I've Never Been (Un) Happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

  Behind me everyone ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ at the cuteness and perfection of this new, Shaheen-less picture. The chorus continued and soon the excited team had whisked my sisters away to a location that better suited their overall adorableness. As they walked away, I wondered if I’d somehow learned to make myself invisible without realizing it. As the minutes wore on it became clear my role in this photoshoot was over, and I spent the rest of my time idly wandering around the bungalow, playing with the dogs and fighting off tears. A few months later those pictures of Alia and Pooja made it into the magazine. There was no mention of me.

  As an adult, I can appreciate that experience for what it was: no one present there intended to hurt my feelings, and they were simply responding to a likeness that was right in front of them. As a child, however, all I took away was that I wasn’t good enough to be in those photographs. When I went home and looked in the mirror all I saw was a chubby, awkward girl who would never be as beautiful as her older sister or as cute as her younger one. Even at that young age I was already prone to spells of insecurity when I compared myself to Alia. She seemed to flourish with a lot more ease than I did and it made me wonder if I lacked in qualities I should have possessed—and this experience gave my insecurity a whole new dimension. It was also the first time I realized I could be singled out for something I couldn’t control—the way I looked, and later, perhaps, the way I felt. It was here, at the age of twelve, that I first began to equate weight with beauty and it was around that time that I first began to peg my self-worth on my physical appearance and compare myself to those around me.

  Even today, almost two decades later, looking at those photographs makes me self-conscious and uneasy.

  After that disorienting little adventure I decided to take charge of the only aspect of my appearance I had control over: my weight. I became fixated on it. I was already being teased about my weight in school—boys would ask me if I was a bodybuilder because I had a tendency to gain weight on my arms—and I attributed my newfound realizations of distress to this particular, and somewhat physical, wrinkle in my life. Believing that my appearance was the sole cause of all this uneasiness, I began to deprive myself of food to lose weight. I gave my snacks away to friends at school, secretly threw food away at home and went to bed with an empty stomach almost every night. I didn’t realize it then, but I had unwittingly kick-started an adverse relationship with food that persists to this day. For months I endlessly obsessed over how I looked, and spent hours crying because I felt ugly and clumsy around other girls my age.

  In a short while I managed to lose most of the weight I had gained over the past year and by the time my thirteenth birthday rolled around I had earned the nickname ‘sparrow’ at school for my sparse eating habits. Finally, my weight was no longer the source of unrest it had been in the months before.

  Strangely though, losing weight did nothing to alleviate the feelings of unease I had been struggling with, and contrary to what I thought would happen, the situation only nosedived further. The feelings of sadness and discomfort intensified and I spent nearly every single day constantly on the verge of tears.

  I had fixed what I believed to be the problem, but somehow here I was, worse off than when I’d started—unsure and unhappy with the Feeling stubbornly looming over my shoulders.

  It’s three hours later, and I’m still staring at the ceiling.

  It’s dark outside now. I know because the shadows on my ceiling have changed shape. The clock has long been ripped from its home on the wall, and it lies face down on the desk with its batteries taken out. Its ceaseless ticking had been driving me further into the arms of madness. I don’t need to be reminded of how much time is passing me by, of how much time I’m losing. I feel like I’ve lost years of my life like this, holed up alone in the darkness. While other people live, I languish within these four walls with all ambition and drive sucked violently out of me. And for what? Most of the time I don’t even know. To quote Jonathan Safran Foer from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, ‘Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.’

  There is almost never an actual reason for this pain, almost never a concrete, upsetting thought that causes my tears. On the occasion I can say there is, I feel a strange sense of gratitude and relief. I feel lucky on days I actually know why I’m sad. There is deep satisfaction in being able to trace the genesis of a feeling, especially a negative one. When you can identify the source of your sadness, you walk into the feeling armed with an understanding of and familiarity with yourself. Robbed of such cognisance, it’s like you’re locked out of your own mind—cast out and isolated by even yourself. The rest of the time the anguish is insufferably faceless; a fire that started with no spark. Most days there aren’t even tears. On days like that I walk around with a persistent lump in my throat, trying desperately to break through the undetectable veil that seems to keep me separated from the rest of the world, from life.

  It still amazes me how well camouflaged it is, this internal maelstrom I’m caught up in. More often than not no one can tell there’s anything wrong. Sometimes I wonder if I built and moulded my entire personality in a way that would better help conceal my worst days. I wonder if over time I purposefully grew quiet so people wouldn’t notice when I inevitably stopped talking. I wonder if I carefully constructed the reputation of a recluse so they wouldn’t be surprised when I disappeared for months on end.

  In an instant I’m filled to the brim with familiar self-loathing. Every insecurity I’ve had as a child and teenager comes roaring back. I hate everything about myself; I hate everything that I am because I am none of the things I should be. I am not kind, intelligent, attractive or interesting. I am even devoid of gratitude from the moral high ground—I’ve had a near-perfect life bestowed upon me and rather than being thankful, I am tormented.

  It’s now, in moments like these that I so desperately believe that I’m not supposed to be here, that I was never meant to be born. I know that I don’t belong on this planet, because if I did, I would know how to be here. I would know how to be human. I feel like a lost and confused child who is being forced to steer her way through a very adult world. I often wonder if this is what it’s going to feel like forever, if I will always see life through this veil of despair, because if this is life, then I don’t want it.

  My stomach rumbles. I haven’t eaten all day, which is highly unusual in the circumstances, food still being my primary form of escapism and self-destruction. It’s pretty easy to tell when my mental state is hanging by a thread—just follow the trail of food. I’ve gained five kilos over the last four months. Things are not as they should be, and my jeans agree.

  Teenage Dirtbag

  It began slowly—the odd low mood, an occasional barrage of intrusive negative thoughts, a flurry of unexplained tears—but what started out as a flickering flame at a young age was soon a raging wildfire in my teens.

  Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen the true onset of my depression collided headlong with a particularly potent dose of teenage angst and it turned my world upside down. I had never experienced pain and sadness of such magnitude before, and I had no reference point for it.

  All that uncertainty and unease, that mild discomfort, compounded into an all-encompassing sadness, and my still childlike mind struggled to piece it together.

  With this expansive sadness came a predicament, a predicament that made the sadness even harder to shake or ignore. The predicament was this: Sometimes, the sadness didn’t feel like sadness at all: it felt like enlightenment.

  It felt as though the universe had sighed and unburdened itself of a monumental truth, the weight of which fell squarely on my shoulders. It felt as though I was let in on a secret that no one else knew but me—life is suffering, and there is no point to anything. It was not just that I was lonely. It was that everyone was lonely. It was the sudden realization that I was surrounded by pain, and it was not just my own.


  ‘God, but life is loneliness,’ said Sylvia Plath in her journal. ‘Despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship—but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.’ Suddenly, I was aware of the loneliness of the human condition and there was no unseeing it. I was envious of everyone around me because they seemed blissfully unaware of the world’s worst, most inescapable fact: that ultimately, we’re all alone and that we’re all going to die.

  It was an awareness so profound and life-altering that it coloured every experience I had from thereon. Everything began to feel pointless and insignificant—even my own feelings. I was consumed with pain but it didn’t matter. Faced with the prospect of my own inevitable annihilation and the annihilation of everyone around me, every emotion I had felt purposeless and irrelevant. What was the point of all this suffering if it didn’t actually lead me anywhere? What good is a fleeting life filled with never-ending misery? I soon found myself overcome with an exhaustion so intense that simple everyday tasks became impossible.

  I remember standing in front of the bathroom mirror, with my hand hanging limply by my side, fingers wrapped loosely around my toothbrush. I stood there, staring blankly at my own reflection, quietly willing myself to just raise my hand to my mouth and brush my teeth. Not jog 5 km, not hike up a hill, not swim across a river—just brush my teeth, just do something I had done every single day for as long as I could remember.

  But, I couldn’t. I stood there, as a bit of toothpaste slid off the toothbrush and onto the floor. Plop. I couldn’t. I was so tired, so overcome with fatigue that my arms felt like lead. ‘What’s the point? How does it matter if you brush your teeth or not? How does it matter if you get dressed and go outside? How does it matter if you stay put in front of this mirror for the rest of the day? It doesn’t matter.’ And so, I stood there unmoving for twenty minutes until I eventually sank to the floor in exhaustion. Then the whole new war to get up and leave the bathroom began.

  Like all teenagers I was also prone to yo-yo-ing moods and fits of irrationality, but even then I was acutely aware of the fact that I was having a harder time of it than most people my age. I was crumbling under the weight of self-created expectation. I was never good enough. I continued to do badly at school no matter how hard I tried and sincerely went on to believe I wasn’t ‘smart’ enough. I lived in constant fear of failing all my exams and having to repeat a year while all my friends got promoted and forgot about me. I compared myself to everyone—from my best friend, who was always top of our class, to my little sister, almost six years younger to me, who was rocking the fifth standard better than I ever did. I felt like a failure.

  I spent hours staring out of the window, silently wrestling with mounting feelings of hollowness and futility. The only phrase I can conjure up to describe my emotional state during that time is strangely contradictory—I was experiencing a sort of ‘hysterical numbness’.

  It was like being both dead and alive all at once. It was like a part of me had died and could no longer feel—it could no longer be moved by sight and sound and experience; it could no longer see the value of existing in a living, breathing world.

  And it was like another small, immobile part of me was cruelly left alive, condemned to live trapped within the confines of my own unfeeling mind, trapped with the dead part of me, trapped with rot and decay, slowly being poisoned to death. I looked at the world around me and felt an urgent need to escape, to stop. Anything to put an end to this bizarre dance of feeling and not feeling.

  The weeks and months I spent doing battle with the Feeling and staving off the belief that I had no real reason to live began to take a higher toll on me. I retreated further and further into myself. My personality had already undergone a considerable amount of change and, as my teenage insecurities grew, I transformed even more.

  Two years ago, while Alia and I were in the process of packing up our lives and moving into our own house, I stumbled upon a gold mine—a dusty case of old home movies. Within minutes we were in front of the TV laughing and hooting at the antics of our tiny selves. A seven-year-old me burst into frame, dancing and performing for the camera with, frankly, far too much enthusiasm. ‘Darling, do you really have to be in every single shot? We can’t see anyone else,’ came my mother’s patient but weary voice from somewhere off-screen, as I suddenly jumped up in front of the camera, waving at it with a gap-toothed grin and eclipsing everything (i.e., Alia) behind me for the eleventh time in a row.

  Present-day Alia turned to look incredulously at present-day me.

  ‘Oh my God! Is this really you?’ she said. ‘I forgot you used to be like this. What happened to you?’

  As I watched the unencumbered, unbridled joy of my younger self, my smile faded and my amusement gave way to a deep, enveloping sadness.

  What did happen to me? I’ve been this timid version of myself for so long now that I’ve forgotten I was ever anything else. I’ve forgotten that I once used to be free.

  My last year at school was full of the emotional turbulences one could expect in those circumstances.

  But in my case, I was on one hand being buffeted and tossed around on my troubled inner waters, struggling with ideas of life, death and purpose, and on the other hand I was running as fast as I could, trying to win an external, educational race full of grades, numbers and rankings. I felt nothing but confused and inept.

  It was when I was sixteen years old and had somehow, against all odds, made my way into college (my mother cried with joy when I got 73 per cent in my tenth standard board exams, that’s how precarious things were) that one of the most damaging elements of my depression—insomnia—made itself known to me for the first time. When you’re in the throes of what feels like all-consuming pain, sleep is respite. It’s your last refuge from the unrelenting guerrilla attacks carried out against you by your own mind—and here I was, unable to sleep.

  Let’s get technical for a minute. Very often, insomnia (the inability to fall asleep or stay asleep) and depression go hand in hand, and a disruption of sleep patterns is one of depression’s most common symptoms. This disruption doesn’t just mean a lack of sleep though; for some people, it can mean sleeping excessively. If it seems odd or surprising to you that a single illness can cause two such contradictory symptoms you’ve stumbled upon one of the many reasons depression is so complicated to diagnose. Just as there are numerous causes for depression, there are innumerable ways in which it manifests, and some depressives may even experience a yo-yo of sleeping patterns in which they sleep too little on one night and then too much on the next.

  While a lack of sleep doesn’t always cause depression, there is definitely a link between the two. Sleep is a restorative process, and the human body uses the time in deep slumber to repair itself and carry out functions essential to both our physical and mental well-being. The metabolic waste that we accumulate during waking hours is eliminated during sleep and studies have shown that sleep deprivation impairs everything, from our ability to heal wounds and make memories to the functioning of our immune system. But sleep is still most important for the brain. While our bodies are able to carry out a lot of these healing processes even when awake, our brains aren’t, and without enough sleep, our cognitive function becomes severely hampered. Sleep deprivation also diminishes the production of melatonin and serotonin, neurotransmitters that, among other things, help regulate our moods.

  The diagnosis of a person suffering from the vicious cycle of both insomnia and depression causes a classic chicken-and-egg problem. After long enough it becomes near impossible to determine whether it’s insomnia that’s causing the depression or the depression that’s causing insomnia.*

  At the beginning I would toss and turn, wrestling with every negative thought I had while willing myself to fall asleep, though never succeeding. I’d get into bed at night, l
ie there wide-eyed, exhausted and stirring until morning and then get dressed and leave for college, often subsisting on no more than an hour of sleep each night. This pattern would repeat itself for days, leaving me disoriented, unable to function and almost always sobbing with fatigue. When my mind and body finally crumbled beneath the weight of sleeplessness, I’d drift into fitful, nightmare-ridden sleep, which I sometimes found even less preferable to no sleep at all. Nighttime soon became my personal hell, and I’d be consumed with dread as soon as the sun would set.

  My quest for a good night’s sleep has been one of my most long-fought battles and it was only with the help of medication that I ever felt like I was winning and by the time I was in my late teens I had already become overly dependent on sleep medications and sedatives, without which I couldn’t sleep at all.

  I eventually gave up trying to sleep on these difficult nights and spent my time finding creative ways to be self-destructive instead. I discovered alcohol when I was sixteen years old. I discovered it like most teenagers do, with friends, and like most of the lot, we spent an inordinate amount of time chasing its highs. I loved how alcohol made me feel. It was an instant tranquillizer, making me blissfully numb to the flood of bad feelings I was otherwise unable to contain. I soon discovered that if I drank enough, I could impose on myself the lack of consciousness I so desperately craved.

  Binge drinking wasn’t a big deal when I was a teenager because everyone else my age was doing it too. We all got carried away with the newfound freedom of college under the illusion of finally being adults. All sleepovers at friends’ homes involved stealing alcohol from the bars of their slumbering, blissfully oblivious parents. All socializing came with the pursuit of alcohol and getting into clubs.

  But the numbing effects of alcohol didn’t last long—the more I drank, the less it helped, and ultimately it began to exacerbate my pain instead of dulling it. I have an oddly (odd because of the sheer amount I had had to drink that night) vivid memory from when I was seventeen years old and I got into a rather serious spot of trouble with my mother for coming home drunk one evening. I had stumbled home, quite obviously trashed, way past my ten o’clock curfew after an evening involving one too many beers with my friends. Now, the average Indian mother, as any Indian child knows only too well, possesses the well-honed ability to provoke nightmares with no more than a deliberate narrowing of the eyes. They’re terrifying enough on a normal day when the full extent of your wrongdoings are things like talking on the phone three minutes past your bedtime or having to explain why and how you’ve already run out of your weekly allowance on Thursday. So, you can imagine that in the event that you do something that doesn’t just violate totally arbitrary (yeah that’s right, Mom) mom laws but is actually dangerous and bad for you, that ability to induce terror takes on an entirely new dimension. Suffice to say, what was awaiting me when I got home was . . . not pretty.