hand always numbs, before my mind

The First Text:

The first language I ever learned to write was a Hindi version of a Jain mantra in Prakrit, a Middle-aged Indo-Aryan language spoken and written between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D. Some Indian historians consider Prakrit to be one of the oldest languages in existence, predating Sanskrit.

Before I could spell my own name with confidence, I would meticulously copy the Navakar Mantra into my favorite 99 cent, college-ruled, spiral-bound notebooks from Staples, only using 0.7 mm black Pilot G-2s. My hand would cramp, but I never cared. I did not recite the words aloud, nor did I fully know what they meant. As long as my pen kept moving, my mind was quiet. I used language as a form of regulation - keeping myself sane at the age of 11 when I did not fully understand meiotic principles in the extracurricular biology classes I would take outside of school. Repetition came before understanding and structure came before any form of explanation.

Years later, I would learn that motor actions help calm the nervous system and that predictable patterns help the brain manage uncertainty. I learned the beautiful science of this phenomenon long after I learned the instinct. I didn’t tell anyone as a kid. The mantra always worked before I had the words to explain why. The days I would not write it or speak it to myself, I would lose extra points on the math exam. My dad always told me that in Jainism, you don’t pray for the intention of wanting something - including comfort. I felt rebellious, I always did.

Writing for Myself:

Writing the Navakar Mantra was not something I shared or explained. It was private, embarrassing in my eyes to my white friends. I swung back and forth between playing the tabla at the temple and leading Diwali prayers in my community to begging my mom for the godforsaken neon Under Armour clothes and long Nike socks all the cool kids in school had.

By middle school, I learned about journaling - before I ever got my first iPhone. Those same 99 cent spiral notebooks multiplied. They lived in my bookshelf, in the back of my parents’ cars, in the bottom drawer of my desk, in boring math lessons and science worksheets. Most of my thoughts were incomplete and instead observations: my sixth grade science teacher has a weird obsession with Diet Coke, no one except for two people washed their hands after recess and before eating their lunch, and Mr. Campbell removed his wedding ring.

Being an only child meant there was no one else to absorb the overflow. My thoughts and imagination perpetuated a majority of my youth, especially with Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, A-Z Mysteries, and the Magic Tree House books. Writing became a place where my thoughts could go without needing to make sense, in an attempt to better understand myself. I needed somewhere to put things before they stacked on top of each other.

At some points, the notebooks stopped being enough. When I got my first iPhone, the habit shifted almost immediately. The ugly, yellow-colored Notes app replaced the spiral notebooks. It felt faster, more immediate, and less intentional.

Around this time, my notes stopped being observations and instead began sounding like instructions I was giving myself:

They then shifted to scrawl across subjects, obsessions, and half-formed arguments.

Anything that felt unfinished really:

I came to learn this pattern was not completely arbitrary. I wrote down my unfinished thoughts, because they felt unfinished. It turns out this phenomenon is called the Zeigarnik effect in contemporary neuroscience - the tendency for the brain to hold onto incomplete tasks more tightly than completed ones.

Once a thought registered as unresolved surfaced in my brain, I felt compelled to write it down somewhere.

Most of the time, writing it down didn’t mean I planned to come back to it, it just meant I could stop thinking about it. Externalizing the thought calmed me down, similar to writing the Navakar Mantra in my childhood.

When I scrolled through my old Notes, I noticed particularly how I wrote, especially in my early teenage years. I had a particular pattern of writing inspirational - or at least I thought so - observations from individuals I admired. I had a particular fixation on how people used language and what they did afterward.

One note from 2022, buried somewhere in the middle of it all, just said:

I don’t remember the context, but it tracks.

Obsession:

What previously I used to view as childish, I eventually started to better understand and appreciate the relationship between the languages we use, the brain, and how humans behave. I also stopped viewing obsession as an enemy. It started to show up everywhere, including how long I would sit with a sentence before deciding it felt right, how frequently I replayed conversations in my head for what followed after, who went quiet at the dinner table when trying a new cuisine, and who changed posture. Even as a child, no matter how poorly I performed at whatever I did, I became obsessed.

Picture from 2016: Achievements in Jetpack Joyride Picture from 2011: First soccer practice (I used to pick up the ball with my hands and score in the opposing team’s goal) Picture from 2018: State-level speech competition finalist Picture from 2017: Practicing my Hindi alphabet This curiosity ultimately followed me into the Brain and Language Lab, doing neuroscience research at Georgetown. I started learning about the differences between declarative and procedural memory - the facts we can consciously recall and the kind of repetition which lives in habit. How language is processed in the mind, turns out, sits awkwardly in the middle of them both. Some parts are explicit like me completing all of my written assignments in EB Garamond - a font introduced to me by my 11th grade US History Instructor - because of how visually orderly it looks, and other parts are only noticeable when something breaks. In patients with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, structure disappears first, not vocabulary.

Timing shifts and sentences loosen...

This detail stayed with me.

It explained why writing had always started in my hand before it reached my brain. Writing the Navakar Mantra and typing unfinished thoughts gave me a sense of restoring order - something predictable for me to hold on to before I spiraled. I enjoy being deliberate, noticing where margins align, when spacing feels off, and when the idea feels wrong. Language, to me, has always been a medium where my hand leads and my mind catches up.

What I once believed was perfectionism, I now believe is regulation.