Elements- Intimacy, Conviction and Diffidence

ELEMENTS

What are we, but elements of desire, strung together by life.

What are desires, but the hunger for validation, pulled apart by us.

In the upcoming series of excerpts, I try to explore the elements that forms us. Elements that make us who we are. Elements that define us.

The excerpts will be supported by stories; stories of people in real life, in the books I read, in the movies I watch, in the songs I hear. Stories I connected with, stories I experienced and stories I felt.

In this trilogy of Elements I device Intimacy, Conviction and Diffidence.

I recently started watching a US TV series called Homeland. The first season of the show revolves around an American Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody, held captive by the Al Qaeda as a Prisoner Of War, who was rescued after eight years. The protagonist Carrie Mathison, a CIA Operations Officer believes that he has been turned against his country by the terrorists and tries to convince her seniors who believe of him as a War Hero.

 INTIMACY

After eight years of wait and hope, when Nicholas’ wife Jessica finally gathers the strength to move on in her life and develop feelings for another man, she is knocked down by the sudden arrival of her husband she thought was dead. She struggles to catch hold of her thoughts and judgments as she tries to get their marriage and life back on track. The bridge she tries to build over the eight years of absence and separation. The uneasy relationship she shares with her children, the world and her husband. How she grapples with intimacy with a man who has been held captive, beaten and tortured under inhumane conditions. A man who gets taken aback when his wife tries to even touch him. A man who has become so aggressive that he asks his wife to strip down while he masturbates looking at her. It is the painful journey of a wife and her yearn for intimacy from the man she loved.

Intimacy and time are two things one craves from the person they love. It is, in a way, a form of acceptance that we crave, like love and respect. It is the desire to hold their hand, to feel their feet, to rub into the warmth of their body and to smell their presence. Intimacy is to feel, in that very moment, that they belong to you. And intimacy is the language Nicholas seemed to have forgotten.

CONVICTION

In one of the scenes when Carrie confronts Nicholas, he retorts by saying he is only trying to avenge the wrong doings. Avenge the killing of innocent people in one corner of the world by killing others in a different corner. His hatred to one stems from the love for another. The hatred towards his country for killing someone he had come to love. The hatred he is convinced will quantify by genocide. It is his courage of conviction that turns him against his own country.

It is because of conviction that we take every step in our lives. When we try to hurt someone or inflict pain, it is our conviction that they deserve the suffering. When we hate someone, it is our conviction that drives our judgement and the consecutive action. When we lie, it is our conviction that determines that truth wouldn’t work in our favor.

DIFFIDENCE

Gut feeling is like a super power that we have. We can’t quite explain the logic of it; it is just there, like an unnerving voice that precedes our thought and reasoning. When one of Carrie’s assets in Iraq informs her that an American Prisoner Of War has been turned, it is her gut feeling that deduces and points at Nicholas. When none of her colleagues or seniors trust her judgement, Carrie falls into the hole of diffidence. A hole so deep, she becomes unsure of any of her decisions and beliefs.

The hunger for validation does that to you. It dictates not just the right and wrong, but success and failure. Not being successful or right, slowly rusts your self belief. You question your judgement, skill and longevity. Do I really have it in me? Am I actually good at what I do? Do i just like the profession or am I really good enough to be in that world? Validation decides that for us.

After all our life is just an intimate relationship between the conviction of our heart and the diffidence of our mind.