'Mainu Vidaa Karo' and the Soothing Comfort of Death Fantasies
What happens when someone really close to us makes us feel ignored? A close friend, family member, sibling, or colleague—anyone who holds enough value in our lives to hurt us with their negligence. What happens when they make us feel ignored?
When on a particularly bad day, we call them hoping to have them on our side, and they simply ignore our call? When we tell them exciting news, hoping they'll be as invested in it as us, and their reaction is... nothing? When we share an issue that has been bugging us for a long time, and instead of giving us their consideration, they ignore it as if it means nothing.
What do we do? We should address it with them, right? "Hey, I felt hurt that day. I thought I mattered much more to you. I didn't expect that reaction. You know what, you mean a lot to me. I would never treat you this way." That's sensible, right? The only problem is, we rarely do this.
Instead, when someone close to us makes us feel ignored, we put on a brave face and tell ourselves, "I am bigger than this." We make strong attempts to channel our inner stoic selves, behaving as if the opinions of others do not matter to us. We plan revenge, only to never execute the plan. We devise narratives to fool ourselves out of our pain, only to see the narratives fail, one after the other, time and again.
We keep all of this to ourselves. We can't let others know that we're so fragile. That someone can hurt us so deeply—that they too can hurt us so deeply. We can't tell this to anyone, let alone the person who hurt us. What if we told them and they said, "You don't matter that much to me. I don't know how you got that idea."
What if they made us feel that we don't matter, that we aren't needed, that our being makes no difference, that our absence causes no stir, that the one person we wanted to feel important to doesn't really care about us; our worst fear consumes us. It doesn't even allow us to cry because crying would mean admitting it, and we don't want to admit it. We don't want to admit that maybe, we don't matter.
We don't matter.
So we try to repress it and move on with life. We continue to hang out with the same person who made us feel ignored, without even addressing the incident that caused so much trouble. Each meeting with the person only deepens the wound. We leave our fears outside the purview of 'regular' conversations. We put a pretence of rationality in the face of emotional turmoil, forgetting that delaying pain is not the way to deal with it. That we can't run away from our fears; they will find a way of seeping into our lives.
We witness the once-calming relationship morphing into an agitating mess. The conversations that once enriched us slowly become a stretch. Their effect, always frustrating, always ending with the same question, "What's the point of this if you don't even care about me?" And before we can make sense of it, the bond loosens, ties break, and slowly, the relationship withers away and creeps into the dark crevices of our consciousness, only to bother us when we move away from light.
As it's said, old wounds never truly heal; they bleed again at the slightest word. The underlying fear keeps haunting every relationship of ours. Any possibility of being ignored triggers us into action. Turns our personality into sad stereotypes; nosy, reclusive, defensive, terms such as these end up defining us.
Our past doesn't remain untouched by it either. The instances from childhood where our parents made us feel ignored, small, insignificant start creeping into our present. Old, forgotten resentments resurface. We get reminded of that one friend from junior school, whom we considered close to us, but who chose to share tiffin with someone else. And that girl or boy we loved with virgin passion, who chose someone else about us.
Mark Nepo writes, "Unmet needs can quiet the heart's calling". We sink with reminders of each such relationship, and the feeling of unworthiness seeps in. "Does anyone even care about me?", we wonder, often at the expense of forgetting all those who love us now, who once loved us, and whom we would've once disappointed.
Each failed relationship ends up making us more and more anxious about ourselves. More and more insecure about our place in the world. More and more fearful that we might end up alone. All these feelings seep into our being and turn us from the openly loving person we once were, into a doubtful secretive person, who gets a rush of these feelings at the get-go and hates oneself for being this way.
All these feelings of fear, anxiety, insecurity keep bottling up, finding minor escapes during unrelated arguments and unnecessary fights. They keep struggling to find the right exit, one that allows them to move out of the tight space within us. We keep letting out heavy sighs, trying to breathe the same way we once used to. And that just doesn't seem to happen.
We try to move on, without admitting, without addressing the underlying cause. So it happens again, and again, and again, to the point where we start developing a belief that maybe it's not worth investing in people. Maybe it's better not to care for people.
Maybe, people don't deserve us.
And then one day, out of nowhere, we come across something that ends up channelling these feelings of ours.
We hear a song that ponders on the feeling of departure from the world. Like when Jagjit Singh sings:
Tum chale jaaoge to sochenge
Humne kyaa khoyaa, humne kyaa paayaa
Zindagi dhoop, tum ghanaa saayaa
Tumko dekhaa to ye khayaal aayaa
we fantasize about someone realizing our worth after we are gone.
We watch a web series where the most charming character departs towards the end. Like in 'The Office', when Michael Scott decided to leave without telling anyone, we fantasize about ourselves silently departing from people's lives.
We read a book in which a character chooses to be hated by others to save his loved one. Like in Harry Potter, when Severus Snape pretends to be an antagonistic figure to save Harry from threats, we see ourselves being hated by the person we care about.
We come across a movie in which someone makes the ultimate sacrifice and dies. Like in Sholay, when Jai uses his double-headed coin to save Veeru's life, we think of ourselves as the person who makes the silent sacrifice.
We watch them leave, and closely observe the reactions of everyone involved, even those who dislike them. We get so engaged in someone else's pretense that for once, we end up forgetting our own need for pretense. We feel it all so deeply that for a few moments, in the trance of being engaged, we end up dropping the shield we built to protect ourselves from our own feelings. We end up admitting our own pain.
None of this makes sense! We don't want to dupe our friend with a fake coin. Neither do we wish to leave our friends unannounced. But it doesn't matter if the song, the movie, or the book doesn't exactly fit our context. What matters is that for a few moments, it appears closer to our experience, or the experience we imagine.
In those few moments, we see ourselves in them. For a few moments, we stop fearing our fears; rather, we live them through someone else. Just like a small crack is enough for water to find its way out of a huge reservoir, these few moments allow all the emotions that we held back so far to find their way to the surface.
Tears roll down, nose stuffs up, throat develops lumps, and we cry. We cry, and cry, and cry incessantly. And at the back of the mind, a fantasy plays out: "What will follow when I die? Will someone cry when I'm gone?" All our fears of having no place in the vast world seep into our imagination, and we spend that night imagining scenarios of our own death.
We think to ourselves, "Am I a freak to fantasize about my own death?" and continue imagining it anyway. Faced with the choice between being a distressed sane person and a relieved freak, we choose the latter. "It will be fine," we tell ourselves, and gently allow the soothing comfort of a death fantasy to kick in.
We think about how we’ll leave the world unsung, unappreciated, unloved, unnoticed, but after our death, people will realize the gem of a person we were and regret not valuing us in time. Those who were rude to us will regret not being nicer to us. They'll wish for one last meeting to correct their mistake, but sadly, we'll be gone by then.
We imagine this and cry. We feel bad about being alone. We feel no one loves us. We dream of our last words. Maybe a last letter, maybe a last call. We imagine our parents, that friend from school who didn't share tiffin with us, that estranged love interest who left us; we imagine them reading the letter. We think of all those people we’ll share our last words with, especially those who matter the most to us, even if we believe we don’t matter to them.
These ideas have nothing to do with our reality. They have nothing to do with how we'll die or when we'll die. We aren't willing to die. But we still conjure these ideas because they give us a sense of comfort. In a world where we all constantly feel undervalued, under-loved, and ignored, and yet have to behave tough and sane in the face of it, these ideas allow us to feel our pain for once.
It’s said that the pain you feel is the pain you free yourself from. These ideas allow us to cry. They allow us to feel our pain, our fear, our anxieties, in their totality, in their utmost nonsensical way. They reaffirm a belief that we were trying to deny: that in the end, it is the people who matter to us. We care about others' opinions, and we want them to care about ours.
We want the world to care for us, even if that means through the one person who we care about. These ideas, regardless of how self-harming they sound, end up making us a lot more loving towards the people we care about. They help us mourn and move on from all the dead relationships that left us feeling dry.
In our silence, we find our method of relief. And in the theatre of our mind, we start playing this skit every once in a while. The person everyone needed, but no one deserved. In our privacy, we allow ourselves the luxury to be a protagonist. While imagining that the world doesn't deserve us, we make ourselves believe that we are to be 'deserved' and 'kept' and not just have around.
Of course, we don’t tell this to anyone, at least not so directly. We can’t let anyone know the insane person we are. What if they thought, “What the hell am I doing with this screwed-up person?” and left us alone? This is our little lonely secret.
But then, how long can one hold back something they so deeply feel about. These feelings, this fantasy starts seeping into our everyday lives. Even though we hide this from everyone, the algorithm gets to know about it. We start getting suggestions from people similar to us. People who also find their relief through such twisted means. Who, like us, fantasize about their own death.
We learn ways to express this in public. Memes help by allowing us to communicate our subconscious desires humorously. We share reels with some of our close friends and find those rare ones that relate with them. We click a nice picture or a vibe video and post it with a farewell song playing in the background. Though we never intended, we find ourselves plugged into a sub-culture of death fantasisers.
And of course, movies, songs, fiction, become our ways of connecting with this culture. Certain directors, authors, and writers become our favorites, serving as unannounced cult leaders who explore the theme of death in enigmatic ways. Insta editors become unauthorized therapists for compiling clips in a way that makes us feel our fantasy's crescendo within merely 60 seconds.
We discover comfort in places we didn't even realize we were seeking. The comfort that our childhood self sought out when he cried alone after being ignored by his parents. Who spent the initial years of his life happily, assuming he was loved and needed by everyone around him, only to be suddenly confronted with the alien idea of not mattering.
Who, with time, through school, college, multiple jobs, businesses, relationships, friendships internalized not mattering. Who lived with the dream of being loved by all, but surrendered to the practicality of knowing it ain't possible.
Who under all the resentment and anger and frustration of being ignored, carries a sense of grief that keeps growing deeper and deeper with time. Grief that births several anxieties. "Am I the asshole who no one likes?" "Why am I not anyone's number one priority?" "Whom can I rely upon in case something bad happens to me? "Who will care for me in my old age?"
Who, with every reel he shares, wishes to matter deeply to people around him. Who wants a way to relate to people all over again. Who wishes to give the world another chance.
And then one day, we hear a new song that says:
Saath tumhaare aur rahoon main
Meraa to mann thaa
Sach hai yahaan pe jo bhi buraa thaa
Mere kaaran thaa
Mainu vidaa karo
Mainu vidaa karo ji
Ab vidaa karo mere yaaraa
Mainu vidaa karo
Mainu vidaa karo ji
Maine jaanaa hai us paar
We listen to it repeatedly, and our feeling of being 'the unsung hero the world doesn't deserve' emerges.
It doesn't matter if Imtiaz Ali, AR Rahman, Irshad Kamil, or Arijit Singh didn't create the song for us. What if the song operates in a different context? We own it. We own it for our fantasy. We hear it and feel all the misunderstandings that people held against us melting away with our imagined departure, believing that we were too good for this world.
And there, in those brief moments of vibing with it, we bid farewell to our grief. Catharsis kicks in. Protagonist reaches the end of their journey. And with the comfort of concluding the death fantasy, we find ourselves prepared to give the world another chance.
We, the people who fantasize about their own death, give life another chance.