What do People Want??

I recount that I was roughly 18 or 19 years old when I read Eleven minutes by Paulo Coelho. It was a story about a young brazilian girl who wants to see the world and leaves her home to go to Geneva, Switzerland in hopes of great adventures and finding true love. Her situation gets complicated and she ends up making a career in prostitution to make money and get home sooner. One of the stories she writes in her diary entry has stuck with me ever since. 

From Maria’s diary:

Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect wings and with glossy,  colorful, marvelous feathers. One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him.

She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two traveled across the sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird. But then she thought: He might want to visit far-off mountains! And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird. And she thought: “I’m going to set a trap. The next time the bird appears, he will never leave again.” The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put in a cage. She looked at the bird every day. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: “Now you have everything you could possibly want.”

However, a strange transformation began to take place: now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest. The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feathers to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage.

One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for the first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds. If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realized that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body. Without the bird, her life too lost all meaning, and Death came knocking at her door. “Why have you come?” she asked Death. “So that you can fly once more with him across the sky,” Death replied. “If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and admired him ever more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again.”

You see, Maria really believed in this. She believed that when you love someone, you have to let them go where they want to and be who they want to be because if you try to keep them and make them adapt to your life, you would lose the person whom you loved deeply. She writes this when she realises how different her life is from the person whom she loves and tries to figure out what to do about it. This stuck with me. This stuck with me for a reason.

I was a 3rd year undergraduate student when I read this. I was just beginning to understand how relationships worked. I had just started to understand how friendships worked. I was also on the journey of finding myself. I more often felt alone because I was insecure that I was not loved back the same way I loved my friends. This was a recurring pattern in my life. It started when my twin brother went to boarding school and the feeling never went away. Reading this particular entry of Maria, made me think about love in a different way. All of a sudden, I felt lighter. I still remember thinking that this was going to leave a huge mark on me, sitting in the chair in front of my classmate who was working on assignments.

It did leave a huge mark. 

Four years later, I had told this story at least three times in a couple of months, twice in front of my mother. The journey of self discovery had been leading me to unlocking parts of myself that I knew would not be appreciated and accepted by a conservative tamil family. I have very short hair, three extra piercings on each, a considerably big tattoo on the of my forearm, coloured my hair once, questioning my sexuality and gender identity and longing for nose piercings and more tattoos. Whatever I have already done, I have to say that getting them was not easy. I still remember all the fights, arguments, yelling and ugly crying. I have become so hurt and numb that I decided not to approach my parents anymore with the remaining things that are yet to happen. It has led me to finally decide to be discreet and do things behind their back. But everytime I think about this, I remember Maria’s diary entry. 

People like to talk to their friends about what’s going on in their life. Young adults love to talk about how their parents are standing against them and how the war has been waged and fought. I love that as well, I admit. I also love hearing about my friends’ wars and we all advise each other the same thing over and over again. Everytime I am left with one question that has not been answered. Why don’t parents understand their children like friends do?

We could count on the fact that friends are all roughly the same age and generation and go through the same things at the same time. So we understand our friend when they say, “oh my god they are pissing me off”. We don’t even need the full story because we know it is going to be one of the cases that we have in our file. So we can ask, do all the parents connect to each other and feel the same way about their kids? I don’t know. But again, my question is, why do parents do that? Why do they not let their kids who are legally an adult, make their own decisions in life and figure things out on their own? Why do we have to ask them for every single thing? My mother and aunt always say that it is to protect us from all the harm that the world could cause us. But I can prove that more young people are aware of many more dangers of the world than older people are. How is not getting another piercing or a tattoo going to save me from the world? How is getting married going to save me from the world? How is committing to a certain job that I don’t like going to save me from the world? Moreover, How is listening to them going to save me from the world? 

I have been wondering for a while as to why people think friends are better than parents. Now that the lockdown has come, I have started coming across some memes saying that if someone does not have time to reply to your message or call you, are they your real friend? Some other memes say if one’s boyfriend/girlfriend/lover doesn’t do something or is not a certain way, they should leave them. It confuses me. I thought people liked friends and lovers because they were different from parents. But all these new things make me wonder what exactly people want from each other. Pandemic has been happening since the beginning of 2020 and we have all had our lives changed immensely, but this question still keeps lingering in my mind. What do people want from other people? I tried my best to list down all the things I could come up with through thinking, watching drama series and jokes and memes. 

• People need company, they can’t be alone. Company in any form is good. If they can’t have humans, they will want pet animals and plants, if they can’t have animals and plants, they will try to have dolls to hug while sleeping and watching the tv on the couch. If not that, they would even settle for talking to the utensils and furniture in their house.
• They need trust.
• They need beauty to admire and ugly to judge.
• They need control over things to not be afraid.
• They want stability and security at the same time that they want adventures.
• They want experience.
• They want revenge.
• They want romance and sex.
• They want friendship and love.
• They want any type of intimacy.
• They want attention and praise.
• They want to be understood.
• They want assurance and reassurance.
• They want a sense of belonging.

These pointers have helped me understand some of the activities and decisions people make in their lives. But none of them have helped me understand how they would get all of these things by asking a person to change for them and stay with them.

The pandemic had just started when my graduation project started and I had to do it from home while my friends were in different places to work on their own projects. I remember wanting all of the things that I listed above. I remember getting upset with my parents for not trying to understand me, being upset with my friends for not checking up on me, and getting upset with my brother for not taking my side. Time had passed and the same question came up in my head. What did I want from them? Because I knew that nothing would change and magically make me feel happy and loved if all my people did what I wanted them to do. So what was it? What did I want from the people I say I love?

The answer is in the story that Maria wrote. I want to fly away on my own. I want my parents to let go of me from holding me to their idea of standards, lifestyle and respect. I want them to love me and accept me for who I am so that I can love them unconditionally for who they are and be with them. When I think about what I want, I also think about what I want to give. When I say that this is what I want from my parents, I want to give similar things to my friends and family. So I started understanding and accepting that my friends haven’t stopped loving me just because they have started working on what they want in their life. It’s only fair that others get to fly as well.

Recently I watched a 2019 film called Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It was about a lady, Marianne, who had made her career in painting like her father, falls in love with the woman, Heloise, whom she was paid to make a painting of at discretion, to be sent to Heloise’s suitors. The film shows us how the relationship evolves from them being strangers to lovers and going back to being strangers with memories. What was beautiful was that it was a choice. Heloise, who was closed up and reserved, did not want to get married after her sister killed herself leaving the stress to be handled by her. The suitor was from Milan, a place where art and music thrived at that time, where all beauty existed. Heloise only starts to open up very slowly with Marianne during their walks together. Slowly their days together get Heloise to ease up and they fall in love. When the actual painting is finished and both of them realise that this would be the end, Marianne admits that she wants to destroy the painting because she wants Heloise for herself. Heloise feels betrayed because Marianne did not understand her and what she wanted. Both of them resolve their dispute and decide to part ways. But the film goes on to reveal that they were in love with each other even after parting ways. When I finished the film, all I could think was just one thing. I thought this was going to be the kind of story I would have in my life. 

It reminds me of the people that I probably have deeply fallen in love with, who I most probably won’t have a chance with because of where they are in their life and they probably will never know. It reminds me of my brother who has gone abroad to study and will likely settle abroad. It reminds me of my best friends who don’t have anything in common with me and some of us haven’t spoken regularly since the pandemic hit. But now, after realising that I don’t have to have the people I love to sit by my side all day everyday and pay attention to me constantly while I try to do what I think is right, has given me my freedom. I feel free. I feel infinite and powerful. I feel loved and complete, for I know that I can love someone unconditionally and have them in my life forever because it doesn’t matter to me where they are and what they are doing, which makes me feel like I would never lose them and that I never have to worry about losing them. Now I want to love more people and be there for them because I know that my love for them is all I need to feel loved and I can just stay happy knowing they are doing well and watching them succeed in life. I have even written a short poem about the feeling. 

Oh dear wherever you go
My love for you stays with me
Fly high in the sky
Dive deep in the ocean
Touch the tip of the mountain
Conquer all the land
Wherever you go
My love for you will stay
It doesn’t matter to me
If you let me go with the wind
My love for you is mine
Just enough to keep me going

All of these questions and thoughts might not have given me the answer for my original question, but I understood one thing. We, people, try to fill out gaps and holes in our life and heart through other people. Parents think that their kids are the example and trophy of the good life they have lived and that their kids will bring them pride in front of other people, the society. Similarly, we have other expectations towards our friends, teachers, lovers, cousins and all other people in our life, which we think is the only way to fulfill our needs. So when someone goes out of the line we have drawn, it impacts us in a negative way, pushing us to do the same thing over and over again until we burn out and start resenting the people around us, our people. Thus, it makes me wonder and go back to our question, What do people want? I don’t think any of us know. I don’t think that I have everything figured out either. But all I know is that only I can fill the holes and gaps in my life and heart. My people only ease the process. They don’t bring anything new, but they help me dig out what I already have, if it has been buried underneath the other things that my heart holds, no matter how they do it or whether they are aware of it.