coronavirus – A sneak peek into my journey

Lockdown for me has been a very interesting journey , but now that we are finally moving to normalcy – I thought why not reflect on how transforming the past year has been.

Staying at home gave me so much time to think , think and overthink every decision I’ve made in my life , few of them I was proud of and a few decisions I wanted to slap myself for.

However , the same overthinking made me realise that no matter how much I cringe when I think of those decisions , I wouldn’t have been the same if it wasn’t for those.

And for a person who barely stays at home I made some crazy decisions and did some very unexpected things during the lockdown.

Around May, June our house help also left for a while , so my dad and I ended up doing all the work in the house – my dad mopped the house and cleaned the bathrooms while I cleaned the dishes & put the clothes for wash , the rest of the stuff that needed to be taken care of basically was forgotten about.

Appudu anipinchindi , Naveen Pollisetty was 100% right when he said “ maa panimanishi yadama ki oka gudi katali anipistundi “ annapudu.

I even tried cooking – when I say go big or go home I mean it.

I was at home ; but I definitely went big.

Normally when people start cooking they start with making rice or an omelet , but I go big so I started with paneer kebab ( which I found in the trash the next day morning , so you know how that went )

And while all my friends started learning the guitar and the ukulele I sat home watching Netflix.

However thanks to Haripadma Atha and my back pain I started doing yoga!

And trust me I cannot emphasise enough on how much my life has changed ever since , waking up and taking a bath immediately felt weird after 5 months into lockdown but it did incorporate discipline into my life.

I can’t sleep in the afternoon so waking up early gave me so much time throughout the day – that I started doing online courses , I even did a masterclass by tan France on styling and I realised how much I enjoy doing that ; and now when I’m bored I just pick out clothes from my closet and style them.

Furthermore , towards the end of the year I had finished reading two amazing books:

The power of nunchi & The secret

These books introduced me to such new and beautiful concepts like manifestation. Which I slowly started to believe in.

And finally on new years day I read this one write up which sums up everything about last year , the ups , the downs , the mistakes and the realisations.

Now read the next few lines ; let it sink in your heart and live in your head.

“It has been one of the greatest and difficult years of my life. I learnt that everything is temporary. Moments. Feelings. People. Flowers. I learnt love is about giving. Everything. And letting it hurt. I learnt vulnerability is always the right choice because it is easy to be cold in a world that makes it so difficult to remain soft. I learnt all things come in twos. Life and death. Pain and joy. Salt and sugar. Me and you.it is the balance of the universe. It has been the year of hurting so bad but living so good. Making friends out of strangers. Making strangers out of friends. Learning mint chocolate chip ice cream will fix about everything. And for pains it can’t there will always be my mothers arms. We must learn to focus on warm energy. Always. Soak our limbs into it and become better lovers to the world. If we can’t learn to be kinder to each other how will we ever learn to be kinder to the most desperate part of ourselves?” -Rupi kaur

Now I know we are already two months in to this new year but it’s never too late to wish for the best right?

Over the last couple of months we have all obsessed over one virus , today I want to talk about another multifaceted virus that takes thousands of lives every year but will never be declared a public health emergency.

Homophobia; Queerphobia;Transphobia.

I know most of you might be thinking , I’m too young to write about this or I’ve not seen the world enough ; but it is extremely important to me to write about this because I have seen my friends suffer with the fear of how people around them are going to react if they come out.

Thinking about their pains and dilemmas is very disturbing. I can’t imagine what they are going through.

What I have realized in the past few days is that , most of us casually use ‘gay’ , ‘faggot’ , ‘chaka’ and so many other terms as insults and jokes.

I confess that I did it too.

I used it as an insult too.

But this was all way before I knew how hurt the other person could get . I’m not justifying my actions but want to acknowledge that I am no longer insensitive. The only thing I can say now is sorry.

All my power lies in these words :

So what matters is that so many of us try to make this world a better place to live in , itself is evidence that we care ; we love our country and its people so much that we are capable of discussing what we can do , both mentally and physically, to actually make it better.

India has legalized being LGBTQIA .

But the fact remains , about 50 % of the trans genders in India have attempted suicide before the age of 20 and 31% of them are said to succeed.

And what hurts is that we are the ones driving them to the extreme step where they believe that it’s better not to exist.

I want to tell this to all my LGBTQIA friends who are still fighting with the society to be accepted :

You deserve to be loved as much as anybody else and we love you for being you.

THANK YOU !

You are a virus , you are the pandemic , if you are actively or passively involved in dehumanizing the LGBTQUIA community.

~ Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju