I'm not dead. I just haven't been there.

And yes, you're looking at the blog formerly known as Dreamcatcher's Lair.

So now that we are on slightly familiar ground, HELLO.

I know I've come up with several apology posts in the past year, but believe me when I say that I hope this will be the last. I reallyreallyreally hope to up my reading list, set my work-in-progress rolling and blogbomb your feed with more posts that won't necessarily be more fruitless promises to get back to, well, blogbombing.

Ever heard of the quarter-life crisis? I won't be surprised if you haven't. Everyone's so busy angsty-ing up the midlife crisis that nobody gives a damn about that thing that hits you when you're a twenty-something with a bucket list of things to do before you turn old and then you realise that, wait, you ARE old. You're so old that in another 3, 4, at most, 5, years your family and relatives - who ironically end up showing some concern  only in this aspect of your life - will be expecting you to settle down, which basically means legally binding yourself to another person and, I don't know, making babies with said person (!) And no, there's nothing wrong with that (I think) but it's a most frightening thought when you're going through an existential crisis and need a lot of figuring out to do.

And that's a LOT of figuring out to do, really. Like what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life, who's-gonna-give-me-a-job, should-I-be-a-student-forever-and-accumulate-degrees, oh-god-university-is-killing-me-I-should-quit, I-don't-care-about-the-world-I-should-just-go-backpacking, damn-I-have-no-money kind of figuring out. See, it's enough to give someone a life spasm. And then, imagine you have all of this figured out and somebody, SOMEBODY, possibly the last person you expected to do so, comes along and breaks your heart. Why didn't anyone ever mention that heartbreaks are ten times harder in your 20s than they were when you were in high school? And suddenly that entire part of your life with that person becomes a lie, which you have to remove along with all the plans made and goals set and the dreams dreamt around this time, which basically involves just removing a chunk of your life. A chunk. Which also means that you will have to replace that chunk with something else so that it doesn't end up being this massive gaping hole because that would suck. Like, really.

See. Existential crisis + chunk-removal-from-your-life event = Catastrophic Quarter Life Crisis.

Which is what I had been going through the entire time I was M.I.A. It wasn't fun in any way. Ever tried falling off a cliff? No, don't try that. Think it. Think falling off a cliff when you don't want to fall off a cliff. Think trying to climb back up and falling off again and again. And again. And then when you've finally managed to get yourself up there, all bruises and scars of you, imagine a car running you over. Not a pretty picture, is it? The last few months of my life have been pretty much that - one cliff-fall after another, one car crash after another.

While most of the last few months I've spent swinging between self-pity and misanthropy, rage and hate and sadness and utter despair, now I actually feel, I don't know, wiser. Experience does teach you a lot. And when a trunk full of experience flies out of nowhere and lands on your back, at first you wobble with the weight, but then it gets to be okay. You get to be okay. And you realise that you get to be okay because of that trunk, so you can't really be mad about it, because with the trunk, you grow up.

I feel like I've grown up. I've grown up at 22. What I had to go through to collect the stuff that makes up the trunk was eventful and despairing and melancholic and ridiculously frustrating and so utterly devastating, but the trunk's a part of me and that's fine because it's stopped being all those sad and not-sad things. It's like a manual book I can go back to when I'm thinking about what I want and what I don't want out of my life. It's like a chance at a fresh start.

That's what I've decided to do. Give myself a fresh start at just everything. Starting with this blog, which now has a new title and tag line. Also, I've decided to use my full name, Bidisha, because, what the hell, I like my name.

I know this is a long and rambly post and you've had to bear with me the whole long and rambly way, but, hey, thanks for doing that. It's nice to know that somebody out there, anybody, is listening to you vent. And if life sucks for you right now, believe me it'll get better. It will. Even if it doesn't seem so at the moment. You will come out stronger. And grown up.

Hang in there.