the feeling is buzzing. The moment I felt that buzzing in my chest, when I stepped out of the car on jubilee hills Hyderabad. Hyderabad was the most climatic thing I have ever experienced. The 45-minute drive from Airport, to my stay, I saw only glimpses of the big and wide city that holds over 7 million people.

frankly speaking i loathed to come Hyderabad as i was living in to nature . queen of hills Ooty .people having their retirement plan to live in such place , where i suppose to leave that just because of my work demand. it is so strange but true one have to leave and move to another place just to earn enough money. These memories returned while watching EMILY IN PARIS to where I had a visceral, physical experience. Doing that work was like living with a big red flashing light that kept reminding me of what happens if somehow you fall into the situation of “not having enough”. Either you had experienced what she had, or you feared you would. Despite the privilege of whiteness and education that protected me from many of my clients’ fate, my stomach remained in a perpetually knotted state whenever I thought about money, which meant having to work as much as I could because that brought independence and safety. The main character had privilege too; she was white, pretty, and smart and that made people want to give and do things for her. It’s not that acknowledging privilege takes away your experience, or hers, as many people mistakenly believe it does, it’s knowing that same experience is just harder for others than it is for you because of things they have no control over and things you may not realize you have.

After coming in to Hyderabad I found that what I want to do when I am happiest is write, work on my self. So I push in enormous blocks of time to do these things. This means I’m doing some sort of work from 6:00 AM to 7:30 PM and some nights like last Wednesday, well beyond when I arrived home at 11:00 PM. Here’s the epiphany: I found the right box to fit my exhaustion in; I have way more work than I really should have in my life or NEED to have in my life. Worst of all, most of it does not even inspire me or make me happy anymore. How much do I really need to live healthily and to be happy? To be secure in my future life? It’s far less than I ever would have imagined in my delusional world of fear.

Develop an intentional, sustainable, authentic, MINIMALIST and happiness producing relationship to “work” however I may define it. She’s like a therapist who is treating my “work disorder”. I know I’d like to continue doing some form of it, for the other things I get from it that are not monetary in value. Wouldn’t that be interesting to create a different value system than money around the work that we do? Because it’s very important for me to note that all the work I’ve done in all its various forms brought moments of joy and beauty to my life; it’s just that there was too fear-driven much of it to even enjoy it more than I did in those fleeting moments.

What’s your relationship like with work? How has it changed as you get older and how are you thinking about it now?