arunima kaushik sharma
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Foreword
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‘Continue’ is an illustrated collection of experiences that aim at providing hope to people dealing with depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, eating disorders and self-harm, while reassuring them that they are not alone in their journey. It consists of nine short stories of people who are in real life, dealing with or have at one point dealt with mental and behavioural issues. The tenth story in the book, called ‘Clean Slate’ consists of 6 blank pages where you can illustrate and write your own story. Mental health problems are absolutely real, but so is hope. Hope is real. Help is real. Other people are medicine.
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continue /kən'tinju:/ recommence or resume after interruption.
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I’m too young to be done ...7 You’re overreacting ...15 Maybe they’re normal and I’m the freak ...23 Something wasn’t quite right with me ...31 When a fat person suddenly gets skinny, its called progress, right? ...39 They thought I was bored or didn’t have enough drama in my life ...47 My mind can go from being very raw to being a huge glitch ...57 I’m not doing myself any favours ...69 Are you paying attention ...81 Clean Slate ...97 Epilogue ...105
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continue
; your story isn’t over yet
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“Im too young to be ‘done’” Perfection is a disease. But its murderous when you are killing yourself to achieve perfection. It must be so easy for you to wake up to a normal family with breakfast on the table and to multiple college acceptance letters with great report cards with A+ grades. It must be so great to be surrounded by people who actually support you in what you want to do and what you aspire to be, instead of people who just keep telling you that you’e not good enough. It must feel really great to actually feel like you get returns for everything you put in.
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I cant remember what it felt like to get rewarded. I’m sick and tired of working and working and working and it never being good enough. I’m tired of not being good enough. I cant look at life and feel like I’m genuinely succeeding at something-not my grades, not my relationships, not my friendships and not even myself. Why am I such a failure? I’m sick of being a failure. I’m exhausted of trying to be strong. I don’t think I’m strong, in fact what does this word even mean anymore? I’m sick of crying into my pillow in the dead of the night and waking up with a smile, like the night before never happened. I’m only 18 and my life is supposed to be starting. Then why does it feel like its all coming crashing down from the sky?
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“Get over it!” “Stop worrying too much, you cant control this!”
“Why
are
you
always
so
anxious?!” “You’re making mountains out of molehills!”
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Its easy for you to expect me to stop feeling a certain way with the blink of an eye or the snap of your fingers. But no, you need to know that it isn’t easy when you feel choked up inside. I cant help my body from shaking because of my anxiety, that makes my heart beat 500 in a minute and doesn’t let me sleep or think or study or function normally. Its taking over my mind till I drown it and I’m sorry but I cant “Get over it” “You like being sad” No. No one ‘likes’ being sad. You think I so vulnerable and that I like the fact that that people say on a scale of 1-10, hits me whose baseline is a 10000? No, I don’t like an emotional wreck 24/7.
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like being everything on a scale being such
Do you know I cant even count the number of times I’ve broken down as soon as I’ve entered my room because I’m being
‘brave’ all day trying to convince people around me that I am
‘normal’?
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Its very easy for people to blurt words out without knowing what the other person might be dealing with. Whatever happened to compassion as humans. We belong to the same species and that is reason enough to have some compassion towards each other. Its the least we all can do. I don’t like being this way. Stop making me feel worse about being this way.
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Please Just
STOP!
...I beg of you
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“You’re overreacting” There is a mountain on my shoulders and its always been there. I cant help it, its been glued to my back by my parents so I’m gonna have to live with it. Keep walking with the weight. The clock struck 3am and I shot up in my bed. Panting. Crying. Everything spinning. Reach out for help? I did. I made my way to my parents’ room. “Its an overreaction for not having studied enough for the exam tomorrow. Go back to sleep,” they said. I went and took the exam, thinking they were right. I wish they were. This continued. I’ve grown up in a household where academics have played a major role in my life. Its somewhat more important than breathing, if that makes sense.
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It was only after the continued episodes of throwing up, gagging all day, waking up in cold sweats and having trouble breathing that I realised that anxiety is very much real. I read somewhere that you don’t need to tell your story to the world as long as one person is ready to listen to you, and how important it is to have a confidante. Someone who can listen to you, help you and understand you. Thankfully, my friends were on my side. They understood and they kept me going. But that didn’t stop from my anxiety attacks from hitting me time and again. In fact, it worsened when my parents gave me hell for not scoring well in my pre-boards. I don’t understand why I still have to live with the mountain attached to my back. Its heavy. Its really heavy and I’m tired.
It may sound trivial but its mentally exhausting when your parents expect you to excel at everything constantly. Its not even motivating anymore; it is, in simple words what you call pressurising.
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I remember this one time when I went out for lunch to celebrate winning a quiz competition with my team, I was told to stay home then on because “you’re not good enough to celebrate.”
According to them I’m just not good enough and its a problem that noticeably a lot of people my age are dealing with-the problem of not being “good enough.”
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In an Indian society, you live with your parents most of your life-at least till you’re financially stable and decide to move out. Now imagine living a big portion of your life with people who constantly tell you that you’re flawed but also at the same time expect you to be perfect. “You’re not gonna get anywhere in life.” “You are a disappointment.” “Your grades aren’t high enough.” These words play like a stuck cassette that people have to use pencils to fix. No matter how hard I try, I somehow cant reach their expectations. And so I decided that I needed to reach my own expectations first. Having anxiety didn’t make me a damaged person because I didn’t let it get to me so easily. The fact that I accepted it was the first step. I’ve tried self harming, I’ve tried to punish myself for not being ‘good enough’ when all I need to know was maybe their version on being good was way different than mine, and that maybe my version was what I need to be. I’ve tried cutting all sort of contact with the people in my life. There were times when I would blatantly ignore people in school because somewhere at the back of my head I was conditioned to believe that even socialising will stand in my way to becoming the perfect academic parrot.
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Solitude. Desolation. Seclusion.
I’ve seen what happens when people go down that road and I wasn’t ready to go down that road myself. I started coping with it by doing anything I could to get out of it because going to my parents and talking about it failed time and again. From laying on the cold floor to singing, to get my heart to beat normally and stop myself form sweating, I did try everything. I’m not sure how its working for me, yet, but I’m trying. I’m trying to reach out, I’m trying to save myself and I believe I can. I believe I will. Considering how families are supposed to be the one to support you at these situations, I feel upset.
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I do plan to talk to my parents once again about this. Mental illnesses are not a joke, dear mom and dad.
It isn’t an ‘overreaction’ Mental issues are like climate change-if it is there, it is there and you cant deny it. You can’t say
global warming is an
‘overreaction’ to pollution, can you?
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‘Maybe they’re normal and I’m the freak.’ Imagine living your entire life in fear. I’ve spent 19 years of my life in constant dread and dismay. An average woman apparently speaks about 20,000 words a day. Imagine speaking a quarter of it. When you enter a classroom in a school, you see a classification of people in that room. The front benchers, the middle benchers and the last benchers, where the front benchers are the apparent intellects, the middle benchers being the less-serious-in-life and the backbenchers being the notorious ones. I was somewhere in the middle of the back and the middle benchers but I was definitely not notorious. We’ve all seen in chick flicks while growing up, the stereotype attached with someone who decides to sit in the last corner of the class. I was that person, but never the stereotype. I’ve always been dissatisfied with my life for reasons even I cant put in words. A lot of times I feel like I’m not being taken seriously, properly understood and I’ve never known what self-respect is, let alone someone else respecting me. I cant get a lot of people to talk to me because I fit the ‘weirdo’ category pretty well.
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I’m a part of the extreme minority. Thats why even if people tried to understand me, it wouldn’t help in any way. They’re still the majority. They still ‘win’, I guess.
I guess I’ve felt different for a long time, but it all came crashing down in 7th grade. Bullying exists in school and a lot of people don’t even care to address it. Try being a 15 year old with a broken self-esteem trying to cope with every aspect in life-from friends to academics and a mother who constantly made me feel as afraid of people as she herself was.
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I’ve always been reserved and I continue to live that way. I continue to wake up every morning feeling like something terrible is going to happen. I was perpetually petrified of the very existence of everything, and that is what I’ve been all my life. I had to plot out every move I made and think about everything I say at least 10 times because I was too afraid. I believe because of that I’ve never really had someone I could call a friend. Maybe thats the reason why I was always alienated and was made fun of. According to my classmates, being quiet meant being dumb and to them I somehow seemed ‘manly’; at least that’s what I was termed. All of this sort of continued till grade 11 and apart from always being in constant fear, I had now started to doubt myself. Its one thing when someone tells you you’re not good enough, but its a different thing when that someone is yourself standing in front of the mirror, telling yourself that you’re useless.
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I remember telling myself that I didn’t want to live to be 16. Imagine believing very strongly that you’re not smart or intelligent, you’re a total letdown and a breathing, talking, walking disappointment to everybody you know. ‘You have issues’ is something that I was told to on my face which was followed by the other person making a disgusted face at me. I learned to accept that I’m alone and nobody would even begin to fathom what I feel inside. Its very difficult for a child to understand what anxiety feels like. A 24 year old would have some knowledge of it but I as an 8 year old didn’t even drink coffee. It sort of felt like excitement at first but then my stomach felt like it was flipping and my palms started sweating and my heart began pounding. And that wasn’t very exciting, to be honest.
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Anxiety is like one of those small cuts you get on your finger out of nowhere but once its in contact with water, you realise how tremendously it hurts. Anxiety is like a little monster that wears a skull as a mask. Its that little devil that sits on your shoulder and whispers fearful thoughts and irrational worries into your ears. Its very common, but it isn’t very commonly acknowledgedlet alone being understood. I used to see the kids at birthday parties and parks enjoying themselves and I’d sit in one corner and try to hide, hoping no-one came and spoke to me because making conversations was a task I was horrified of.
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As a kid I always felt the need to be perfect and in that constant struggle to push myself, I feel like I lost an integral part of my childhood. I didn’t have friends like all the other kids did. I had one confidante though, and she’s someone I’d call a friend. The worse thing that people don’t realise is that all of this struggle leads to suicidal tendencies and yes, I attempted it. It was after my entrance exam that I did horribly in, which made me think I had no future. I felt like I was failing in every aspect of life-mentally, emotionally, physically in terms of appearance, socially because I was always reservedand so I really wanted to not fail in at least one aspect but I managed to do that too. Academically too, I failed. Killing myself felt like the right thing to do, except, I failed at that too.
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Oh,the irony!
But I did succeed in something. I realised the hurt I would cause to the people who knew me- my family. I thought about the uncertainty of what would happen after I died. I’m currently on medication, but I do know that I can overcome this. Anxiety is something that exists in everyone’s mind, the one difference you can make is how you learn to control it. Its like a rocking chair- it gives you something to do but its not going get you very far.
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“Something wasn’t quite right with me.” I’ve always been the kind of girl who hid in her own face. Maybe thats why no one ever bothered to understand the person that I am, and to be honest, I wish I could understand myself better too. I’ve always been a people-pleaser, because the fear thats always been is that one toe out of line and I’ll be on my own again. I’ve always feared being abandoned in my life. Its just a fear that never seems to go away. I remember the exact same thing happening to me twice. Let me tell you how.
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I remember how one fine day all of my friends decided to stop talking to me for no concrete reason. It left me conflicted because I still don’t know the reason. I blamed myself for it. I came down to three people I called ‘friends’ but they made me want to stay at home and not go to school and face everyone. I remember gaining a lot of weight over the summer break and people aren’t usually nice to you in school if you’re fat. I remember being called names- one of them included ‘fat-ass’- in front of the entire class that was laughing at me. I remember that day very clearly because until then I didn’t know weight was an issue. I want you to imagine a scenario. Theres a room with 50 people of your age. There’s one person pointing at you and calling you names. The three people you call your friends are also laughing at you instead of standing up for you. So you rush out of the class and run to washroom, lock yourself and cry because you just got ridiculed. Imagine that entire scenario. Imagine it happening to you. You’ll never know how it feels like till it happens to you.
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I remember standing still that day, with my heart in rapid waves, blood gushing under my skin and my head flooded with static.
I stood still.
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Ever since that day, I never left my bench in the classroom, unless it was absolutely necessary. I’d even be ashamed to ask the teacher if I could go to the restroom, because I didn’t want any kind of attention on me. In case I did have to go out, I would cover myself up with an A-3 size sketch pad to conceal all the fat. I’d never even get out during the recess and I had stopped eating. All because of that once incident.
It got to a point where someone had to sit with me and force feed me because I’d just sit there and look at my food or probably throw it away. I knew I was starving but instead I’d drink some water and curb my hunger. This went on till grade 11th. Amidst all of this mess, I had one person I could call my own, but not for long. If someone is happier without you, why would you want to stand in their way? And so I took a step back. And then I took a leap back. Except, maybe a week later when I was out in a mall, a random realisation hit me- I was lonely. I wasn’t alone, but I was lonely. And so I gave in to my fear, locked myself up in a bathroom stall and wept my eyes out. 40
Somewhere at the back of my head, I knew something wasn’t quite right with me. Something just felt wrong. I had already had a history of eating disorder and it was somehow coming back to me. I’d stare into the darkness and lose myself in nothingness and all of that felt calming to me. I’m not sure why I was now addicted to being alone because that was the one thing I always feared. A few years later, when I moved out of the country for college, I refused to live with my flatmates for a semester. The thing with anxiety is that, you know you need people, you know you want them in your life and you know that there are people out there who care for you, but it makes you push all of them away without you even wanting to. You don’t have control over it. I knew I was losing people again as they one by one stopped talking to me. My anxiety attacks got worse because of this. What people think about having anxiety is that the person is shy and awkward. What they don’t realise is that they have full blown panic attacks, heart palpitations, problem in breathing, restlessness, trembling and shaking. I’ve always had issues with keeping romantic relationships and if keeping friends was also becoming difficult, I didn’t know how long I could do this for. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be interesting to keep people around. I had to be normal, or at least pretend, because in this country, if you have issues, you’re left alone to sort yourself out.
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My mind kept telling me that the problem within me was keeping everyone away and made them hate me. The fact that at this point, when people leave you alone to ‘sort yourself out’ or give you your ‘space,’ it didn’t help even one bit. I started staying with myself more often. I stopped going to the common kitchen my flatmates and I shared. I’d buy food that would only require re-heating or to be left in the oven-basically food that didn’t require me to stay in the kitchen for longer than two minutes. Days went by and then came the day I was hoping would bring me some happinessmy birthday. I decided to go out with people on my birthday eve, to bring in my birthday at midnight. At midnight when I tried finding my friends, I got to know that they’d all gone back home. I went home that night and realised that it had finally happened. People had actually physically abandoned me. My fear of being abandoned actually happened with me.
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Since then I’ve taken another leap back. I spend most of my time in the library or I work in the laundry room to distract myself. There are days when I wake up, I don’t switch on the light or leave my bed because I physically cannot will myself to move and get on with my day. My therapist tells me my deep rooted issues of anxiety points towards my fear of being abandoned. And the fact that I’ve sort of given up on even trying anymore, isn’t helping. But one day at a time, right?
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“When a fat person suddenly gets skinny, its called progress, right?” I can look back into my past and think it must not have been that bad, but then I start thinking about it and I think it was really horrible and teenagers can be actual physical demons sometimes. The worst is when even you don’t realise whats happening to you. So its sort of like this blackhole thats pulling you towards itself and you want to get out of it but you cant, because you let your demons be stronger than you are. My story has multiple layers to it. It goes like thisI was always a very flamboyant kid. I’m talking bent wrist since the third grade, there was no mistaking. But I remember being a smart and a very eager kid. The kind who would want to be the first hand up for debates, speeches, poetry recitation, announcements, etc. I was very prominent and I was well liked by my teachers and peers both.
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But then when you’re different- in the sense that you don’t fit rulebook of how things are supposed to be, people generally tend to take notice. Starting right from the 6th and the 7th grade, the bullying started. Like I said, little kids can be real life demons. all of this got really bad by the 9th grade.
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It isn’t the best feeling in the world when the people who you call your ‘friends’ publicly demean and ridicule you because you’re born a certain way. I had a terrible group of friends- the close minded, never-seen-the-world-apart-from-their-little-cornerkind of people. I’ve been called every name in the book by my own friends-people I thought I could call my own. I have my notebooks defaced, been yelled in the corridors and I remember they used to yell ‘gay pig’ at me. It isn’t the best thing in the world to be called all of that by people you thought were your ‘friends.’ Around the 8th grade, I started battling demons of my own. 2008 was a rollercoaster ride for me and whatever I was going through in school didn’t make it any easier. I had just come off my first, almost successful suicide attempt. I was realising what damage razor blades could do to me and how calming the ritual of bloodletting felt. I was discovering the joy of feeling empty after each meal by shoving two fingers down my throat and purging everything out. I was also on the cusp of becoming sexually active. When you add non existent self-esteem and a desire to be loved by anyone who would say they wanted me, the result isn’t really great.
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Imagine growing up in a town where you’re convinced that you’re the only one of your kind, not just based on your sexuality but your interests, views and passion too. Nothing was common and I felt like a pariah in my own group of ‘friends’. I was already learning my place as a freak and coming into my own. I never spoke to anyone about this because of the only fear that they wouldn’t understand. I’ve always been the kind of person who stays shut about whatever he’s feeling inside, to a point where I’ve felt so strongly about being against talking. Maybe I was conditioned to be that way. Only recently have I started to even acknowledge the fact that reaching out might actually be a way out. Only recently have I even begun saying out loud that I’m struggling with depression or that I have gone through things in my past. I’ve been in and out of therapy since the 8th grade, but most of it was just psychiatrists who would give me medication. So effectively, all I’ve been doing since 2008 has been popping pills. Its too early to be on medication at such an age but it’s real and it happened and if I don’t acknowledge it myself first, I’m not sure who will.
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This year is the first year that I saw a therapist and actually sat and spoke to him. I chose to reach out. I chose to end my silence and speak. I chose to ask for help. I cant even begin to imagine the thoughts that probably went through my mother’s head when she’d see my bloodstained clothes or hear me retching in the bathroom. I guess she always knew without me having to verbalise it to her. She saw my weight drop and my hair fall out in clumps. What my mother, or as a matter of fact no one really knew, were my sexual escapades. When low self esteem and teenage hormones entwine, they create a horrible cocktail and that led me to give myself to men who were in one word, disgusting. It led me to being sexually assaulted and being okay with it.
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But the beauty of this is, when a fat person gets skinny, its called progress, right? I guess thats a success story right there. So there I was, 2012, starving myself and reducing my world to numbers. I’d cut each time I transgress or actually eat something solid, as some sort of punishment. I think the worst part of this all has always been having no one to talk to. For whatever reason, I just refused to share my story. You know how you’re surrounded be so many people because of your social life, yet when you go through your phonebook at night, you truly do not have a single person you feel like you can reach out to? That is what I felt like. Earlier this year I realised that dealing with mental issues and coping with them is a make believe situation. Once you make it a point to recover, once you store it in your head, it works. And it works wonderfully. It takes a lot of time though, I wont deny that. Years later, here I am with air in my lungs, blood still running in my veins and beats in my heart. I’m in one piece, I’m getting better and if this isn’t my success story, then I don’t know what is.
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“They thought I was bored or didn’t have enough drama in my life.” Social stigmas are the cherry on the cake in the mental health bakery department. Except there isn’t a bakery, there is no cake and forget the cherry because there’s nothing sweet here. Isn’t it funny how we all have a story to tell, but not until we get it down on paper can we objectively view the component parts? Let me ask you a question. Have you ever felt so bad about your very existence that it was easier to stay in bed each morning- and I’m not just talking about winters- firmly tucked away from the fears and tears that the coming day had in store? Have you ever been too low and alone that what you really would prefer would be to just…fade away?
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I think it started in school when I was about 17 and a little incident triggered a month of depression and incessant crying and paranoia. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know how to feel, who to talk to or what to even talk about. The negativity that was dwelling inside of me got woken up one day and I’m not sure how. I didn’t know how to put it back to sleep either. It went like this-from three good meals a day to none. But I wanted it to stop. I wanted to stop living this life on a loop again and again. I avoided social situations. I had self image issues. I hated what I saw in the mirror and it isn’t a great feeling when your reflection tells you you’re ugly. I was scared of talking, of looking at myself in the mirror, of attention, of myself- I was scared of everything.
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Who could help me and more importantly, who would want to?
My first incident of anxiety was triggered out of insecurity or losing almost everything and everyone I called my own. I tried talking to my friends back then but hardly anyone takes a medical problem seriously if its not physical-till they cant see it happen to you. They judged me for wanting to get space. They thought I was bored and didn’t have enough drama in my life.
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Drama? Stigmatising was exactly what I was afraid of and so I decided to stay mum about it for the longest time. Someone thought I had attention issues. I started writing my thoughts down instead of talking about them. I tried to draw my monsters on paper, but that didn’t help at all. I would go days without sleeping because anxiety doesn’t let you sleep. Which means my whirring mind had 24 hours of opportunity each day to undermine and criticise myself in every way possible. Any semblance of self confidence had evaporate with assistance of this negative self talk.
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Who could
And more importantly,
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help me?
who would want to?
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In college, I found people of my kind. Call it the twist of fate or the way my destiny decided to shape my life-if that sort of a thing even exists. People who actually knew what it feels like to feel your heart race and stop the same time. Or when you cant breathe long enough to finish a sentence while talking. They understood that feeling when you think your heart is about to explode out of your chest or when you need to find the nearest chair because your legs felt as though they couldn’t hold you up. Getting the diagnosis was really hard. There is so much stigma surrounding mental health and I didn’t have a lot of friends as it is, let alone having someone I call my friend with the label of “mental nutcase”. I was really worried about how it would affect my life. I had weekly sessions with my psychologist, after I finally decided to see one, working through my problems as a part of an acceptance and commitment therapy program that was based around creative expression. Guess what? It worked for me.
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I still have my days though. Anyone who knows me can tell and yes, it is hard, I do struggle every day but I know how to fight my demons now and I make sure I avoid my triggers. But the most important thing I learned is that there is always hope. There is always going to be someone out there who knows what you’re going through and there is always someone who can and wants to help you. But more deeply than that, I feel grateful for the experience of my panic and anxiety disorders-this is one way to look at it. It taught me that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to panic and anxiety. Instead, we all have our own unique questions to ask, and our own unique paths to the answers.
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“My mind can go from being very raw to being a huge glitch” I don’t fully understand myself, I don’t know myself. But I knew one thing- I knew it when things started to go visibly wrong with me. I’v always had an abnormal relationship with my family. From the age of 5 to 12, I lived with my maternal grandmother because there was always something or the other that wasn’t quite right at home. I’ve always tried to suppress my memories and so I don’t quite remember a lot of incidents that took place. Call it some sort of coping mechanism, but I’ve always had an escapist attitude.
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I remember back in high school when I was around 16, there was a sudden addiction to staying in bed and not wanting to carry on with the day. There was a sudden love for darkness and I was letting it consume me voluntarily. I found myself crying for no reason, but maybe if you think harder, maybe I was crying for too many reasons. It bothered my family, and so I was taken to a child psychologist. As a therapist, it is absolutely unethical to disclose your patient’s details with anyone-even their family. I’ve always been wary of therapists or psychologist because mine revealed every piece of information that I shared with her, to my mother. What none of them knew was that I lied my way through it all. I never gave her any real information about myself and the strange thing is that she bought it. I never felt like I could tell her anything about me and so I never did. Not at least the reality of it all.
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I moved on to thinking depression is a liberty and frankly, I wasn’t only depressed all the time. Sometimes I did think that there were other things that were wrong but this is how my illness decided to pan out. Its only last year that I was properly diagnosed with a type of a personality disorder. I was in therapy for a month until I left it consciously, not abruptly. Here’s the thing about having a borderline personality disorder- you have cooccurring disorders along with it like depression, anxiety, substance abuse, eating disorders and suicidal tendencies along with self-harm and a lot of times, completed suicides. It is literally being on the spectrum of everything mentioned. Lets not categorise it as disorders, lets talk about general disabilities that make them this bad. It doesn’t let you keep a healthy relationship with anybody because you’re not in control of your feelings, mostly because you don’t fully identify with the sort of person you are.
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After I was diagnosed with a personality disorder, I literally went to an introspective shell because somehow everything started to fall into place. Every puzzle I wanted to solve from childhood sort of unfolded. As a kid I’ve always questioned how other people see each other, and more importantly how would they see me, since I have relentlessly believed in the ideology that everyone has a perceived reality. As a kid I thought of it in a very literal sense. I always thought to myself if others see me the way I see myself. I’ve always sort of juggled with identity and had major problems with regulating thoughts. Doing things when they shouldn’t be done seemed like a distant song. Back in school my set of friends were constantly changing and I never seemed to care too much about broken relations which somehow internally made me feel really guilty about the kind of person that I was becoming.
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What if the mirror lies to us all?
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Things changed post college because there was a whole lot of impulsive and reckless behaviour that I didn’t have room for in school. I’d like to think of it as one of the worse things, yet I’m glad I got out of it before I could do any more harm to myself or the people around me. I’ve never understood how I can go from disliking someone to loving them in the same moment. I know I’ve hurt a lot of people in this process, but I feel that only a diagnose made me understand and appreciate people more. Now if I do have thoughts about my world crashing down, I can make myself understand better. My constant need for change is something I cant handle myself. I tried to control it but I failed every time. I think all of this goes back to my childhood, personally, since I remember I didn’t have a ‘normal’ one.
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My mother was my hero and I never really had a regular relationship with my father. Until the day I found out that my mother was just like me. She has a history of mental illness which was discovered too late and personality disorders can only be helped till a certain age. I was told she had Bipolarity Disorder, which led to more problems like having multiple affairs about which I found out in 10th grade. She wasn’t my hero anymore. I’ve seen it all too closely and the fact that I’ve always seen more disagreements and fights, but the negativity and euphoria can take over a person. I feel like I’ve seen it all too closely. I’ll always hate the fact that my mother disappointed me in this unbelievable way and no matter how many times she apologises, that one word can not make up for a thousand actions.
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Except, very recently I realised that if I try to hone this issue of mine to my own benefit, things might work for me. Not identifying with anything makes you want to change every now and then-this can either be a good thing or a bad thing. This effects every aspect of my life-from the kind of clothes I wear to the kind of work I produce, the brand of cigarettes I smoke, to the kind of music I listen to. The bad part is that it interferes with my personality. My mind can go from being very raw to being a huge glitch. I’m 21, I have been diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder and I am treating myself. I know it is a very long journey, but here’s to making it till here.
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“I’m not doing myself any favours” It’s hard to get by in the world sometimes when you feel like you’re not in control, and have never been in control of your own body. It really started once I was old enough to understand myself, and my body. It all went downhill from there. I was a scrawny child, but by the time I had turned 9, things had taken a bit of a 180. Never really putting any kind of attention on the way I looked, it was a sudden change when people my age, and my brother as well obviously took notice and didn’t hesitate in teasing me. This wasn’t the beginning of people belittling me, especially in school. I was a more sensitive child, I was easily hurt and scared and I got along better with girls my age. I was the “boy who cried”. This is enough material for any preteen influenced by the influx of patriarchy and gender norms in India to start teasing another person.
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It started off with “he’s such a crybaby” and “are you a girl?” and it eventually got to a point where I, a person already struggling through school, just didn’t want to get up anymore. The amount of headaches and stomach problems faked just to avoid another day of school probably went into the hundreds. It got worse when I started being called fat. People started noticing the obviously large stomach protruding through my clothes. My already slow pace was amplifying and I was becoming the antithesis of a person in any kind of shape. By the time I was 12, I was failing every subject, I wasn’t focusing and I didn’t want to go to school. I didn’t want to see anyone and I didn’t want to step out of my house. Going into middle school, I seemingly lost most of my friends, although not in totality. I had the odd pair or two but I didn’t have that one person I could ask for support or ask to even defend me, because heaven knows I couldn’t.
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Years went into me trying to mirror what was around me, simultaneously destroying any kind of academic record as well as self-respect. I didn’t have friends or any kind of company. I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I locked myself into my bathroom drowning in my own tears. By the time I was 13, I’d started taking psychometric tests and I was diagnosed with dyscalculia and ADHD. This was so far the only rational explanation for me to justify why I was always shaking. I didn’t think it was anxiety and I didn’t put it onto the hatred I had for myself every time I looked into a mirror. I slowly settled into school again, detached myself from the bullying and restarted. I’d dropped math by the time I was 14 but then puberty hit and a whole other source of anxiety had started. The refusal to acknowledge the fact that I was gay.
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The thought of it brought back memories of being pushed around in class and being abandoned by other people my age. It brought back the mockery and all the laughter and fingers pointed at me every time I fell down and cried. Terribly enough, half of the body shaming was from my brother and cousins itself. They didn’t realise I was talking it as seriously as I was and they didn’t realise the damage they were doing. I was on medication for my ADHD and it began to curb my appetite. The size of my stomach became smaller and I began eating less. I was becoming thinner, but obviously not “thin enough” for myself.
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My brother left for college and left me alone with my parents, my grandfather got diagnosed with cancer and everything was suddenly chaotic in the span of a year. There was less attention on me and my first instinct was to stop eating. I remember the latter few months of 2011 going into throwing my food away, and feeling dizzy all the time. It didn’t help and I didn’t feel better. But it became a habit and I didn’t hesitate to throw up my food once in a while either. I was settling into a steady social circle and had made friends, but I was stuck in a steady and solid bubble. The thought of my sexuality was bringing up fear and anxiety every single day, and I just started shaking more and more, moment by moment. I can’t keep myself steady even now. By the time the last year of school rolled around, the fear of what was next was building up. I needed to prepare my portfolio for art school, but I was tearing everything I was making. Nothing was good enough and neither was I.
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My fear of abandonment was coming true; my friends were getting to know other people and I started not being invited and ignored by the people I thought I was closest to. I’m used to time alone but over the years I’ve cultivated a need and craving for having people like me because I felt very few ever could. I need to know people still like me; I need to be sure that they won’t leave the first chance they get. I got into college and the shaking was getting even worse. I didn’t know how I’d adjust into a new environment. I didn’t know how to make friends in new situations, and sitting in class alone, even in college was enough to send my legs into motion overdrive. It managed to sort itself out and I found a niche group but my self worth wasn’t going in any kind of upwards trajectory. The need for external validation in a new environment was driving my self-consciousness wild and I was stopping eating again. It became crazier and I became obsessed with my flaws. And I still am.
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When I look into a mirror I don’t see a face. I see a big nose, a unibrow, a double chin, no defined bone structure, ears that stick out, a large lower lip, acne, fuller cheeks and dark circles. I still see a big stomach and I see fat that shouldn’t exist. By the end of my first year, my fear of new people, new situations, public speaking and the thought of all eyes looking at me were higher than ever. And nothing has changed. I’ve managed to hide behind a screen and social media over the past few years and create a mask for myself through the Internet. There was a specific instance where someone recognised me via my Instagram and introduced themselves to me and I stood there shaking, unable to move my arms feeling like a demon was inside my body and pulling my tongue back and stopping me from saying anything.
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Two more important things happened around this time. I’d started breaking down in college and having regular panic attacks. I’d started punching walls and slamming cupboards shut. I’d flunked my way through school and I couldn’t destroy a creative education which in my mind was everything I’d been waiting for, for 14 years. I didn’t have a margin to even mess up a little bit and the pressure drove me nuts and it still does. If I can’t do this right, there’s nothing I can do right. The other was that I’d accepted my sexuality and slowly started telling people in my immediate circle, bit by bit. Except I was coming out as bisexual. I still hadn’t accepted it fully. Over the next year it finally happened and I told my parents. While my father supported me 150%, my mother’s been hesitant. At one point saying “As a rational person I can completely accept it, as your mother I’d rather not.” There’s been no conversation since.
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I still eat very little, afraid of any kind of weight gain, and can’t keep myself steady. Panic attacks come and go, tears are being shed more than ever. What the worst is that I’m completely aware of my own creational destruction but when it actually comes down to stopping it, it doesn’t happen. I fear I’ll never be able to love myself, the concept seems like a conspiracy theory. People don’t understand the rage that runs through every nerve of my body when I look into mirror and see that I still look the same because I’d much rather look like and maybe even by someone else.
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Because as I am right now, I’m not doing myself any favours.
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“Are you paying attention?” Where do I start from? I do not know, but I can give you details. You have to pay attention. Chapter 1. Attention Attention noun at·ten·tion The act or power of carefully thinking about, listening to, or watching someone or something Attention whore Attention seeker Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
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I have fragments for memories from my childhood, If I force myself to remember, I remember the darkness in the toilet dad locked me up in, because I was breaking up a fight between him and mum. I can remember the darkness taking over, fear gripping the veins in my body and the banging. The banging of my hands against the door and my heart against my chest. I wish you’d paid attention, to the details of your child’s behaviour after that. He lost love for you that day. I still remember that day, when the elderly neighbours were sitting in the last room of the house. I remember calling up my uncle to break up the fight. I remember the grim faces of the elders. I remember the screaming of my parents. The gentle hum of anxiety leading down from the heart to the stomach. I wish you’d paid attention to your child’s fear that day, the details of his paranoia whenever your voices shot up. He lost respect for you that day.
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I could walk you through some rougher parts, but such is life. My dad, thought I didn’t wish to communicate with him. He always saw me getting up and away from the dining table. He always saw me returning back to my room. He always saw that I did not want to watch tv with him. He said and i quote, “He doesn’t wish to speak with me.” Oh dad, how I wish you’d have listened at all the times I wanted to talk to you. You never comforted the child who kept banging at the door. You never comforted the child who was left crying and traumatised after your fights. You never wiped his tears off and put him to bed. You slapped him on his 17th birthday night. And you say that I don’t wish to talk to you? Yes, I don’t wish to.
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He thinks it’s some sort of disease. I call it
Voluntary Solitary Isolated Confinement
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Chapter 2. Kintsukuroi Kintsukuroi Japanese: Golden repair. It is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
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For that which is b r o k e n
...is more beautiful, for having been broken.
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I was broken. I don’t want to get into why or how I was broken. ‘Teenage drama’ , I’d like to sum it up in. But with being broken, came a sixth sense. I became a mirror- I reflected and ergo I only saw, those who were broken. And in their brokenness, I saw their beauty, even if they and the whole world turned a blind side to them, I saw the cracks in their skin as pathways to illumination. After all, as Rumi said, “the wound is where the light enters you”. And with a keen eye for brokenness, came an insatiable desire to heal. I saw beauty everywhere, I saw beauty in the way she let out her breaths and I saw beauty in the way she lit her cigarettes. I started paying attention to the details.
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How often the person smiled or how they sighed talking about a certain person. I saw the nervous ticks in their voice and the impatience in their leg. I developed a certain panache for reading people and I found it easier. I saw cut marks on wrists and I could see those failed suicide attempts. And all I had was love in return. There goes about, so much events throughout a person’s 20s and I believe, you only need two things at that time- ending up knowing who you are, with the comfort of knowing that you are loved. Everyone, at a point in their lives, is very hard to love, but I read this somewhere,“The ones that are the hardest to love, are the ones that need it the most.� So every time you see a girl with cut marks on a wrists, comfort her, treat her with respect and love. Tell her that the tide of time moves the largest mountains, and floods the driest plains.
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Don’t tell that fat kid that he won’t finish the race, hold his hand and take him with you. That girl you call an ‘attention whore’ in school, she just wants someone to hold her hand and tell her she’s loved. You can’t see the wounds she carries. You’ll never understand the pain she endured. And you will never, understand the plight of her soul when she was being violated. We all have our journeys and we all have a final destination. Some reach it in a few years, some take a lifetime. So let her know that it will be fine. Even if you don’t believe it, life isn’t fortunate enough for everybody, maybe they won’t get that closure ever, but hold their hand, let them know, that you understand and you are there. And trust in the tide of time. As it sweeps all, heals all.
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Chapter 3- Divine Intervention Divine Intervention Divine intervention is a term for a miracle caused by a deity’s active involvement in the human world. My Philosophy of life is, choose what philosophy suits you. For me, that philosophy came as a mix of everything.
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The perfect recipe for me, if you want to call it that. I’ve had interventions all my life. It wasn’t necessarily always profound miracles. At times, it was the little things like a comfortable night’s sleep after a traumatising day at home, or losing control of your car at 80km/hr, ending up in a 15ft deep ditch, with not even a scratch on your family and surprisingly, not even the car. It was the inner voice, that told you to not indulge in a certain vice, or the hand of God cradling you scratchless as your bike’s front wheel ends up being run over by a car bending alloy metal, like it was rubber. It’s this voice inside, that we often ignore and seldom hear. It’s the voice that tells you to not date a certain person, and it’s the same voice that tells you not to loom around a certain area because forces are at work that you shouldn’t come in contact with. We drown this voice everyday.
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It tries to talk to us, it tries to help us, it tries to intervene, but seldom do people pay heed to it. We sometimes hear it, but rarely do we listen. I urge you to go out, head to the mountains, sit yourself down, try to hear it, try to listen. Pull out your pen and your journal, and try to write it down. Read. Go out to your balcony, sit down and meditate. Breathe and try to listen to the sounds around you. I met a saint once, while I was on a religious trip with my grandmother in Gujarat. He was in his mid 40s, father of a married son. He had this soothing aura to his face. He asked me to come to him and show him my palm. As told, I did and he said, “You’re a troubled soul, but worry not. You’re going to come across certain souls in your life, one by one, who will liberate you from this cage you’re in. They will cut you loose and free, one by one”
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In my life, I’ve had the pleasure and the honour of knowing and befriending some beautiful souls. Some have let me go, some are holding on still, some have made a home in me and in some, I’ve made a home. But each and every one of them, has taught me something about myself, without which, I could not be who i am today. Whether its the girl I fell in love with, or the girl I chose not to fall in love with. Everyone taught me a lesson, how to love, how not to love. How to commit and most of all, to leave where not needed. In the end, we are who we are for a thousand reasons, and we’re only trying to get to know them one moment at a time. Which is why we are still going. ...We’re not done yet.
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Clean Slate
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I remember when,
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... to be continued. 109
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Afterword
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sonder n the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. Narrated, written, directed, edited and coined by John Koenig. THE DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE SORROWS
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‘You will need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people, and you will need to be that other person to someone else. A living, breathing, screaming invitation to believe in better things.’ - Jamie Tworkowski, TWLOHA.
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This is for all those people who put their faith in me and trusted me enough to tell me their stories absolutely unadulterated. Thank you for being so patient and for believing in me. A big thanks to Bhuvi. Thank you for always being so positive and inspiring, and making me believe in how broken things can be mended. A very special thank you to Veer Misra for lending me some of his great artworks. This book wouldn’t have been what it is, without your expertise.
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Inhale. If you’re reading this, if there is air in your lungs and blood gushing through your veins and beats in your heart, you’re absolutely alive and in one piece. And if that isn’t something to be happy about then I don’t know what is. It is disheartening that people especially in our country refrain from talking about mental health and behavioural issues. Teenagers and adolescents that are actually dealing with these problems often get termed crazy, called bored or attention seekers. You will never have the knowledge about what goes on inside the mind of another human being, let alone someone who is fighting a battle with their mind. All we can do is believe in this common concept of compassion and not severely lack it. The difference between a person battling these issues and a person who isn’t, is when the latter wakes up, their nightmare ends. Depression is like drowning, knowing the fact that people around you are breathing.. It isn’t like the rain, in fact its more like being unable to see he sun after the storm has passed. Anxiety is not just thinking too much. You can switch off the light and climb into bed, but you cant switch off your mind, stop the pictures and switch off your thoughts. Anxiety is seen as a weaker disorder in comparison to others but it is the most common and the hardest to get rid of.
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There is absolutely nothing beautiful about blood flowing down someone’s wrists. There’s really nothing romantic about mental and behavioural issues. It is difficult to reach out and talk about yourself if you’re going through something like this. Someone else will only know that you’re dealing with mental trouble if you tell them directly. Unlike a bone fracture, its often very difficult to understand what the other person is experiencing because these issues are internal and no one can visually see whats happening to you. Talking about it is the first step in the way out. Remind yourself to look up. Remind yourself to look up at the stars. The stars are always there but we may miss them in the dirt and clouds and the storm. Remind yourself that you’re the designer of your own catastrophe, but you’re also the author of your happy ending. Tell yourself to remember hope. We always have hope. If mental health issues are real then so is hope. Hope is real. Help is real. Your story is important. I hope you find peace within yourself.
Exhale.
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; your story isn’t over yet
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