The Carpet Needs Cleaning

I have a confession. I’ve been thinking about it all of last week and I believe I’m finally ready to dust the cobwebs in my head. I have a habit of not communicating the truth. I call it “omission”. I don’t volunteer information about myself and I’ll keep mum until someone pushes me into a corner and demands that they be told. I guess the world calls it lying… But in my head, they’re just tools I use to protect me and sometimes the people I care for from uncomfortable truths. I believe in the what-you-don’t-know-doesn’t-hurt-you principle. But last week things happened that made me realise that this might not be true. I took a long, hard look at my life today, I’m questioning these lifelong habits of mine. Why do I hide the truth?? Why do I have a problem with intimacy?? Have I been sweeping things under the carpet for so long that I don’t even realise how much it is harming my relationships until it is too late? Maybe now is the time to clean the carpet… Because from where I stand today, it seems just too damn dirty.

It started when I was 12. I was playing cricket and I had a fight with a boy. I hit him. He got injured and starting bleeding. When I went home and told my mother about it, I was expecting admonishment, but I was also hoping that she’d be happy I didn’t lie and stand by me despite my mistake. But all I got was a sound thrashing. Maybe she’d just had a bad day and was in a foul mood, but that became my first impression of truth—it doesn’t serve any real purpose.

When I grew up, I went to the NDA. It was a place where rules were meant to be broken. The only rule you needed to survive was, “Whatever you do, don’t get caught.” For three years, that became the mantra of my life. I stepped into the real world with this diktat firmly planted in my head. Don’t ask, don’t tell… Don’t ask, don’t… It became the principle of my life. And every time an uncomfortable situation arose, I chose to simply sweep it under the carpet. Every time there were difficult moments in my relationships, it became my habit to just sweep the questions under the carpet.

We, as creatures of convenience, hate confrontation. In our fast-paced lives, we’re all already battling so many stressful situations that we tend to shy away from adding any more to the number. We don’t want to have to think of one more unresolved issue in our life. And so we keep shoving them under the carpet. Out of sight is out of mind. But then one day, the pile of dirt becomes so big that when you walk into your house, all you can see anywhere is the dust. And then you fall sick.

You realise how ugly a once-beautiful thing has become. And you wonder how it ever reached that point… When did things become so nasty… You also feel angry. But expressing that anger becomes difficult. You either explode, or you implode. The years of shoving things under the carpet catch up on you and suddenly you’re angry beyond words. All this anger finds expression in that one incident that acted as a trigger. For a while, it seems like your world has come crashing down. 

But the truth is, we’re not angry over what has happened now, we’re angry about all the years of pent-up frustration. And the day that frustration finds a voice, it feels like the end of the world. We fight with those closest to us, say nasty things and sometimes cause irreparable damage to some relationships.

It’s hard for me to admit, but I think in life, we need to be able to talk to the people we love… We need to express what we feel, and above all, we need to stop pretending that it doesn’t matter… It does matter. In ways unknown to us, these little, little things keep playing on our minds. They’re like little parasites, slowly eating away at us, waiting for that one day when something big happens. I’ve learnt that to be able to survive those big days, we need to have relationships that are rock solid. Because otherwise, the moment we lean on what we thought was a rock, it crumbles into dust.

We need to finish our unfinished businesses. Go back and complete the fights, the discussions and the arguments. A woman I once dated told me that the one thing she loved about me was my habit of not sleeping over a fight and my efforts to resolve it before we went to bed. I do that with most of my fights. But I also need to start doing that for my issues. I need to resolve my intimacy issues, my feelings of inadequacy when someone loves me beyond explanation or reason. I don’t know why I question whether I deserve her love or not… My tendency to play Jesus in the lives of the people around me… I’ve been sweeping these issues under the carpet for far too long now.

I don’t want last week to ever happen in my life again. I don’t want to feel that kind of anger ever again. I know that the anger was not over the incident, but over the feelings I had bottled up for so very long… I’m cleaning my carpet these days. Dusting it and putting it out in the sun. Each day, it looks better. But it’s going to take a while, there’s many years’ worth of dust on this one.