I've Never Been (Un) Happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

  The resulting blowout involved all the usual things you would expect in a situation like this. There was, understandably, a lot of screaming, a lot of tears, a fair number of threats and a rather sizeable loss of future freedoms and liberty. But, for the first time on my part, there was also a brief moment of complete honesty. In my less inhibited, liquored-up state, as my mother yelled at me, the words that I still remember so clearly, came bursting out of me before I could stop them.

  ‘Mama, I feel so empty. Why do I feel so empty?’ And that was it. I spent the next hour heaving with drunken sobs with my head on my mother’s lap, repeating the same words back to her every five minutes as she gently and worriedly stroked my head to calm me down. The next day, she was obviously intent on discussing my mini-meltdown from the night before but, now that the tongue-loosening effects of alcohol had worn off, I was back to being my tight-lipped, evasive self. I somehow managed to talk my way out of discussing what I had said in great detail, and succeeded in assuring her that I was fine and that I was overstating how I felt because of the alcohol and thankfully, she let it go.

  It was only when I was in my twenties and the novelty of alcohol had all but worn off that I realized I used alcohol as a crutch during depressive episodes. I wasn’t an alcoholic; I could stop drinking for months at a time when I chose to, but I had my alcoholic father’s genes, and every time my mood plummeted my abuse of alcohol soared.

  In the times I drank to escape, I did it to hide from my feelings because it was too agonizing to confront them.

  It took me years to learn that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t outrun my feelings and the antidote to them definitely wasn’t at the bottom of a bottle. Even today, drinking and partying requires constant self-restraint and is no longer an option when my mood is low.

  Depression and substance abuse form a cycle according to Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon and a long-time sufferer of depression, who you will find me quote a lot throughout this book. People who are depressed abuse substances in an attempt to free themselves of depression, and in doing so damage their lives to the extent that they become further depressed by the wear-and-tear their abusive behaviour causes.

  I’ve found that for me this abuse isn’t restricted to substances like alcohol alone. I’m an emotional eater and my relationship with food, much like my relationship with myself, is a troubled one. It is said that most addictive behaviours are caused by underlying mental and emotional issues. When you’re depressed or anxious you’re desperate to feel good, or at the very least desperate to feel less bad. In order to avoid feelings of stress and sadness we turn to not-so-great things that will help us feel better; things like alcohol, unhealthy food and binge-watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

  My relationship with food and my body soured at the onset of my depression when I was eleven years old and it never quite recovered.

  For most young girls, insecurities and self-esteem issues caused by poor or problematic body image are inevitable and form a part of growing up and learning how to be comfortable in your own skin. At a young age I formed lasting mental and emotional associations between my weight and the idea of happiness and it’s something I’m certain a lot of us do.

  Since that time, my weight has fluctuated wildly, unhealthily, and almost yearly. Just like with alcohol, when my mood plummets, the amount of food on my plate skyrockets. I eat without love or enjoyment, and I eat compulsively. For over fifteen years I have oscillated between bouts of binge eating and deprivation and I honestly can’t remember the last time I ate normally.

  Writing the first version of this book took a heavy toll on me. The process involved venturing back into emotional pits I had long clambered out of and once there, I stayed. Unsurprisingly, I fell back on some well-tested, destructive coping mechanisms and in the six months it took me to write the book I gained over ten kilos.

  This has been the story of most of my life. When I’m free of the Feeling, my self-image is positive and I’m able to nurture myself and keep myself healthy. But when the Feeling is present, it is swiftly followed by an overwhelming narrative of futility which obscures all good judgement, leaving me unable to look after myself.

  And so, when I was younger, my weight and the way I looked was a constant source of medical and cosmetic concern and a fairly accurate gauge of how I was doing emotionally.

  My worried parents had long realized that something was wrong with me in those teenage years, even though, like me, they didn’t quite know what the problem was. I had slowly walled myself off to greater and greater degrees until there came a point where I would no longer leave my room. What eventually emerged was more surly panda—I had dark circles down to my toes—than secretive teenager. My mother was disturbed by how much of a misanthropic loner I was growing to be and she, like me, was reaching a breaking point. About five times a day she would come hammering on my door yelling at me to leave my bedroom while I either yelled back or ignored her entirely. To her mind I was simply a lazy, detached, rude teenager. I could hardly blame her for feeling that way because many times I wondered if I was those things too. I wondered if I was just spoiled and unambitious, content with living out my life within the four walls of my bedroom because I didn’t want to make an effort. By this point my education had more or less come to a standstill. I had chosen to attend college in Bombay over a prestigious IB school outside the city because the anxiety of leaving home was more than I could bear.

  Lost in an overcrowded system where most students were faceless and there was no real accountability, I barely attended classes and spent all my time holed up at home or out with my friends. Often, I would leave the house, make the effort to travel the one-hour distance to college but then change my mind at the last minute and not attend lectures after all. After the academic struggle that was the end of my school life, I became indifferent towards my continued education. It was too much work and I was quite certain that I would never pursue a career that required a degree, so I just gave up.

  Teenagers are incredibly innovative when it comes to hiding things from their parents, and they’re also frighteningly good at it. No matter how well you think you know your teenage child, or their various exploits, trust me, what you know is only the tip of the iceberg. I was blessed with open-minded and liberal parents and I rarely had cause to lie to them. As a result, they were more aware of my escapades than most of my friends’ parents were of their children. Despite their understanding and my mother’s hawk-like attention to my life, I had managed to carefully hide away a whole distorted inner world that I didn’t allow them access to. This left them with no other option but to discipline my wayward ways as best they could, and while it did keep me out of trouble, they were unable to figure out the driving force behind this quiet rebellion, concealed as it was.

  Truly, I was ashamed and afraid of how I felt. I hadn’t yet come to terms with my feelings and to tell my parents about them would be to admit they were real and I was too weak to deal with them on my own. It took a much darker phase in my life for me to finally admit that I needed help.

  If someone were standing outside my bedroom right now with their ear pressed against the door they would mostly hear the hum of silence.

  But, if they were the sort of person who really enjoyed standing around outside people’s bedroom doors listening for noises and they hung around long enough, every few minutes they might hear something like:

  ‘Ugh, shut up’ or ‘Stop it, just stop it’ or ‘La la la la la la I can’t hear you’.

  Upon hearing this they might infer that I’m having a distressingly childish argument with someone on the telephone, but they would be wrong.

  In actuality, what I’m doing is lying flat in bed surfing the Internet with my laptop on my chest, yelling at myself every few minutes for no apparent reason.

  Depression, when combined with a good broadband connection allows for a lot of time to learn things, I’ll admit. In the past hour I’ve learned a great de
al about penguins, the commonness of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, Sjogren’s Syndrome, Spontaneous Human Combustion, the fall of Pompeii, super-volcanoes and the Greek origins of common English words. Did you know the word ‘telephone’ comes from the Greek words for sound (phon) and far away (tele)? You didn’t? Well, now you do.

  I’ve also been reading a lot about shame.

  You know shame . . . it’s that thing that makes you feel like your brain is suddenly dissolving, melting through the base of your skull and emptying out into your stomach, collecting in a lead-like ball at the bottom of your abdomen that threatens to pull you deep down into the ground, but no matter how far down it pulls you, it won’t be enough because nothing, not even being vapourized by the earth’s molten outer core, is enough to help you forget and escape the intense, all-consuming humiliation and embarrassment of simply being you.

  That shame.

  I’ve received many explanations and theories for why I suffer from the crippling and intense feelings of shame that I experience almost every other day during a steady month and every other second during a not-so-steady month. Anxiety, melodrama, overthinking, low self-esteem, bad upbringing, masochism, narcissism, fatalism, being human: these are just some of the theories that have been so helpfully proposed.

  I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if these feelings of shame are the crux of depression or if they’re just one small facet of the disorder.

  I don’t know whether it’s depression that causes shame or whether people who experience more shame are more susceptible to depression. What I do know that somehow most people who live with depression, live with some sort of shame.

  Whether it’s shame about who you are: I’m not good enough, smart enough, successful enough, pretty enough, thin enough.

  Shame about what depression has turned you into: I’m not productive enough, reliable enough, happy enough.

  Shame about being depressed at all: I’m not normal enough.

  Shame about not being able to control all these disturbing thoughts: I’m not enough.

  Convincing you that you’re a vile, loathsome creature not worthy of the existence that has been bestowed upon you—that’s one of depression’s many specialties.

  For me, even a feeling as common as embarrassment is usually enough to send me into an immobilizing shame spiral. I’ve always had high levels of social anxiety (also an offshoot of shame) and I’ve always been incredibly awkward in social situations. People I’m unfamiliar with make me nervous. I either make too much eye contact or too little, I find even regular small talk challenging, I say all the wrong things, become cripplingly self-conscious and basically just freeze. The pressure to be ‘cool’ and unruffled is always infinitely higher in situations where you don’t know people very well, and there’s nothing quite as uncool as someone trying really hard to be cool.

  Sure, saying something stupid to someone at a party a long time ago may not seem monumental enough to cause the sort of crippling low-level shame (also known as ‘OhMyGodWhatIsWRONGWithME’ syndrome) that makes you wish you were dead, but like I said, this is one of depression’s specialties. It takes a should-be-simple and common enough feeling like embarrassment then shakes it, blends it and churns it until it goes deeper than the simple act of doing or saying something stupid.

  You’ve said something stupid because you are stupid.

  You’re worthless. You don’t know how to behave normally or talk to people.

  You’re fat, you’re ugly, you’re not even good at your job.

  And, everyone sees it. They look at you and think you’re an idiotic waste of space.

  They laugh at you behind your back. Just like you’ve always suspected.

  You’re useless and broken and can’t be fixed.

  You should do the world a favour and just disappear.

  That. That’s shame.

  Embarrassment while similar to shame, is still very different. Embarrassment is situational and occurs when the image you want to project to the world takes a hit and there are spectators.

  Like when you’re doing your cool walk and someone sees you trip over your own foot. That’s embarrassing.

  Shame, on the other hand, is the all-pervasive feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with who you are. It’s what makes you want to hide. It’s what makes you want to isolate yourself, to vanish from the world so that no one will notice all the horrible things about you that you know to be true.

  Shame and guilt are not the same either. Guilt can often be a positive emotion that helps you alter your behaviour—if you believe you have behaved badly—and it pushes you to behave more morally in the future.

  Guilt is all about making amends while shame is about hiding, isolating and escaping.

  You experience guilt when you do something bad. You experience shame when you believe you are bad. There’s nothing more toxic or more distressing than believing that the problem, the root cause of everything wrong with your life and everything you are, is you. What do you even do with that? How do you fix who you are?

  In a bid to postpone having to come up with an answer to that rather terrifying question I decided to do a little digging and understand the destructive emotion traipsing around in my head. I learned a lot, and of the things I learned, here’s what I found particularly interesting about shame: it’s a social emotion. As it turns out, the entire purpose of shame and the reason it exists at all, is to control and regulate human behaviour. In the two-hundred-thousand odd years that we’ve been around, human beings have essentially evolved as pack animals who both lived and hunted in large groups. In order for these large packs to flourish and succeed, they needed to all work together for food and protection. Strong social relationships were not only critical to the survival of the group at large but also pertinent to the individual, who relied on these relationships, to sustain oneself.

  ‘In this world, your life depended on others valuing you enough to give you and your children food, protection, and care. The more you are valued by the individuals with whom you live—as a cooperative partner, potential mate, skilled hunter, formidable ally, trustworthy friend, helpful relative, dangerous enemy—the more weight they will put on your welfare in making decisions. You will be helped more and harmed less,’ says John Tooby, a professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara.

  We may not be hunter-gatherers any more, but human beings have banded together on a scale like no other species before us. Through the use of language and emotion, seven billion of us, spread all across the globe, have learned to work towards one common goal—the progress and evolution of the human race. This gargantuan feat would not be possible without somehow being able to keep individual behaviour in check on a large scale to ensure everyone is following a prescribed and beneficial path, and that’s where shame comes in.

  Biologically and historically speaking, the function of shame is to prevent you from exhibiting behaviour that is perceived as wrong or dangerous by the group at large—behaviour that could cause setbacks to all this progress we have made or put the survival of the pack in jeopardy. It also exists to keep your social relationships intact by ensuring you don’t damage them with harmful behaviour—all to give you the highest chance at survival. Essentially, shame causes you psychological pain so that you can see mistakes that you’re making and correct yourself.

  Correct yourself. As you can see shame functions on the principle that both you and your behaviour are fundamentally incorrect. While shame does serve a function, (it’s also what prevents people from causing each other grievous harm) there is a point at which shame becomes toxic. Certainly, most people dealing with mood or anxiety disorders seem to have an overdeveloped ability to feel shame.

  It’s fascinating to me how depression both fuels shame and feeds off of it. Like with the other existential facets of depression, it’s a mystifying chicken-and-egg situation. What came first, the shame or the depression?

  I have had intense feelings of shame sin
ce I was a teenager, and it’s only recently that I was able to identify all the horrible voices in my head as the toxic voices of shame.

  That humiliating moment at the photoshoot in my childhood triggered an explosion of shame that centred around my appearance. Since that moment I have spent my entire life trying to ‘fix’ the way I look. That shame is what has often been the reason I’ve had more to fix than I otherwise would have. The more shame I felt about my appearance, the more I ate to feel better and the worse my circumstances became.

  Depression and the lethargy it caused robbed me of my will and ability to be productive or feel like I was contributing to society, and that in turn led to deep feelings of shame about my value as a person. From there on I have lived through a vicious cycle of shame and painful, hurtful feelings, one feeding off the other in an endless loop.

  For the past hour, every humiliating, shame-inducing moment in my life has been having a leisurely walkabout through my mind. For the past hour, I’ve tried to occupy my mind as best I can in a bid to prevent myself from jumping out of the window, hence the gathering of useless but oddly fitting scraps of information—like, the ‘mare’ part of the word nightmare comes from Germanic folklore where ‘mare’ is an evil female spirit or goblin that sits upon a sleeping person’s chest, suffocating them and/or giving them bad dreams.