Category: I Am

Confused, frustrated, angry

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

It began with a sentence that stayed with me long after it was spoken. When I said it had been a month since we had made love, the partner I most desire looked at me and said, almost casually, that I was angry all the time. It wasn’t the first time. Over time, the language had been shifting. I was controlling. I was a perfectionist. Now, apparently, I was angry.

Maybe I am.

But I have begun to wonder if what he calls anger is actually frustration — the kind that comes from being starved of touch while being told you are difficult for wanting it. The kind that builds when you ask, quietly at first, to be held, to be wanted, to be made love to, and the asking itself becomes evidence against you. When longing is recast as a character flaw, something inside you hardens just enough to survive.

I don’t want constant sex. I want closeness. I want to be held at night. I want to feel a body reach for me without having to negotiate for it. I want desire to feel like an offering, not a concession. When those things don’t happen, when tenderness dries up and erotic attention becomes sporadic or withheld, the ache doesn’t disappear. It finds other outlets. I scroll, I watch porn, I masturbate daily — not because I am insatiable, but because something in me is trying to self-soothe what is not being met. And sometimes, lying there afterwards, I find myself asking the question I’m afraid to say out loud: if there are two men in my life, why do I still feel so alone?

In queer spaces, we are often encouraged to name ourselves early and clearly. To know whether we are tops or bottoms or sides, as if desire can be neatly categorised and remain stable across decades. I have moved between these words for years, trying to see which one fits. When I was a teen, I thought I was a bottom because surrender felt right in theory. Then, after I topped and tied bottoming, I didn’t like either experience. So, I thought I was a side because penetration was never central to my wanting. Then, with my last partner, there were moments when I surprised myself entirely, enjoying things I had once assumed were not for me. None of it followed a straight line. None of it stayed consistent. What I once mistook for confusion, I now recognise as responsiveness — to safety, to trust, to care, to timing.

What we rarely acknowledge is how deeply fear shapes desire. How avoidance can masquerade as preference. How wanting closeness without certain acts doesn’t make you less sexual, only more specific. And yet, there is pressure to present a stable, legible version of ourselves — one that partners can rely on, even if our own bodies are quietly asking for something different.

Alongside this uncertainty about sex lives something even more tender. I love being held. I love sleeping with an arm around me, the reassurance of touch in the dark. And yet, the partner I am most sexually drawn to is not the one who holds me at night. That care comes from my older partner, now, the one who steadies my day-to-day life. I sleep between them. Care on one side. Desire on the other. Somewhere in that arrangement, I began adjusting myself instead of asking to be met fully.

Over time, I taught myself how not to want. I stayed awake until exhaustion took over so I wouldn’t lie there missing what wasn’t coming. It’s a quiet grief, learning to dull a need because it feels inconvenient or unwelcome. From the outside, it might look like composure. On the inside, it feels like erasure.

When I confide in men outside this life, they sometimes say things that sound like promises. That they would never let me go untouched. That they would always hold me. I don’t dismiss them, but I don’t cling either. I’ve lived long enough to know how time works. How novelty softens. How desire changes. How even sincerity is no guarantee. So I accept the recognition, if not the reassurance.

All of this leaves me questioning structures I once took for granted. Whether committed relationships are meant to carry everything forever — desire, care, novelty, safety, touch — or whether that expectation itself is what exhausts us. Whether open relationships should be less of a scandal in queer lives and more of an honest response to how desire actually behaves. Whether love and sex are always meant to live in the same body, or whether insisting that they must is an unnecessary cruelty.

I don’t have answers. What I have is a growing refusal to be reduced — to a role, to a label, to an accusation of anger when what I am really expressing is hunger. Hunger for closeness. For tenderness. For being chosen without having to justify the wanting.

If any of this feels familiar, you are not alone. Many of us are renegotiating love quietly, in the middle of the night, teaching ourselves how to sleep, how to wait, how to endure without hardening. Confusion is not failure. It is what happens when we stop performing certainty and start telling the truth.

Sometimes, that is where living actually begins — not in neat resolutions, but in allowing ourselves to feel the full weight of what we want, and refusing to disappear just because it makes others uncomfortable.

On Looking Down, and Looking In

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I met someone recently—someone I’d spoken to online—at a party I attended not long ago. In person, though, something felt immediately off. Not because of chemistry or the lack of it, but because of an almost compulsive need he seemed to have: to look down on everything around him.

The party wasn’t good enough.

The music wasn’t up to the mark.

The people weren’t interesting enough.

Nothing passed muster. Everything required commentary, and all of it was dismissive.

He told me he was 22. And instinctively, I wondered if this was an age thing. But then I stopped myself. I was once that age too. I don’t remember needing to belittle an entire room to feel significant within it.

What unsettled me more was the familiarity of it. I’ve encountered this posture before—among people I’ve known, been friends with, sometimes even admired at one point. A certain self-appointed elite, defined not by kindness or depth, but by what and whom they reject. How others dress. How they speak. What music they like. Where they come from. Everything becomes a metric for exclusion.

I’m not pretending I’m immune to prejudice. I’m not. I know exactly where mine lies.

I don’t tend to judge people by caste, class, race, or colour. But I do judge—quietly, perhaps arrogantly—on intellectual and emotional grounds. Empathy matters deeply to me. Curiosity matters. The ability to question inherited beliefs matters. And yes, I struggle with people who are blinded by unexamined faith or rigid dogma. That is my bias. I own it.

So the uncomfortable question arose: was I doing something similar to him, just dressed in better language?

I don’t think it’s the same. Or at least, I hope it isn’t.

Because there is a difference between choosing not to engage, and actively deriding. Between recognising incompatibility, and making contempt a personality trait. What I witnessed wasn’t discernment—it was dismissal masquerading as sophistication.

There’s something deeply sad about believing that to appear intelligent, dapper, or “above it all,” one must constantly signal what one is not. That one must shrink others to inflate oneself. It’s a brittle kind of confidence, and it cracks easily.

Perhaps age does play a role. At 22, there is often a frantic need to impress—by saying the right things, having the right opinions, aligning oneself with the “correct” tastes. Sometimes that performance hardens into habit. Sometimes it softens with time. I don’t know which way it will go for him.

What I do know is this: I don’t need to pull anyone down to feel whole. I don’t need to sneer at a room to belong in it. If I don’t resonate, I can simply step away—with grace.

We live in a world already cruel enough, stratified enough, lonely enough. Choosing empathy over elitism isn’t naïveté; it’s resistance.

And perhaps the real marker of maturity—emotional, intellectual, human—is not how sharply we judge, but how gently we hold our differences.

Checking In

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

An hour back, when the television had gone quiet and I was settling into my familiar hush, I was doing the small, ordinary rituals that end my day — switching off gadgets, straightening the hall, moving towards the bedroom. And then came a sudden, heavy bang against the window.

Xena stirred. Zuri woke up.

I turned back.

Perched on the railing of the hall window was a black kite — one of those great, ubiquitous birds of Mumbai that I have watched all my life, usually from far below, their silhouettes cutting slow, elegant arcs across blue skies and white clouds. But this time it was here. At my window. Close enough to meet my eyes through the glass.

It did not panic. It did not shy away.

It simply stood there.

As a child, I had always watched them — from the balcony of our Bandra home, sometimes beside my grandmother, sometimes alone. I would follow their flight for long minutes, losing myself in their effortless gliding, riding invisible thermal currents with a grace that felt almost unreal. Wings, feathers, sky — they became symbols long before I had the language for symbolism.

During difficult school years, when things were unkind and heavy, the song Wind Beneath My Wings found its way into my life. The idea of being held aloft by something unseen lodged itself quietly in my imagination. As a Gemini, an air sign, I always felt strangely attuned to flight — to movement, to the freedom of altitude, to the idea of rising above without force.

And now, at this juncture of my life — nearly fifty, standing on the edge of leaving this house to return to my mother’s home, with both my kids, Xena and Zach, very unwell — this bird arrived.

I have been holding myself together with a very thin, polite front. Loss, I understand. I have learned how to sit with it. What weighs heavier these days is the world itself — its cruelty, its relentless hunger for power and money, its refusal to soften. None of this is new, and yet I feel it more keenly now, as if the volume has been turned up.

The kite remained there while I took photographs and videos, its feathers ruffled slightly by the morning air. When I opened the door, Zuri rushed out, spotted the bird instantly, and froze — then barked in sheer terror, her bravery collapsing into panic. I had to shepherd her back inside; Xena had already checked out the hall and finding nothing amiss had retreated. The bird stayed, unbothered, watching.

Eventually, I stepped away. The kids wouldn’t stay in the room if I was out, after that.

I do not know how long it remained after that. But the fact that it stayed at all — that it did not flee even reminded me of something I had long forgotten: stillness can also be a form of courage.

In many mythological traditions, birds of prey carry layered meanings. Eagles are often seen as messengers of the divine, symbols of power, vision, and transcendence — creatures that bridge earth and sky. Kites and hawks, closer cousins, are associated with watchfulness, adaptability, and survival. In Indian folklore especially, birds that circle high are sometimes seen as guardians — not saviours, not omens, but witnesses. They see the whole picture from above.

In ancient symbolism, such birds appear not to predict events but to remind. To lift the gaze. To suggest perspective when the ground feels unbearably close.

I do not want to romanticise this too much. I am wary of assigning meaning where there may be none. Nature does not owe us messages. Sometimes a bird is simply a bird.

And yet.

This has never happened to me before — not like this. Kites have landed on pipes on terraces, have watched me from heights, have shared space from a respectful distance. But never like this: eye to eye, separated only by a pane of glass, unafraid.

Whether I communed with nature, or nature briefly acknowledged me — or whether this was nothing more than coincidence — I cannot say. But it left me calmer than I have felt in days. Not hopeful, exactly. Just steadied.

As if something ancient had paused, looked in, and reminded me that even in a world obsessed with conquest and noise, there are still beings who know how to glide — who expend no unnecessary energy, who trust the currents, who wait.

And perhaps, for now, that is enough.