Solitude

Solitude is a funny thing to write about. I don’t think there is much virtue in describing the state itself, because one has to endure it themselves in order to fully understand it. This is probably a futile exercise, but one can try to describe it and its merits anyway. So let me try.

To a lot of people, solitude is their reality. That is their most commonly inhabited form of environment, and always has been. They might consider this piece of writing completely non-essential and puzzling, because why write about something so obvious? If you think solitude is your obvious state of existence, your universal truth, then this is not for you. For most of the rest of us, including me, solitude is not our primary reality, it’s an option. I thought I might share my observations on my own conversion from being an extroverted social psychopath to what some people like to call ‘a loner’. I’ll take that as a compliment.

When I decided to move my life to Europe for the next three years, nothing could have prepared me for what I had coming. Or rather, maybe I didn’t prepare myself. I will never know. After persistently cursing the painful five years of Indian architecture schooling through which we passed, I had finally taken life into my own hands (and with the help of my parents’ funding) and decided this was not enough for me. Much like the majority of Indian middle-class dreams of studying abroad, I had my mind set on moving to, and studying in Europe. Not sure why I had to be weird enough to choose the most unconventional and uncomfortable option of those presented to me, but it was probably dreams and ambitions and knowledge and quality and all of those other first world motivations. Sigh. A 23-year-old young, enthusiastic, Indian girl, head full of excitement, energy, passion and dreams.

I landed in Milan. What I realized only later that night once I reached the ‘comfort’ of my room in Mendrisio and hit the bed was the one and only single obvious truth of my existence ever since I had left home. I was alone. It’s true that when you try to go to sleep is when your mind takes every effort to make sure you don’t. All your existential problems and sorrowful memories come back to haunt you. I always wondered why one always had to pass such a troublesome state of mind before entering the most peaceful one.

Mendrisio is a small Swiss ‘city’ close to the Italian border, with a total population of about 10,000, out of which about 1,000 may have been students and professors at my school. Nobody outside school spoke English. I was the only Indian in the city. I was alone on the flight. I was alone in the bus. I was alone in my room. I had close to no preparation for this. I know there are a lot of people who have been in similar and more extreme circumstances. My experience is not special, I guess what validates it is the fact that some of the people reading this might be able to relate to it in their own way.

What catapulted my feeling of loneliness was the fact that I’m Indian and I’m privileged. I never had to live through a time where my existence was challenged in any manner — my parents had fought through that themselves so my brother and I didn’t have to. I was looked after, provided for, and never had to fend for myself. If anything went wrong, I always had my security blanket to lean back on. I was a smart, hard-working, driven, kind but pampered brat. (I wasn’t actually a brat, most people took a very good impression of me; I just used the phrase for comparative emphasis). Apart from privilege, what made that experience distinctly harder than my friends from the West was the fact that I was Indian (and still am, proudly so). Overall, the differences in social structures, language, food, culture and climate took a while for me to get used to. In India, one can of course be lonely, but never really alone. To put things in perspective, the population of the whole of Switzerland is more or less equal to the population of Chennai, my hometown. I grew up with activity, noise, chaos and of course, a lot of people. Living in silence is not something I was accustomed to. My first few nights in Mendrisio were spent acclimatizing to the silence. I could never sleep very well because it was so damn quiet. Why couldn’t they just have some stray dogs barking? A ceiling fan running? Some people on the road yelling? Cars honking? No? Nothing? Too peaceful.

Ridiculous.

My first few weeks in Mendrisio were extremely difficult. On most nights, I would cry myself to sleep. I constantly needed my friends and family to support me over the phone. It wasn’t easy to make friends; that took a while. Understanding how relationships worked in a different culture also took me some time. I think what compounded the effect of everything was just the fact that Mendrisio was a great big bubble of a world. It was so far removed from my common notion of reality. All the people I knew were architects (bubble no.1, architects really do live in a world of their own), living in this small town (bubble no.2), part of a country like Switzerland (bubble no.3), which is part of the larger self-alleviated narrative of the West (bubble no.4). It was so detached from everything I knew, that nothing that ever transpired in this world seemed to have an impact on one’s existence there.

In some ways it was like a dream.

To come to terms with all of this on my own seemed like an insurmountable task to me. On some days I wondered if all this — all that I had wanted for so long, that I thought was the right thing for me to do — was worth it. It’s not a good feeling when you begin to question things in this manner. Being alone can do that to you.

I was lucky enough to have had an amazing support system of friends and family who kept me going. It’s also a time that helps you identify the people who really care about you. The responses ranged from consolation, motivation, talking and sometimes just listening and empathizing. When all this continuously failed, I would sometimes be asked to grow a spine, which definitely helped as well. I remember one such conversation with my mother where I was complaining about being lonely and sad and having no friends — this must have sounded like the same episode on repeat for the tenth time to her — when she blew her cool and said, “Okay you’re lonely, SO WHAT?! You have people here who care about you. Why do you always need to have someone around to make you feel good? So what if you haven’t made friends yet? You can’t make friends overnight. There are so many things you could be doing. Read a book! Write something! Explore the wonderful place you’re in! Focus on your studies! Learn new things! Isn’t that why you went there in the first place? Stop complaining and being sad all the time! You need to grow up.”

So I tried to grow up. I tried to exist on my own, comforting myself when I didn’t feel so good and celebrating small wins by treating myself. A pampered brat learned to cook for herself, clean for herself, and live for herself. The first time I walked into a supermarket I realized I couldn’t read any of the labels or clearly ask somebody what I wanted to buy. Italian! I really had to work on my Italian. What was I to buy now? The milk with a fat but sorry-looking cow on it, or the one with a skimpy but happy cow munching on green grass in the Swiss Alps? I was in Switzerland and boy, was there dairy. Too much dairy. Decisions were made. I think learning to exist in a new culture became primary and with what time I had left, I could study. Things did get better, though I thought they wouldn’t. With each passing day I felt less pitiful for myself and gradually the self-pity turned to self-joy. Food was burnt, lessons were learnt. One way or another, I learned to cross over — on my own (and with a little help).

I remember my first semester’s final jury — even though I had tried my best to meander through the first few months, I wasn’t happy with what I had produced. I had learnt a lot collectively from my peers in the atelier, so it had been an enriching experience, but that didn’t take away from the fact that I wasn’t satisfied with my work. One could argue that seldom are architects ever satisfied with their work, but this didn’t even come close. I considered it to be too primitive and basic. One of the external jury members was an Indian architect I was acquainted with.

During my critique, he looked at me and asked, “How heavy is your model?”

“200 kilos.”

“That’s probably the biggest and heaviest model you’ve ever built.”

He turned to my professor, “That’s the biggest model she’s ever built! This is big for her. 200 kilos!”

The critique went alright. When I was speaking to him personally later I told him I had been struggling the last few months, and that I didn’t feel confident about my work at all. I asked him for his honest opinion informally. Although I don’t remember verbatim, to my memory he was promising in his response which went something like this, “No, I liked what you did. However simple and humble it is, it’s a reflection of you and your thought. You’re being true to yourself. The rest of the class is busy trying to copy your professor’s style and please him. It’s evident in their work. What I like about what you’ve done is that you did what made sense to you, irrespective. It shows the material in its primitive character and you’ve worked with your hands to transform it to the best of your understanding. This is huge for you, right? Think about where you were just a short while ago. Don’t be pressured, don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Don’t look left, don’t look right. Just keep going, keep doing what you’re doing. You do you.”

His words stuck with me and made me reflect on the almost accidental nature of how I had worked. My naivety and newness to this environment meant that I had no preconceptions of the school, its methodologies, its professors, the ateliers and my peers. There were students who were so conditioned to the ‘Mendrisio way’ that they steered on autopilot in the way that they approached the work. I don’t have an opinion on whether this was good or bad, but what I took away was this — my lack of social interaction and absence of friendships forced me into an independent system of solitary working with little influence from peers or norms. I still learnt from my environment, but I wasn’t so entangled in it to develop certain notions. Not having close friends had its perks after all! It had, unknowing to myself, shielded me from unwarranted ideas, helped me maintain my own truth, and in fact, recognize it, even enhance it eventually. Once I became cognizant of what had happened, I carried my truth as close to me as I could for the rest of this journey. Solitude helped me move closer to myself, closer to my gut, closer to my belly.

On an unrelated note, it was quite cathartic to smash our models to pieces the following day.

Spending time by myself helped me recognize and delve into things I loved with a passion — whether it was photography, reading or yoga. I had no distractions, no social commitments, nobody to take care of but myself. I managed to attain and thrive in a certain mental space that was conducive to thinking, creating, designing. I tried to be the best version of myself every day. The mountains helped. I began to enjoy my conversations with nature — there was so much beauty that spoke to me all around in Switzerland. Pristine lakes, rivers, forests, animals and snow-capped mountains. These were my friends, through movement and in stillness. The biggest embrace I made was that of nature. The cheese, chocolate and coffee were easy to embrace too.

Although I became increasingly confident and secure, made friends and began to live to the fullest, three years is a long time and it did come with its share of ups and downs. My time in Brussels the following year was plagued with mental and physical illness and I decided to finally seek comfort by coming home. It was a time where I was constantly trying to push my body beyond what it was capable of withstanding; I saw that my body was talking to me, asking me to slow down, and I finally acknowledged that. It was probably one of the toughest times of my life; my friends and family helped me get through it. We all need comfort when things get difficult, and its brave in itself to seek it out. Through those struggles I felt increasingly lonely, the dark side of solitude I didn’t sign up for, and I didn’t want. I began to understand the multitude of layers, meanings and forms ‘Solitude’ could take, from empowering to devastating. How one can maintain relative stability through its different forms is a challenge worth taking up.

Another interesting skill of the independents I acquired in this course of time was the act of carrying and moving big, heavy things. Living on a student budget meant never taking taxis (I think I took a total of maybe five taxis over the three years), making moving very tedious always. I didn’t have a car of course, so sometimes I would get friends to help. But this was not always possible. And Mendrisio had scarcely connected public transport. Everyone walked a lot. A lot of weightlifting was done. Going to an architecture school that barely sold any model-making material made life even more painful. Stuff we needed was big and heavy, like MDF boards, clay plasters, gypsum, cement, wood, cardboard and styrofoam sheets, paints, nails, drills… the list goes on. I remember how challenging it was to physically carry these things uphill and downhill for two-three kilometers and then finally carry them up to our atelier. I know a lot of other people had to go through the same ordeal.

The moments in which I broke down in the middle of the road, carrying things double my size and half my weight in bruised hands; in those moments I really, truly, felt alone. The pain was suddenly so real, so tangible. It was an outright miserable feeling, and with time I learnt to deal better with my emotions. It came down to me crying but walking on anyway, knowing that this just had to be done and I would feel okay and forget about this in just some time. (I cry a lot, in general). For a long time I wondered, how could my peers not see I needed help even when I asked for it? People had cars, but not everybody had the intent to help. I’m thankful for those who did. I eventually got around this feeling by learning to have zero expectations. Nobody owed me anything. So I continued going about my business myself. I learnt to rely on myself completely — even physically — something I never thought I could do. (Of course, financial independence is still some way off…) In writing, this may sound so trivial, but in reality these small things really hit home.

In addition to carrying material, I carried luggage too! (A student budget allowed me only hand luggage, so this wasn’t a challenge. What was more of a challenge was learning to travel light. Now, not travelling light is a challenge.) That was fun. Travelling through Europe had been a dream, and what a way for it to come alive. It was exhilarating. Visiting places on my own helped me overcome a lot of travel anxiety I carried with me before — I used to worry a lot about being by myself and not having an active phone or internet connection in a new country, how I would get around, how I would find places, how I would connect with people, where I would stay and so on… I eventually got the hang of things, and developed such a strong faith in my abilities. I learnt how things worked, and I could be rest assured I would ‘figure it out’ one way or another, irrespective of where in the world I was, in company or alone, phone or no phone. I grew to feel secure in myself.

Eventually I felt like the responsible one when my mother used to visit — I had to take care of her and her things, organize and plan everything, and carry both our luggage! It’s funny how roles can change with time and place. In between getting robbed of my phone and purse, learning the basics of so many different languages, eating, dancing, swimming, hiking, and taking buses, boats, planes and trains… I discovered some breathtaking places, made some amazing friends, and captured memories for a lifetime.

By my final year I became almost too comfortable, it felt wonderful. I finally felt like I could call this place my home. I never imagined for me to be able to feel what I was feeling. It had been a remarkable journey. I didn’t want to leave.

That turned out to be one hell of a three year-long solo trip. Company is great and there is immense value in shared experiences. But the joy of being in your own company is quite inexplicable. If you ever do get a chance to fly, fly solo.

The day I graduated was one of the most special days of my life. There was nothing too fancy about the ceremony itself. Everything was still in Italian. (I love Italian, but ugh! Even at graduation? Seriously!) We received our degrees and drank some champagne. No black robes, only laurel wreaths for us. Once everything was over, I had a moment to assimilate everything that had transpired in the last three years. I was overwhelmed with gratitude and accomplishment. My friend and I were the first Indians to graduate from the Accademia; that was a milestone in itself. I looked at myself, and then I looked at myself from three years ago, and only I was aware of this journey that changed everything for me. I had everyone beside me, my friends, my family, and I was so happy to be able to share a part of this journey with them. But in the end, my eyes were moist with pride, a humbling pride that I shared only with myself, fully aware of whom I had been, who I had become, where I came from and where I was going.

It must have all been a dream.

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