I am You

A few months ago for woman's day I was asked to guest blog an article for Tanishq titled "I am NOT You",

It was a portrait of a few successful women who had done things differently, and yet I felt like the title didn't fit. 

 it was pretty exciting actually, because I realized how much I missed writing. I'm definitely going to start writing more regularly after this. 

Here's what I wrote :

"I am not you"

This much is true. This article, I’m told is about me. And all the success and love I have found by being me. But what’s ironic is that perhaps the realization that brought all of it to me was ‘I am You’.

I am You. I see myself in everything that shimmers, every whispered love song, every flower that gently finds its way to the ground. I travel in gardens and bedrooms,around corners, through doorways, up stairs, in the sky, with friends, lovers, children and heroes; perceived, remembered, imagined.

For all my growing up years, my angsty teens, I tried to separate myself from you. I said I was a rebel, robed in black, scribbling poetry into my skin while watching raindrops from a distance.

I said I was not you. Cut you off. Broke you down until ‘I’ broke down and then something changed.

The poet Kabir said
‘The Redness of my Beloved is such,I went out in search of Red, and became Red myself‘and this is how it happened.

I was brought up primarily by my mother, also an artist. And so our relationship was set in pigment and pixel. Perhaps the greatest realization for both of us has been that Art and Illustration and the creation of beautiful things wasn’t a process that cuts people off, but brings people in. ‘I am you’.

I am not the ‘You’ that chose a road well traversed, I am not the ‘You’ that didn’t stand up for beliefs, I am not the ‘You’ that chose corporate jobs and black suits. I am the ‘You’ that fell in love, the ‘You’ that remembers and lives the innocence of childhood, the ‘You’ that dreams and believes that these dreams can be transformed into a reality. The child, the dreamer, the mother, the goddess, the lover and in all these manifestations we are one. Cyclic and Moon-drawn.

I started travelling when I was 16, perhaps more fearless then than I am now, and on those countless train journeys sitting by the door of the train I learnt (and keep learning) that perhaps the most important thing is to trust. Trust that you are protected, trust in your own strength, trust that this strength will guide you, that your feet (adorned with anklets and colour) are strong and will not slip, and trust enough to “Let the Beauty of What you Love be what you Do”.

Trust those doodles, those songs hummed in the shower, that poetry scribbled onto your skin, all the drama, because it’s in those that one’s love sometimes lies, in those doodles an artists, that humming a singer, a poet and an actor.

Love 

Shilo