I still remember how nervous I was when I went to see a therapist for the first time in my life. I had never done anything like this before. When I told my parents that I was thinking about seeing a mental health professional, I could see the worry in their eyes but not in their words. They were trying to be strong for me. I remember reaching the clinic and going to a room where it was just the two of us. The first question she asked me was why I felt the need to come in and see her. That’s all it took for me to start crying and telling her about everything that had led me to her office that day. Shortly after that meeting, I was diagnosed with depression and my life changed forever.
It all started with the bullying. I had always been overweight (still am), and in a society that champions the size zero figure, I didn’t exactly fit in. I was bullied almost everywhere I went. At school, coaching classes, on the streets, in the restaurants and sometimes at home. Everybody thought they could say whatever they wanted about my body, but I paid the price. When I was being told on a regular basis that how I look is not normal, that I’m supposed to look like something else, I took all those comments and started internalizing them. This constant bullying first became a regular part of my life and then slowly ended up becoming THE thing I started using to define myself. I started telling myself how ugly I am because I’m fat, how I needed to control my food and exercise for a gazillion hours a day because I thought becoming thin would be the magic cure for all my problems. I became extremely conscious about how I looked and I truly started feeling that there is something wrong with me. I started hating myself and I did it so well that I ended up completely losing myself. Strong feelings of inadequacy started to make their place in my mind. I also developed a very toxic, unhealthy relationship with food during this period; the kind that just kept getting worse with time.
While I was trying to deal with the bullying, my skin condition developed. I suffer from a chronic, autoimmune skin condition called Hidradenitis Suppurativa (H.S.). There are three stages of H.S., and I am between stage one and stage two. The exact cause of H.S. varies from person to person, but it involves the development of painful ‘bumps’ or lesions due to inflammation and the infection of the sweat glands. It started when I was about ten or eleven but initially, it kept getting misdiagnosed as acne. As I got older, it spread to other areas of my body but I kept dismissing it. I thought it would go away on its own. It didn’t. A big psychosocial impact of this disease on me was the shame. I became even more ashamed of my body and started thinking that all this was my fault. That I had somehow caused this. I was scared to show what this disease was doing to me and ended up telling no one about this. For the next six years, I hid this condition from my parents, my siblings and my friends. There were days when walking was painful and getting any sleep at night seemed impossible because of how much it hurt, but I never let anybody know what I was going through.
I finally told my sister sometime in 2011 when I realized I can no longer handle this alone. Together, we told my mom and finally went to a dermatologist where I got my official diagnosis. But by then, it was too late. I was stuck in a vicious cycle. Let me paint you a picture. Losing weight was always at the top of my list. I felt really lonely because of all the bullying and all the hiding. I felt like there was nobody I could share my problems with even though I had a lot of friends and a supportive family. I hated feeling like this so I started self-medicating with food. Every time I felt bad about myself, I turned to food. Now, this was already so much to deal with, but I also never knew when and where my skin condition would decide to act up. But, it didn’t matter how when and where it came, I just had to get that next workout in, lost the next kilo just so that I could fit in. But when I wouldn’t be able to workout, I would get frustrated so I would eat. All this would make me feel bad, so I’d promise to stop this behavior and get my life back on track. But again, there would be bullying, there would be new breakouts, and then I would find myself right back on my chair eating junk. I was just hopelessly stuck.
The bullying left mental scars I still deal with today, but my skin condition left me with multiple physical ones. I thought that I was already fat, and now I have this destructive skin condition, there is no way anybody will love me. So I pushed people away, every possible attraction, every potential long-term relationship. Dating anyone was just not an option. I used to read a lot of romantic novels and see romantic movies, always cheering for the main leads to come together, but I could never imagine finding love for myself. I convinced myself, with a lot of pain, that there is no way anybody is ever going to be okay with this, and there is no reason for them to be either. This was my problem, not theirs, and so I built walls, pretty big ones, around myself so that I could protect myself. I told myself I didn’t deserve love, and probably will never get it.
In 2012, I went to Canada to pursue my undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo where everything was better for a while. I met some awesome people, some of whom went on to become my best friends. Then something happened that changed my life again. My maternal grandmother was my absolute best friend and favorite person growing up. I’m talking weekly sleepovers, every big celebration at her house and baking together. In early 2013, she had been in the hospital and I was worried, but I also wasn’t worried because I was confident she would come home. She always came home. She had spoken to me the day before she passed away and she told me she was missing me, that she was going home the next day and is waiting for me to come back. I thought everything was going to be fine. But I was wrong. The news of her passing away completely broke me. I couldn’t come back to India to see her one last time and that is something that will always haunt me. It was so hard for me to deal with this that I didn’t deal with it at all. I didn’t give myself time to grieve and I was back to my normal self in no time. But that’s the thing with emotions, even though you can choose not to deal with them, they’re still there, and they fester. Like mine did. I don’t think I will ever be fully over her death, I just think I’ve learned to live with it better.
Now, imagine a completely dark, empty room with no light and only one door. I didn’t realize it then but I was slowly leading myself to this dark room- one mean comment, one breakout and one suppressed feeling at a time. I finally walked in and shut myself in when I missed my deadline to secure a job. I was in a co-op program and after the second year, I had to alternate between work and study. I would see everybody around me getting interviews, securing jobs, and I wasn’t getting anything. The feelings of low self-confidence, low self-esteem, inadequacy, not feeling good enoughfurther intensified because of this process. I stopped going out because I thought I didn’t deserve it. I stopped hanging out with my friends frequently because I felt I wasn’t good enough for them. I started staying in my bedroom and sleeping long hours. Even if my day was jam-packed, getting up from the bed seemed like the hardest thing to do. It was almost like there was another person sitting on my chest, stopping me from getting up. I felt like I couldn’t enjoy anything anymore. Those few months were the absolute worst of my life. But I hung on, found a part-time retail job and made sure I got a co-op job next semester. I started that job in 2015, thinking everything will be fine now, but that’s rarely the case with mental illness.
I was still so busy in just getting through the day that I didn’t realize how loud it had become in my head, and how unequipped I was in dealing with this noise because up until now all I knew how to do was to shut it up. These self-deprecating feelings were just getting louder day by day. It was almost like there two different voices in my head saying completely different things. One voice was the rationalist, the grown-up one, telling me that everything was going to be okay. That I am not defined by my weight and my scars and that I should start accepting myself. The second voice was the ‘dark’ voice, always telling me how I won’t measure up to anything, how I’ll always just exist, and how I don’t deserve anything. These two voices were constantly at war with each other and the second voice always won. I lost out on so many adventures, so many experiences and so many memories because this ‘dark’ voice overshadowed everything. This voice convinced me that the dark room was where I belonged now. It didn’t matter how much I banged on the door, how much I screamed for help, I would never get out.
In the summer of 2015, I came back to India for a visit after two years and this was when I was diagnosed. I started getting therapy right after but I had to stop it once I went back to Canada. I started therapy again in 2017. When anything happens in our life, we might forget specific details but we will never forget how a situation made us feel. I forgot specific incidents of bullying, of the pain, the crying but the feelings associated with all those incidences was always there. Going to therapy for the past year and a half has really helped me identify my behaviors, get in touch with feelings I had tried so hard to suppress and reflect on them. For the first time, I had the time and space to really look at the events of my life as an outsider and try to figure out where and why everything started going wrong. I was able to recognize the vicious cycle I was stuck in and take the necessary steps to try and break it. Slowly, I am learning to accept that I am not just defined by my weight, that the development of my skin condition was not in my control and wasn’t my fault and that in spite of everything, I deserve love. I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it without the constant support of my best friend and my family. I will forever be indebted to them for the patience and love they have shown me.
I completed my undergraduate program with honors last year and then worked for 8 months. Once my contract was up, I decided to take a break and focus on the issues regarding my skin condition. I have been in New Delhi since April of this year, getting treatment. Therapy has been mentally exhausting, hard and painful sometimes but now I truly believe that someday, this girl might finally get out of that dark room and never look back.
