An Unhelpful Guide to Processing Feelings

When I was a child, people used to remark upon my extremely sunny disposition. Or so I would like to believe.

I have what I like to call a resting sad face, although it slides into the category of resting tired face quite frequently. Which occasionally causes people to exclaim, “what’s wrong?”. Nothing is wrong. It’s just my face.

The world puts a lot of pressure of individuals to be happy and look at the positive side of life. What if I don’t want to be happy? What if I want to wallow in a pit of self-destructive self-pity? There are a lot of articles on the internet regarding facing your life with a glass half full attitude. Sometimes, one just needs to say, “I know the glass is half full, but I would rather ignore it for some time as it is not half full of the liquid of my choice.”

Review: Biotique Bio Musk Root Hair Pack

Being Indian, you are expected to have three things: beautiful hair, a love for all things natural, and a digestive system strong enough for spicy food. I don’t have any of that. But what I do have is a lot of spare time, which I use to try out a lot of random things, and I already have a test subject desperate enough to go through all of it- me.

Biotique is an ayurvedic Indian brand that is 100% organic, vegetarian, preservative free, and they don’t test on animals. Every Indian’s dream, right? Other than marrying a tall, fair, slim, decent Brahmin girl or boy.

Let's Talk Lips

I live in a city where the weather is dry all the time, even our monsoons aren’t humid enough. In school, we used to carry around our little bottles of Vaseline that used to leak and ruin our bags, and lip balms made their first appearance in our town well into my teens. I used to think that a lip balm should be used only when my lips begin to crack, because of which I have tasted my own blood for way too long and laughed out loud with my mouth in the shape of a butt hole because if I smiled any wider than that, my lips would most certainly turn into the bloody version of Niagara Falls.

Around my fourteenth birthday, I decided that it is high time I started using something on my lips, mostly out of the fear that I might end up looking like the Mouth of Sauron. I started experimenting with whatever I had at home. Lip balms just seemed to sit on my lips, doing pretty much nothing. Ghee smells nice when used for cooking, not when it is constantly on your lips, right under your nose. The only thing that helped was my good old Vaseline.

As it turns out, there is a reason behind all this- your lips get used to the instant relief your lip balm provides and they stop building their own protective barrier, making you reapply even more balm, thus creating a vicious cycle of sorts. Basically, keep it simple, and you will be fine. 

Everyone’s lips react differently to different products- these are some of the things that worked for me: