I feel insecure all the time, crying silently without people noticing. You’ll never understand this I know, but please help anyway”— an anguished cry from a teenager.

Don’t for a moment think you are alone. It’s a familiar feeling to most of those reading this column and to the guy writing it. Insecurity is a churning pit in the stomach whose bitter juices spread slowly into every cell of your body, making you feel sick inside. Insecurity is when your lips stretch on their own in a forced smile, with an accompanying feeling of drowning. Insecurity is a clenching of fists, curling of toes, wide-open irises, mouth dry as sawdust, heart thudding away like a jackhammer on a street. Insecurity is a sudden craving for the hem of your mother’s sari, for being cuddled in a warm embrace and told meaningless nothings in a language without words. Don’t we all know it? For decades I took my insecurity along as a companion. For decades, I had the sure sinking feeling that I would be doomed to feel the feeling — and there it was, sure enough, waiting for me in corners, grabbing me as I passed, holding me tight in its devilish grasp and letting me go only after I was too exhausted to feel its toxic pangs anymore.
I hope you are feeling a bit comforted now. The whole world is tottering in the same boat, friend. Everyone feels more or less insecure most of the time. In fact, it’s been that way for ages. It was much worse in the past. Anarchy, wars, wild animals, lawlessness and disease — all these took their toll on the human psyche. How did our ancestors cope, I wonder. How on earth did they find the peace of mind to write poetry, create marvellous architecture, art forms and things like that? These days we have cellphones and keep tabs. In the old days, whenever a family member went on a long trip, they would plant a sapling in his name and water it everyday. If the sapling suddenly died, they knew some harm had befallen the person. They seemed to have accepted the inevitable far more graciously than we do nowadays. There was this notion of immutable Fate, and every culture imbibed it in its own way, threading it into its religion and culture. So life flowed on, relatively serene and unmindful of calamities and holocausts.
Being a teen, you at least have youth on your side. Spare a thought for people who are four or five decades older. The truly unfortunate are those who cannot find peace even in their middle years. Yes, there are many who wander with wrinkles and tight, worried faces, silently fretting over a doom that hangs over them. I meet people like that all the time, and I say a silent prayer for them — because it’s one thing to be a teenager and insecure, wholly another to be an abandoned grandmother or a penniless father with neither youth nor strength by your side.
How do you feel less insecure? How do you pack off these destructive feelings permanently from your system? This was Hamlet’s quandary— and Shakespeare’s immortal ode to insecurity. Do you “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or do you oppose the “sea of troubles” and end them? Do you psyche yourself out like an ostrich and pretend the problem has disappeared or do you rage and fight and win or fall trying? All the philosophies and religions of the world are there to help you seek an answer. It’s complex, though. You may browse through their wisdom but you have to find your own solution. Hang on to this space and I’ll try and follow up on this topic next week.

The writer is a film director