From shadow to light

 I am so used to being sad for no reason that whatever reasons I find to snap out of my sadness seems like a distraction and I tell myself that it's only just until I get to numb my feelings, as if numbness is my destination and I just can't get stuck with taking a detour to working on feeling something more than sadness - it's as if I am letting myself be sad and the sad truth is my family has been seeing me this way day in and day out and just accept me as if it's a normal thing with me being all so quiet and introverted but with all my frozen sadness within and which they don't care to see and are hardened by their own veils to bother to look beyond them.

This dead end that I was not able to work past and without anyone's support and believing that I am too weak to support myself in any form or way made it a no way out but to get stuck with this ruminating path that leads nowhere.

I feel more sad having realized the huge hollowness that this numbing has led to and this grieving for being avoidant, dismissive, and insensitive to my feelings as if my life mission for each day is to get past this dead end but keep trying to feel alive to face it every day like a routine. How can I be so self destructive? How can I shut myself off feeling anything but just sadness? My mother made me feel like an extension to her tragedy and frustration, agreed, but do I stay in that as a shadow in order to adapt to this limited interpretation which I believed is who I am all about.

And when coming to the light through this hardened ignorance and thick fog, it feels like I had remained disillusioned in my own make-believe illusion world of living like a shadow to my mother's self absorbed feelings about losing my father and the world is all set against her in some way or the other and that sadness and getting sympathy was her ticket to thriving in a joint family along with her brothers and their wives and their children. What works for her need not work for me and this distinct voice to express what feels like truly me is something I am opening myself to and hearing myself out and trying to be compassionate and unconditionally accepting and give myself some flak for whatever I manage to do or not.

It's very hard to want to thrive in your own space without having to feel like a shadow to another being specially and all the almost realistic imaginary explosion in my head proving that I am this and good enough for that are just ways to cope up for having compromised on my emotional/mental space and for having gotten weakened more and more for carrying a lot of overwhelm, guilt, anger, helplessness, and lack of power and control over claiming what is truly mine.

This staying wrapped up in her shadow has made me doubt my identity, my existence, purpose, direction to take in life, and a yawning wide in coming away from myself as if I need the imaginations in my head to be my shadow for a lack of rebuilding my self from scratch. I am working on it but can't seem to get myself together for my true self seems to be out of grasp similar to a shadow that doesn't know how to survive by itself and needs someone or the other to justify to being one. 

And so all the knowledge, creativity, and problem solving abilities and so on get wasted to being a shadow trail and not wake up fully to my inner light which has been the reason for coming out slowly from being a shadow as I express about it in this writeup.

Clinging to being a shadow as well as wanting myself out of the shadow is like being aware of the obsession but not able to cut off from practicing that obsession which is like a habit.

Freedom of expression

I grew up trained to be in fear and worry about how to be good enough for my mother as she had made a habit of making me feel bad about my body. I feared deep down and was caught up in confusing feelings that the person whom I trusted most made me feel like an outsider to my body by criticizing it so much and quite regularly so that I didn't know if I had to be defensive about it or defend my dead father whom she brought up in every health issue of mine (almost) as he had left us prior to my being born due to a sudden cardiac arrest, and all her broken dreams of a long happily married life with him and their future together with the baby had all gotten shattered. The ensuing anger that she had bottled up kept coming up whenever my health failed to meet her expectations - the point was that she had been through enough already and that my frequent migraines and other not so life threatening issues and maybe one or two serious ones had all been treated by me as dust that need to be suppressed under my life carpet and which I did but not realizing then that this act of suppressing and stifling my feelings in order to look good for her was laying the seeds for being a fake from within. 

When you are not true to yourself and sensitive enough to understand how best to deal with your body, your emotions, and how to process stagnation of your feelings and release them from time to time through some proactive means if possible that could be for your good and more importantly to have someone next to you who cares enough about you to see how far you are going away from yourself is the start to feeling disconnected from your reality - the reality that you create as a response to adapting to someone's mood swings and judgements is the most limiting feeling and that when practiced for a long time becomes your belief that you need to fear to stretch yourself beyond a point physically specially lest it makes you feel weak all over again to seek support and withdraw from giving yourself a chance to come out of that comfort zone. Fear and withdrawal are not healthy means to train your mind to discipline yourself and just rotting in the pent up energy, drive, missed opportunities, and weary enthusiasm is the outcome of lack of self discipline. 

How long to hang on to such dead end habits is the question...Having fought within myself for so long that all the courage to actually face reality seems worn out. I know I will get up not because 'I have to' live but living through it all, pains, suppressions, withdrawals, stagnations,  over thinking, procrastination, lack of clarity in goal setting is something that had made me who I was but to be true to myself in such vulnerable times is who I am now and I am proud of how far I have come despite the emotional abuse from my mother, my long term dormant depression, addiction to stress, self destructive coping up and so on.

I don't doubt myself anymore if I had really gone through so much and just downsize it to make it sound like nothing because it was terribly hard for what it's worth to be your own support system emotionally and mentally and having a huge family like my mother's relatives besides her to live along with makes it all the more harder to release that family makes you biologically and materially nurture you but when they are not with you truly in your times of real need, then it's not worth it to hang on to such memories. 

Families are made and sent to us while we are born and we can't get to choose them but how to navigate through a bunch of people who see you but don't see the depths of despair that makes you believe that you are invisible to them and just cope up with it anyway is the loophole that only unconditional self love can provide. I can't jump through this phase by just suppressing my truths but discovering my true courage by being open to my vulnerabilities and accepting them for what it is is the way to allow myself the freedom of expression.

Narcissist and the real victim

 It's not really clear why someone is a narcissist and why he(Generally speaking and is not gender specific) behaves the way he does.  A dysfunctional family has little hope to become an integrated unit when narcissists rule the scene -  the amount of chaos that they can organically create and be oblivious of their self destructive habits which sadly pulls everyone down as a family, as a unit together is the effect of such a personality disorder. This disorder is inherent within someone as in it can be genetic or it can be a coping behavior or a learned behavior from dysfunctional family environment and from the heads who run such families (with narcissistic tendencies) and so in turn becoming narcissists themselves. But no matter what be the reasons for one's display of  narcissistic qualities, it's fairly common to have a dormant amount of those qualities within each of us like seeking validation of our efforts and the lack of it in the form of emotional neglect that is the primary seed for narcissism, and acceptance of a person and making them feel secure for who they are and a lack of which triggers the narcissist to seek supply outside of him and not within him, and these are relatable as long as the way we let this frustration, this sadness out by means which don't emotionally or physically harm others. Exploring one's hobbies, journaling, talking with people who are not quick to judge you, and most importantly understanding the need to vent in healthy ways as human living is always going to be challenging in some form or the other are part of the parents' growing up stages alongside the kid/kids and mere expectations without practicalizing healthy habits in daily life would just deepen this grief of not being understood. 

It is crucial to understand here that by allowing the emotional wound to stay and which makes the afflicted more and more embittered, angry, reactive and insecure are just symptoms of this disease which when not treated as early as possible or in earlier stages of life like from childhood itself, could spiral down further to become a pain that looks for nurturing and enabling from outside to make the narcissist feel important or special for no particular reason but their inflated sense of self, which is enough reason for them to believe and expect an appropriate treatment or response from others to keep them happy, accepted and secure.

It is alright to have expectations but to project these expectations as universal truths which others surrounding the narcissist need to comply is quite another. Taking accountability for one's behaviour and actions is something that the narcissist seem to conveniently forget and any attempts to remind and bring them to acknowledge their lack of empathy for others feelings is usually a wasted effort (the reactions could be childish, explosive, revengeful and just unpredictable in short) as narcissists when they become hardened more and more by practice of getting things done through performed acts of graciousness and kindness and stage worthy display of love bombing and charm used on their victims to get them to comply through deceit, dishonesty and lack of scruples, are stuck almost forever in their own created whirlpools that they love to go round and round and mentally/physically exhaust others in the process. This whirlpool is a dense and dark place that just sucks the life out of innocent people who could be their near and dear ones, friends, colleagues and so on, who will become weary of the narcissist's intentions sooner or later - the darkness refers to a refusal to come to acknowledge their own truths about themselves and wanting those involved with them to live in the façade that they have built around themselves in so many layers to get what they want. 

This firm refusal to grow up can bend the will power of many a victim as they could walk into the world of a narcissist only to be blinded by all their attention but no true love can be felt from narcissists as they expect others to make them feel self love but do nothing to work on loving themselves by managing their habits, looks, diet and taking responsibility for their actions and so on. Failure to acknowledge this lack of balancing oneself cannot be thrust upon others by being just charming and attentive as long as it suits their needs and blame shifting and gaslighting people to make it seem like the rest of the world are at fault and that they are victims who are on the receiving end when it's quite the opposite.

So it's no coincidence that people who have adapted to living with a narcissist and who are blurred by weak or no boundaries fail to differentiate their own feelings from that of the narcissist as that's what they expertly do - keep the victims trapped in constant state of self doubt about their own state of mind and knowingly play that against them and keep them more and more vulnerable to mind fog and anxiety for not able to fit in with the mood(s) of the narcissist which is in short like learning to walk on egg shells and make their path all inclusive where the narcissist would want to take up all the space as the victim squirms and squeezes in for making more way for the narcissist to walk beside.

Goals are very important in this way as learning to live off the other and through them reach their individual goals is a narcissist's chosen path - no guilt, no shame, no regret for using the others as a ladder to reach to the top as they will glorify in their own sense of victory and sing their own praises for goals big or small - capitalizing on attention at any cost is something they will never let go of till the end. It's sad to see that their life is just what they want others to see and not a true reflection of who they truly are, in mind, in spirit, as they masterfully disguise their true motives under a noble skin.

I have been a victim of my mother's narcissistic emotional abuse and was shocked to grasp the fact that I had been her scapegoat all along in order for her to project her gaslighting of how traumatized she has been for my physical illness (just a migraine and nausea) and made me feel worse by ruminating aloud calling forth the rest of the family members and sharing her grief yet again for the millionth time that how sad she is again to see me mimic my (late) father's health condition in having migraines and that he too had one such migraine attack and nausea, vomiting, a low bp episode had ensued and was quickly admitted to the hospital and within few hours from there on he had passed away while she was pregnant  with me (3 months). She made my misery worse not because I was in physical pain but by making me feel guilty for reminding her about my father whom I had never seen, she just upped her receiving of sympathy from her brothers and their wives with whom we lived together and there was cast a tragic spell by enacting this sadness out in front of her family audience as I was made to be the scapegoat for having just a common migraine headache. But the truth behind the recurrence of repeat headaches is not owing to my father as she had conveniently grief smeared and made me a participant of her confusing emotions which seemed like concern on the superficial side but was just an opportunity for her to showcase her tragedy even after decades after my father's passing and that no amount of medicines and doctors shoved down my unsuspecting mind then could actually silence my chronic emotional stress that ate me up and made me feel completely disconnected from my own body - it was all hers to claim - her difficult pregnant phase bearing me, her difficult time during delivering the child (me), her frustration to see me so physically sensitive (my core sensitive and intuitive nature got blocked, thanks to her smeared beliefs on me), and projecting how concerned and worried a parent she is by sharing my headache episodes the next day at office with her office colleagues. 

My self confidence, feelings of safety in my own body, trusting my mind to make decisions for myself all went for a toss as this chronic emotional stress that I kept absorbing while ignoring my sensitivities to feel my life, my pain, my real experiences whatever they be as wanting to adapt into her nut shell version of her grief seeded in me was what I carried within me as if pregnant even after being born but with a load of emotional pain which I could not process was mine or hers even after ages while being burdened to be empathetic and sensitive for all that she materially did for me, and that her saying that over and over was a way to not make me forget that I owe and should always owe her my every breath not because I organically or deeply feel that I want to but because she expects so and has made her unconscious thoughts my programming for me to blindly follow and which I did painfully being oblivious to my life's unfolding. As my body kept giving me true signals as the body always does and specially under this long term unresolved emotional stress that manifested in the form of migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, menstrual problems, and cardiovascular disease, it has become more and more clear to me in these past few years and which is almost 4 decades neck deep into this kind of narcissistic emotional abuse, that physical pains had indeed kept me alive to feeling my life even if they had caused a lot of discomfort and chaos in my already burdened mind. It was as if a part of me I had willfully suspended just so that I can hang around in some vague vacuum of having a life but not able to get my head and heart around living it as I clearly could not see past the persistent mind fog that I had been wrapped up that just kept blocking my way for so long. And so the digestion issues persisted, heart issues too, till this date, and for wrongly shifting blame on my dead father for no apparent fault of his other than succumbing to a sudden cardiac arrest that he could not survive through, this low level depression that kept clinging to me like vedhal clings to vikram is how it feels to get past all this trauma for surviving a well disguised emotional abuse well scripted by my mother to make herself the martyr of being a widow and a single parent with a 'sick' child who was in fact normal as any other kid but grew in such chaotic emotional family environment that supported such emotional abusers with sympathy and enabled my mother to 'nurture' my sickness while reveling in all the self pity that she liked to be addicted to. This has been slow poison for me as I was way too empathetic and sensitive to absorb all that she said and how she said it and believed myself in this web of stories that she told herself as well as all of us as I had gotten stuck in this toxic relationship which will still live on until she is alive and in some form or the other, but with a bit of boundary setting wherever possible, I try to protect myself and feel safe in my body from within and not seek validation of wellness from doctors outside which is what I was programmed to by my mother.

The effects of her internalizing and passing on her bitterness, frustration and criticism is so real as I am able to see the truth for what she is that it pains me more for having been used by her as a lifeless scapegoat which was made lifeless by her emotional abuse, neglect and gaslighting episodes which affected me both physically and mentally and for the life that I still am left with I hope to let go this dormant sadness, anger, and forgive myself as well as forgive her for being so cold to my emotional conflicts, anxiety, and chronic stress. And I am glad that I am discovering all these layers of truth before her passing as these sharings will not feel dead when done after her departure. These realizations are bringing alive so many emotions that I had coped up with repression and numbing and that I have grieved for as well but human life is anyways consisting of suffering in some form or the other and has given me an important lesson that I don't need to sacrifice myself in order to adapt to suffering and just let go this deeply embedded programming to make way for exploring my life realizing my mind, my true feelings and pains and keep moving forward to liberate myself possibly to the fullest by my life's end.

What habits can you let go of?

What are some of the habits that you would want to let go of? 

I had some answers to this rise up in my mind and few of them being:

1. To let go overthinking and giving into imaginative fears and fantasies

2. To forgive oneself time and again for (the amount of prioritization of others and limiting one's idea of what life, living, exploring life, interests, likeable activities etc means to oneself and in short) seeking validation from others at the cost of self minimization.

3. For getting stuck overanalyzing in proving I am right in my mind and repressing my true feelings and opinions whenever I had to express and thus self invalidating as a result.

4. For believing the fears of my parent and caretakers and absorbing them as my emotional template.

5. To keep creating the need for emotional blocks (unconsciously) so that I keep getting stuck in analyzing them and not fully feeling and expressing and releasing them.

 6. To let go living in my mind and to focus on expanding consciousness and awareness (which is why I have been able to sum up all these in a list form) and just simply sit through meditations as much silently as possible without too much mind chatter.

To let go these old patterns and to be fluid with the flow of life means to release my fears in holding onto them as way of habit. Expecting great results with not so great habits is the truth of the matter and realizing all these truths about oneself is the start to recreating oneself slowly one day at a time.

Healing all these patterns without overanalyzing the stuck aspects of these habits is a start to being kind to oneself. 

Anyone can be a critic but mindful awareness, silence, and sensitivity to one's feelings, one's ways of being and habits, (no matter how redundant or toxic they may have become, but owning upto them) and releasing them to the universe and working towards healthy habits is self acceptance from a newer perspective.

The joy of being (true to) ourselves

 Being yourself is a lot easier when you have all the layers covering you and you feel you can safely hide in them. Being true to unraveling all the layers is being true to your vulnerability that made you want to hide in the first place and why. Maybe there is no straight answer why but hiding your pain, emotional (even if you are physically hurt, it's your emotions that take a lot longer to heal) mostly is to safeguard the authentic juice or essence of being oneself and stay away from acknowledging it. Numbing this acknowledgement or repressing becomes a habit owing to having to cope up with the emotional/physical abuse and not letting it out for fear of being perceived as weak. 

And so not feeling safe enough to be your natural self and even before understanding what that could be, the amount of trust we place on others opinions of us becomes our conditioning that we levy on ourselves as if we tune into proving to others from then on, even from childhood days, that others are right at the cost of feeling all messed up from inside - it's like suspending our belief in ourselves in order to enable their judgements, no matter how criticism oriented it could be or how emotionally immature or insensitive or toxic it could be, but just plainly second guessing ourselves over and over just to give the benefit of doubt because they are family and that they will not mean any harm or belittle, compare, guilt us for no real fault of ours, but they do, and make us silent empathizers by practice - by making us practice as we unconsciously start doing so from a very young age and start assuming that we will never be as good as they want us to be and so to hide this pain that it's better to be adjustable with limiting ourselves, absorbing their energies and mood swings completely and not have any room, any space within us that we can call is for ourselves and completely dishonor boundary setting for ourselves as that thought of setting boundaries doesn't even arise let alone express the need for it. The abuser's toxic becomes part of us as we take comfort in the darkness of such a misguided and lost reality - the reality that we are important as well and that our needs, wants, feelings and so on need to be prioritized and even if it happens later in later, it's still worth it because at least then we will know the real pain of not knowing ourselves enough and not being kind enough with ourselves as we individually deserve that irrespective of what others think.

The stories we tell ourselves just to make ourselves feel more accepted in the lives of others is the most emotional wounding that we continue to sustain and live with and not even feel the extent of numbness that has layered like moss on stagnant waters. 

And so to come out of this cave, this self imposed isolation owing to abandoning ourselves for the need of circumstances needs to be relooked into. Darkness can make us turn away as there's nothing much that we can discover in the absence of light, but continuing to deepen our search that we will find our true self lurking in the deep crevices of the cave is a flickering hope to hold onto. Broken we maybe upon finding pieces of our true selves scattered without a linear thread of meaning and purpose behind it, but it's the fractured pieces if we own up to and acknowledge their presence in us despite the brokenness, then we make way to return to our true self with total integrity. Because it's not the gaining what we have lost and how much we have lost ourselves that matters, it's the letting go what we cannot fix anymore or what we cannot control anymore, and simply accepting over and over until we learn to hear our own painful truths with courage and equally kindness that we are really worth all the time to self explore and go in this inner journey to reclaim the joy of being ourselves.

Focus on surrendering to God

 Focusing on lack in my life has been my primary focus and mental conditioning - by doing this I believed that I was good enough for my mother's care for me as she obsessed on taking care of me when I got sick physically, and not wanting to take responsibility for maintaining good physical health discipline which came with with a healthy mind backup and since my back up was based on lack, I just did a formality of self care while giving away all my power of self accountability and living life to my best possible levels into others hands (her hands more or less).

To let go this habit and to move away from the confines of others devised self care for me and to trust myself fully to exercise in strengthening self beliefs took a lot of effort and a lot of letting go of old loops of patterns of thinking which was so absorbed in focusing on my lack and limitations. I probably would have started on that habit wrongly assuming that by focusing overly on them and taking whatever help I got for fixing my physical health issues was somehow enough to justify self care. 

Fear got the better of me as letting go this focusing on lack was so much my second nature and to surrender this fear, and all the layers that make the fear or fears what it is was harder than just the lip service surrender to God that I would think and visualize about but had not quite gotten the feel of it.

So, is this another form of dependency on others and disguised in the name of God? The one thing that stands out in this form of surrender and not blind/numb dependency on others is the feeling of freedom that I feel and have all the awareness of my true feelings and emotions returning back to me through release of this fear of letting go and such limiting beliefs that had kept me imprisoned within myself. It feels as if I don't have to worry about what would happen in future because the feeling of being aligned to this freedom from past ruminating fears gives me more space to explore what I can really do without any limitations or lack thoughts holding me back.

I still have not figured out what to do but it does feel like a weight is lifted off my chest and that I don't have to feel like an emotional cripple who is bound to her own fears and now has found a way to come out of it through Lord Muruga's grace which helps me walk to Him with whatever strength that I have for the rest of my living days. I know there's a long way to go in terms of walking the faith each and every day but with His blessings this blessed life, my blessed life seems to have found a purpose  broadly speaking - to surrender all my worries and fears to him and to flow with ease no matter what be the waves of challenges. In His ocean of love, everything is fair and unconditional. 

I don't need to keep living my previous mental conditioning anymore and that's like a new lease of life. Because I grew so tired sustaining this adapting to limitations mindset that I had gotten away from my true self (which I am still getting to know) and from knowing Muruga from close quarters. To belong right back in my life navigation map feels like I can take control of my life and travel with awaareness ahead. With Lord Muruga by my side and within my heart, I don't quite feel so alone like I need to do all this life by myself. 

It's so crucial to get a support system, a family or family member of friends to get to trust you unconditionally and not out of sympathy or obligation, and this source of connect with my true self I draw on as I walk inwards into my inner journey with truth and courage and perseverance is the most validation that I can think of for myself, and this inner journey could not have been possible without Lord Muruga showing me the light wherever it might have been needed. 

And so surrendering to God/Lord Muruga is strengthening my inner ability to heal myself emotionally and physically taking one day at a time. It need not occur when you really need something to manifest but as a form of unearthing your core nature that has been buried under all the years of fears and worries. Therefore Muruga has helped me wake up to see all these truths and to embrace myself fully and kindly and to trust Him which I discovered through my inner journeying is much above trusting any other family member or friend. 

This path of broken expectations from myself, from my family members, friends have all come together to bind my surrender to Him not as a way to escape reality but to face reality accepting it for what it is and letting go expectations for people to be this and that and also including expecting a lot from myself which has gotten eased a bit.

Acknowledge your brokenness

I would feel lost a kid in the joint family crowd that I used to live in - it didn't feel like family but as crowd for lack of better words and people sticking it out together through sheer tolerance and adjustments, and they become our conditioning. While the younger people did that more, the elders got to live their emotional immaturity and to survive this without lashing out at elders felt more hypocritical and far from being honest. All this to just stick it out as one huge family with all the broken people coming together to live in it!!

I am thankful for this in a way because even if my emotional maturity bloomed late, but I got to learn the lesson that in order to be respected as elders you need to start young - you need to work on respecting yourself and not expect it from others - validation from others is not respect and neither is fearful obedience to elders...what's the use of such respect anyway? 

Self motivation became my gradual go to after I have given up waiting on my mother who didn't know how to read my repressed silence, my difficulties with expressing myself and just wanted to focus only on my physical/material upbringing. I wish I had gone to self motivation not because there was no other choice. And exercising that overly stressed me a lot and felt fake to want to appear as if nothing has happened beneath the cracked surface within. But I would rather seem alright than weak and just followed the ego as it made me feel better if not feeling true to myself. And this contradiction kept me limited to knowing what I truly connect to or what do I really desire and so on. 

Ego is not one's life energy but it's sad if one is driven by that more than real self love and self belief.

I can't make the past all alright but by realizing this that it was broken and it lacked the guidance and direction from an elder no matter whoever it is allows me to make peace with the imperfections of life - that life is full and complete in itself and it's what we make of it that adds meaning or pushes us to seek some sense of purpose to our life. 

That people are broken and they need a sense of family to make them feel wanted, respected and so on is an undeniable truth. It's this feeling of real family that I had wanted to belong to and not just the number of members who maybe present in a house. A feeling of being at home is when you are secure with yourself and with how many ever members there maybe with you also adds its charm. And to feel secure with yourself from an early age needs a bit of trust from those who are present in the family - that she is more than just a bunch of physical ailments and that she has a world and hope and feelings and voice of her own. 

I was like the fallen star that everyone in the house wished the best for but with an air of despair and I just kept falling quietly and crashed in my heart's darkness again and again. To rise self motivated was my pursuit for happiness and feeling so empty just accompanied me no matter what I achieved..in repressing my feelings habitually from childhood I just learnt to give up on myself as some sort of reflection of others projected on me and I was quite at the edge of the mountain time and again, as if someone's validation outside of me will keep my self belief alive. 

To feel like you are emotionally dead or dysfunctional is like committing suicide when you are still alive and people in your family hardly notice that - as long as you are physically moving around, that's enough for them. 

To experience numbness for a long time was not part of my agenda, but to become defensive about it added more pain, more numbness than what I could hold in my heart. It's this outburst of pain, of longing to be understood, to express authentically without any fear of consequences, of what others would think, of how they would judge me or validate me that makes my voice what it is - to hear what I am truly feeling and acknowledge it simply and quietly is the best form of self expression. 

I am feeling alive for the past few years now and to feel all this pain, all this numbness that I went through as if it was some sort of rite of passage to get out from all the self imposed walls and ignorance makes me feel more sad but grateful that I am blessed with this life to experience all this as part of my life and not an entire life gone in vain if I were to realize all this at a later stage.