A year ago, on an average day in the month of May, I began to breathe less. Fading to black-and-white like a misplaced photograph. Pale faced, lifeless and bonier than I had ever been. I felt frozen in a space I didn’t recognise. It had been a long time, four years of constant eradication of self. I could no longer feel or see beauty in anything. And while I didn’t know how to leave the path I was on, I also couldn’t stand to hurt my family anymore. I was the perfect inconvenience, I felt. So, I temporarily moved out of my home.
The months passed in utter desolation. Someone I thought I knew, decided to leave, because I was not worth the chapter in his life. He was, and then he wasn’t. Our memories had to pick up the slack. But this story doesn’t begin when he left. I was sick before I had even met him. But I didn’t know how unwell I was. Depression doesn’t hand you an itinerary. Up to a certain point, you have a ‘normal’ amount of depression, and then one day your mind’s like, “Time to kill yourself, now.”
The months following were awful and strange. Honestly, I don’t remember much, because I don’t want to revisit any part of the pain I felt. I slept a lot, fatigue had taken its toll, and what I thought was rock bottom, was nothing. It was getting worse every day. My mind was definitely quite wrapped around the words I heard from him before he left.
‘You’re irrational and disruptive.”
“I think this relationship just happened.”
“How do you live with yourself”
‘Don’t make it an excuse”
“What if this is chronic?”
“It’s a pattern. You don’t do what you say”
It was the perfect answer, to everything that was wrong with me.
I remember coming home in October, thinking that I would be ready to go back to Udaipur (my work place at that time). But a week of constant breakdowns, much worse than what I had faced ever, made me realise that it was the end of me being alone in any city away from home. I had tried suicide a couple of times by then. And it was only then I realised that the mental agony I considered a phase, was chronic now. Death of any kind, is not isolated.
The throbbing of the chest, the aches in the head, and internal noises. It screams and screams and no one can hear it but you. No one is untouchable to it, it’s as wild as it gets. As raw as it can be. And when it breaks, it still remains silent. Sometimes things become a part of you, whether you want them to or not. I had lost a lot of myself. Large, significant pieces of who I was had been killed off in those passing days.
While I was perpetually feeling sick and miserable, I was finding ways to express that experience. Help was difficult to ask for, especially when it was difficult to understand one’s own state. I thought myself bewitched and cut off from everything I had once known – somewhere- far away – in another existence perhaps. There were moments when my past came back to me in the shape of a noisy dream. And the stillness of life didn’t resemble any peace. It looked vengeful instead. Depression unlike the majority of people’s mis-understanding is not just about being sad, or a gateway to being rash, with an excuse in hand. You can’t wish to just ‘delete it, like a button on your laptop that can erase uneasiness when it likes. It is a real disease, and the symptoms one feels are valid. You can be strong and still be depressed.
I didn’t understand the oddity of paying immediate heed to a physical illness, and not to any emotional or mental turmoil. People around me could see the negative changes in me over the years, and yet the translations of love and help seemed to fail. We are so extremely sensitive, such fragile beings, who learn to disregard self love and self healing. We are far too great at keeping going, and fail miserably at slowing down or healing ourselves.
While I continued to plan a new life in the acceptance of a mental illness, I still hadn’t approached recovery as an absolute need. For it is easy to say that mental illness will ‘go away if you accept it’. It is easy to say ‘get some rest and it’ll be better’.
Our tribulations are a symptom of being human. It is hard to make despair sound charming, or at the very least, understandable. Yet we are harder on ourselves. Breakdowns, our unseen surprise, makes us reach for an immediate fix, so that things can reload to what they were like. I had reached a stage of complete shutdown, by January 2018. Although I was trying alternative methods to heal, I could see that my breakdowns, and days of extreme crying till my eyes would swell up red, was not a sign that would be healed by ‘sleeping or eating well’. This time, even my friends and family couldn’t understand it. In love, there is always an intention to help. But the intention doesn’t always automatically decode well.
I wondered why was the thought of therapy so nagging to me, even when my family was in all support for it. Perhaps some part of me didn’t want to accept that the existence of a chronic disease was there in me. Perhaps the idea of our disease becoming a part of our personality, hurt me, be it true or false.
I remember hearing my parents talk about the kinds of professional help they were exploring to approach for me. I think, that was the first time, in a long while, I felt like they understood me without me having to say it. I was accepting the need to approach for help, but was too scared to ask for it.
My constant breakdowns was an answer to a malfunction that was bound to take place with the consistent disregard to my emotional and mental distress. The deceit of good health lies in the advent of these breakdowns. It showed me the importance of illness, in a word which despises it to contempt.
I dropped seeking meaning in every step. Suffering seemed like a better bed to rest in, for at least it was the most honest emotion I had seen. Pain is a great awakener. It is by disease that health is pleasant. The once feared depression now seemed like a comforting friend, trying to help me create a safe space within myself.
Within the oddities on my road to recovery, there was a plea for change; to listen to myself, to live a more fulfilled way of life. For acceptance of who we really are. Healing is filled with so much love and joy, more love than one can imagine. My first step to seek therapy proved to be the best decision. Every other month, my parents took me to our psychiatrist for a check-up, to manage the ongoing therapy. I know that not all families understand or do the same for their loved ones, and this makes me value my relationship with them even more.
I learnt more than what I had learnt in the past four years of on and off harsh phases. I saw the enormous cost of a lasting emotional pain. Relationships suffer, life can’t be fully enjoyed, you rarely believe in yourself enough to follow your own dreams, even small irritations lead to emotional overreactions. I saw the difference between what we consider a person’s nature, and pure ignorance. My ex-boyfriend wasn’t a brute, but one doesn’t need to have malice to be hurtful. Ignorance, and insensitivity is enough for that. It helped me see the difference between mistakes, and what I just meant for him. And that is the greatest gift any human being can give, a gift that will stay in my heart for life. For I know, that all kinds of people exist, and that one needs to be careful of whom they are with, in times of sickness. Especially if and when we don’t know we are going through something perhaps.
The difficult art of self-love, came to me in the form of a depression I used to curse. I don’t feel the same way about my mental illness anymore. I feel proud and happy, to have learnt how to accept myself and to appreciate the moments of self-compassion. There is tenderness and wisdom in a heart burst wide open on the journey through pain. Dark times drive a dissolution of everything, allowing something greater to be born. Little things that my loved ones did, helped me get back to where I was and had always been. Home.
