Writing the Distorted Reality of the ‘New Normal’

“We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.”

Humans are natural storytellers whether we realize this or not. The stories that we are familiar with, that shaped our customs are the building blocks on how we view reality. One would feel disgusted towards the news of a man of influence who is caught in bed with his secretary, while some will view the story as a desperate gold digger sleeping with her married and wealthy boss. Then, some would assume that such scandalous news will be hushly buried with some generous pay and that the man would keep his job while his mistress is fired; no one wants to hire such temptress in their workplace, their wives would certainly not allow it!. And soon, the story dies down and another surfaces and it goes on. One day, we will eventually forgive the man when he apologises openly in the media; after all, we know that society favors a changed man in the end.

We create stories to find the rationale behind one's infidelity, to make sense of why such unimaginable events happen. Stories navigate our reasonings of life and the events which are out of our hands; whether we are able to make a good man out of a monster, to pin the fault on someone or to make sense of a loss that went too soon.

Ever since I was young, writing has always been a coping mechanism for me. To write about my emotions and make them tangible on paper, the process is like untangling a maze in my head, and hoping that these strings of words will serve as a map to lead me somewhere. However, as I grow older I have started to accept that the stories in my head do not provide an ultimate answer. Instead, the process of crafting stories in any medium humbles me; it is like discovering facets of myself that I have yet to understand and make peace with. Writing can be a lonely journey. I find it like stripping myself naked on a blank page and tapping into my emotions, which sometimes can be a self-indulgent process.

When everyone was encouraged to isolate themselves during this deadly global pandemic, I somehow assumed that I would write more during this forced quarantine, but I was wrong. When the world starts caving into my room and life has never felt so suffocating with these sudden influx of new stories, is it possible to make sense of the world on our screens?. Since the pandemic started, I have been having a hard time creating stories because I was so overwhelmed with the news. I expected my poems or stories to be a clever social commentary, but I was wrong for expecting the end product to be perfect. It was like I was waiting for a mountain top view at the bottom of a hill, instead of climbing it and walking amongst the trees; I was scared of bleeding from my open wounds if I took the step of writing from a vulnerable place.

As the quarantine prolongs, I feel like each of us are living in our own fish bowl; circling around the same news, stories and headlines. There is a movement restriction, we socially distance ourselves from one another for the sake of one’s life and now we read each other's eyes as if it is a new language for us to get by. We live as hermits, crawling from our beds to meet society via a screen - this is what ‘alone together’ looks like. ‘How did we come to this?’ I ask myself every day.

The advancement of today’s technology is a godsend to ease the world’s adversity during the pandemic; but sometimes it just seems like a convenient out for humans. When the reality we are living in feels too overwhelming, we build another one virtually - one where we can play God and carve the world and its expectations with our rules. Now “we accept the reality with which we are presented”, a striking quote from a film called The Truman Show that eerily resembles how vulnerable we are to misleading news. Some of us may even contemplate if the news and media are just a hoax to divide us apart.

Despite this, like I mentioned before, we are storytellers and stories will keep on coming to us in the form of mosaic tiles representing different versions of the ‘truth’. So to my dear reader, I urge you to reflect on the stories that you believe in, the ones that mold your belief system and shape your worldview. If confronting these insurmountable emotions seem too much, writing about it seems like a good idea.