Harshada Does Brooklyn, Covid & A New Favorite Book and Song

In My “Humbled” Era

Life has a knack for knowing exactly when to knock you down a few pegs when it knows you’re having a little too much fun. I’ve had a pretty eventful month—high school reunion, T Swift movie night, Diwali celebrations (Happy Diwali everyone!), and an amazing trip to NY/NJ for Thanksgiving break. The trip was kind of perfect. We got to see both sides of my family on Thanksgiving, I got to go to Brooklyn (not the most wheelchair-friendly place, but with my brother around, he makes the entire world feel accessible to me) for the first time with a few of my loves, and we got to eat so much incredible food. There was so much love and laughter packed into every second of those five days, my heart (and stomach) were bursting at the seams.

I was almost sitting on cloud 9, even feeling myself a little. But life, Mother Nature, or whoever, knew just how to humble me right up. As soon as I got home, I felt sick. My throat was on fire and my head felt like it was going to implode and sure enough, I had Covid (which I had successfully avoided until this point). Then, before I knew it, it was November 29th, my dark day. Exactly 15 years to the day since my stroke. I know it’s supposed to be a celebratory day—my rebirth, my survival, etc—but it’s never felt particularly celebratory. And as if I was rubbing salt in my own wound, without realizing it, I put on this sweatshirt: 🤦‍♀️

The day wasn’t celebratory but it wasn’t sad either. It all feels like it was another life or another person. I guess that’s what time does—when enough of it passes, your paşt begins to feel like someone else’s. I spent the day listening to my sad girl emo music and contemplating life.

Life tends to flow in this way, constantly fluctuating between highs and lows. Normally, the highest of highs isn’t juxtaposed directly next to the lowest of lows but it helps make this point abundantly clear. The math nerd in me thinks of life as a smooth sine wave oscillating between positive and negative amplitudes with the passage of time. The poet in me sees life as a fluctuation between light and dark, day and night, joy and sorrow, good and bad. However you choose to see it, life is a balance where you can’t have one without the other. I’ve learned that you need to be present throughout it all. You need to live the shit out of the happy moments, to soak up every second of them, because you don’t know how long they’ll last. And when it’s the sad moments, the bottom of the sine wave, the darkness, know that it will pass. The sun will always come out tomorrow. I promise.

Advocacy Updates

This past Tuesday was GivingTuesday: a day to remind people that this is the season of giving as well as receiving gifts. So keep your favorite charities in mind and develop some good will before we let ourselves get carried away with our own materialistic joys!

Quote of the Moment

"The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain."

~ Khalil Gibran

Book Talk

Last month’s reads: includes quite possibly one of my favorite reads ever…🤭

Sula by Toni Morrison (short story) - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - a historical fiction story about two girls from drastically different households in a black neighborhood in rural Ohio who develop a special, almost unbreakable bond. Almost. Toni Morrison’s beautiful style of writing is poetic and abstract and tends to go over my head a bit, but the complexities of each character are so engaging and keep you thinking about them long after you finish reading.

Against a Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa - ⭐️⭐️⭐️ - I follow a brilliant Jewish author on TikTok and they recommended reading novels by Palestinian authors and the title of this one was enough to sell me on it. It follows the story of a displaced Palestinian woman who finds herself in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison. The beginning and end were fantastic but the middle was a little slow. Overall, it was super fascinating, eye-opening and insightful.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - SO freaking good. A historical fiction masterpiece that is brilliantly crafted, epic, thought provoking and unlike anything I’ve ever read before. I don’t want to reveal too much so I’ll just say that the story begins with a family in Ghana in the 1700s. Each chapter is about a different character and somehow ties into the stories before it. I learned so much about black history, colonialism, and institutionalized racism. It is the only book that I finished and immediately wanted to start it over again from the beginning.

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q Sutanto - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - such a fun, heartwarming read! I read this on my plane flight and must’ve weirded out everyone around me with my random giggles and giant, goofy grins. This book follows the “found family” trope like in Man Called Ove—I’m realizing I kind of love this trope. It started off slow but it’s about a pushy, widowed Asian mother who wakes up to a dead body in her tea shop and recruits random customers to help her solve the murder.

Ok, that’s all for now! I had tickets to see the Beyonce movie tonight with some friends. I was trying to branch out! Sigh, I guess I’ll just have to stay home and stream some more TS…darn it! Speaking of which, she finally dropped a fan favorite, You’re Losing Me, (the saddest song she’s ever written), to streaming on the 29th so I listened to it on repeat pretty much all day that day. It was pretty perfect. When I write to you all next, I’ll be one year older and hopefully, wiser. Thank you for sticking by my side through all the ups and downs, highs and lows in my wild and crazy life. See ya’ll next year! ✌🏽

Yours,

Harshada