You have to forgive me, for I’m using words and phrases for which I only have a tentative understanding of the complexity, history, and significance to describe, most likely poorly, my own experience. To be fully transparent, it’s because of this naive understanding that I can, in any way, describe my feelings sensibly. I’m to co-opting these words and phrases, not to describe these borrowed concepts in any negative light but to illuminate these emotions which I can’t readily discern otherwise.

Begin

It’s a fury in my chest, a fury that arises from the seething fire of the accumulated stress and pressure of my everyday life. A fury without direction, coursing through my body like boiling water, scorching my veins and arteries and wanting me to turn everything back to black. It strains my muscles, my mind, my flesh with an untempered ferocity that asks to destroy, to upend, to dismantle, and to reduce everything back down to its component parts. It’s a frustration with my circumstances that calls for me to rip and tear apart everything, but most of all destroy some foundation of myself.

These destructive impulses call so loudly for destruction, like being opposed to creation in its purest form. The desire or instinct to bring it all down to nothing – that in my mind have named the Asura instinct. This idea of being opposed to heaven, to creation, to everything that sentient existence convenes upon us. To raze towers and seas. To bring mountains low and us even lower.

This Asura Instinct on the surface appears to be this overwhelming negative impulse, because how could these feelings of wanton destruction bring about anything good? But it’s because of this desire to destroy that I understand the true need, the need for change and control. That my life in some ways is not working. That this pressure begins to build and build until the whole system feels like it’s going to come down. This directionless fire and fury in my veins serve then as the power to change, to dismantle systems and build them anew for myself and my future.

It reminds of the three principal gods of Hinduism and the cycle they foretell through their role and existence, the creator, the preserver, and the destroyer. All three serve an important purpose and each role is seen as essential for the process of life and reincarnation. Destruction and death are all part of this cycle because without destruction we have nothing to create, and without destruction, we have nothing to preserve. It is true then without destruction we cannot fully be.

It’s this fury in my veins that tells me that something has to change, that sadness and frustration are, too, the part of this journey. That all things must end no matter how much I fear the end and how much this fear paralyzes me. I’m scared of the destruction because of what will happen when I can no longer hold onto something in my arms so tightly. That I have to let go and say my goodbyes wholeheartedly. That it’s okay for it to disappate and no longer return. That it’s okay that the permanent state of a thing could be in both its ephemeralness and its finality.

It’s this Asura instinct, the fire within my veins that I know that I need to complete the cycle of change and growth. That the wave has to return to the shore. That projects and problems must see an end, and in their end, they may not be perfect but they may be perfect because they end.

It’s acknowledging this Asura Instinct, my need for destruction, that I know change needs to happen and that I must let it. I must let things end so they can begin anew. I must let go so I have the opportunity to hold. It’s through this destruction that I know that I can truly live at all. It’s through this destruction that I can finally be me.