When I get to the bottom, I go back to the top

Resilience has been my forte. I always thought of it as one of my strengths, given that I rise after every fall, pick up all the broken pieces and start afresh, every single time. Except that now I’m drained out. Exhausted. I have been doing this for way too long, and now I want life to be easy.

I’m a bit worried about my erratic mood swings – nope, I’m not PMS-ing, and I’m not pregnant. I used to be very good at hiding my emotions, but these days, I just give in, and let them overwhelm me. I seem to have lost my grip over my feelings – love, hate, stress, happiness, sadness, anxiety, panic, regret, spite, envy, confidence, confusion, optimism –  they all seem to collide at once, resulting in a giant muddled mess of nameless emotions that are difficult to read and make sense of. How did I let this happen to me? Is it depression, anxiety or am I just having a crappy day? I can’t tell anymore.

There’s no word for ‘depression’ or ‘anxiety’ in my mother tongue, Tamil. You could use the word ‘Manachorvu’ (lethargy) but it doesn’t do justice; ‘So-gam’ is sadness, and we know that depression and feeling sad are two different things. Which is why, where I come from, people do not understand depression, it’s not in our vocabulary. Depression is always considered a Western illness, something that affects rich white people; it’s an alien concept, much like Scandinavian cuisine in my hometown in coastal Tamil Nadu. Nobody would know what it is, but when they eat the food, they’ll tell you it’s just a fancy, overpriced version of the local fish curry. It’s a weird allegory, but I’m being lazy and hoping you get the drift.

So I stopped trying to talk to my folks about it; they’d simply tell me that everyone goes through a roller coaster of emotions, everyone has regrets, we all go through tough times, we feel sad, upset, angry. It’s normal. There’s no one to blame, you toss it and move on, it’s all behind you now. Which is great advice. But it’s not what I want to hear. And therein lies the problem. Because I want people to tell me what I want to hear. I think somewhere down the line, we have twisted what is simple and natural into something overly complicated.

I don’t even know if I’m depressed or anxious, so I’m fully aware that sometimes, I’m probably reading too much into my emotions and moods. The deeper I dig, the more I find that there is no reason for me to be sad at all. However, this Eureka moment happens only after I bring the roof down, burn some bridges and let the storm clouds pass. So the damage has already been done by the time realisation dawns.

The point is, I cannot use depression as an excuse for inactivity, I cannot blame anxiety for losing my cool. For instance, I haven’t gone on my evening walks for more than a week now; it’s something I look forward to, yet I have chosen to sulk at home instead of heading out. You could argue that depression makes even doing things you love difficult, so it’s all right. But no, I call it laziness. It’s stupid to not go out for an evening walk because you are busy crying over your perfectly normal life, when you know fully well that a walk in the park makes you happy. How twisted is that? I am willingly putting myself into misery, stopping myself from feeling better, and then I convince myself that it’s because I am depressed. It strikes me as odd.

M tells me to engage myself and I go livid. I tell him, you think I’m not trying? do you know how difficult it is? And so forth. After he talks to me and leaves for the day, I put on some music, I write, I cook, talk to friends, and surprise! I feel better. M’s simple advice helps me get through the day. I’m drama queen when I’m with him and the poor thing puts up with all my crap. So I tell myself that I must be happy and more stable, for his sake at least. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But I just keep on trying, falling, rising and making a new start every single day.

Let’s talk about depression

I have been treating my blog like my private diary. Yes, I do realise that; and I’m glad that all this blogging has been therapeutic in a sense. It’s always nice to share a bit of your life with the world ( read: 5 strangers who skim through my blog) and at the same time, not worry about writing a great copy or a gripping lede.

I’m thinking about depression today, because it’s suddenly in the spotlight. Deepika Padukone, the Indian actress, spoke about it in a show; the Germanwings co-pilot was supposedly going through depression; someone my sister knew killed himself because he was depressed. It’s almost an epidemic now. And it is by all means a disease that must be addressed just like say, cancer. Yet, thanks to the stigma associated with this condition, in India at least, there is hardly any support system in place for people going through depression.

Another reason why this resonates with me is that I spent the best years of my life feeling depressed, lonely and suicidal. What made it a nightmare was the fact that I had zero support. My family was least bothered – in fact, it annoyed the hell out of them and they’d keep asking me to snap out of it. Which is ridiculous. With my friends, and at college and later at work, I would try to be as normal as possible, pretend that everything was cool. I’d even make jokes about my situation just in case they thought I was not okay.

I remember feeling powerless, hopeless, bitter, cynical but I never let it affect my work. Instead, the office became my refuge; immersing myself in work was my way of shielding suicidal thoughts. It also helped that I loved my job, and was having fun with my colleagues and friends. I was trying to distract myself constantly and I have had terrible breakdowns on many occasions and spent nights wide awake, crying and struggling to sleep.

I was afraid that I’d be ostracised if I was vocal about my depression. What if my friends stopped talking to me? What if I lost my job? So I did what my family trained me to do over the years – keep your thoughts to yourself, suppress your emotions and always, smile, be nice. Because we don’t want your neighbours or your relatives talking about you in a bad way, right? Abs0frikkinlutely. Can’t argue with that now, can we.

Anyway, for the next four years, I put my bravest face on. It was a facade, but I had to do that to survive and stop myself from becoming a complete wreck. There were days when I’d just go to the terrace of my apartment and wonder what’d it be like to jump; or walk really further into the sea in the hope that the waves would eventually take me.

But thankfully, better sense prevailed. I went to a psychologist on the sly because my parents were against the idea of me visiting a ‘pythiakara (mental) doctor’. I had a couple of sessions, and though it did not change my life, it made me believe that I’m a normal person and not a weirdo like my family thought I was. I got my family to meet the pyschologist later, and there was some drama what with the subject being my then boyfriend (M, whom I’m now married to) of more than four years whom my folks were refusing to meet, for whatever reason.

Things did work out eventually. Not because my parents changed their mind – they never did, and I doubt they are 100% okay with it now – but because I made a conscious choice to leave behind all that trauma and start a new life with the one person who was there for me, every single time.

Even then, my depression did not just vanish magically. After moving in with M too, there were days when I’d wake up crying, or break down in the middle of a conversation. I was trying my best to deal with my past, and failing, many times. It took months of resolve to consciously feel positive or at least fake it till it became a habit. It took months of reading articles and books on positivity and happiness, and trying to incorporate some of the practical aspects of it into my everyday life. It took tremendous amount of perseverance and effort to wake up every morning and be grateful for my life, for my struggles, for my past. And focus on myself, on M, on the two of us together.

It was definitely not easy, because depression doesn’t just cure itself. It doesn’t heal with time. And it wasn’t easy to forget all that I’d been through. It wasn’t easy to forgive my parents. I guess, I have come to accept that things couldn’t have been any different – my parents were like that and nothing can change them; I cannot rewrite what already happened. We never spoke about it and I don’t know if we ever will – whenever I made an attempt to discuss my problem, it led to heated arguments and I ended up feeling much worse. But we have sorted out our differences to some extent now and despite the fact that my parents and I were in a bad space then, on hindsight, we loved each other and did not want to see each other be sad.

In a sense, I’m grateful for it now, because it restored my belief in my own self – it gave me the confidence and the resolve to do something I really believed in. But most importantly, the fact that I was in a positive environment with an amazing guy who loved me unconditionally, helped me get over my depression. It was such a refreshing and liberating change in comparison to the environment I was used to until then.

Some people tell me I’m lucky that it worked out, that M was trustworthy, unlike their boyfriends. But no. I was unlucky as shit with life. I just happened to choose well, unlike them. And fight for what I believed in, when the easier option was to chicken out. And luck had very little role to play in it. A lot of my friends are super lucky in that they have extremely supportive families who let them do anything they want – what a privilege that is. I really wish I had that, because it would have made my life so much easier and happier.

A friend of mine is now going through depression. And though we are far away in different countries, I’m trying to be there for her. Thankfully, unlike me, she is vocal about her problem, she has identified it, and she is being treated for it medically. I’m sure she’ll be okay. Because the takeaway from my experience is that, love is the answer. I usually don’t say such things, but honestly, without love, freedom and strength, I wouldn’t have been able to tide over my bad times. And I can’t tell you how incredibly grateful I am for being able to write about all this now without breaking down or losing control of my emotions.