I’ve also been yelling at my own head whenever it throws up a particularly painful memory, hence the seemingly insane, unprovoked bouts of shouting.
Maybe I’m not depressed at all.
Maybe I’m just a shitty person.
Maybe I just hate myself and call it depression.
Maybe this is all my fault.
Maybe I should be ashamed of myself.
Show Me How to Live
Nestled inconspicuously in the back of my first journal (a ruled Navneet long-book that was originally a maths workbook, easily repurposed by tearing out the first five pages) in a messy, inconsistent scrawl, is my first (yes, there would be others) suicide note.
In it, I bid farewell to my best friend. The note contains only the briefest explanation of my state of mind. It seems she already knew enough of how rough a time I’d been having because it didn’t warrant more clarification. The bulk of the note comprises instructions: don’t cry for me, always be happy, and always love boys (sigh, in my feeble defence we were teenagers and boys took up a significant amount of mental processor power at the time. Things are different now.)
(Okay, fine, that’s a lie, things are pretty much the same.)
This is the earliest mention of suicide I can find in my journals, and mortifying contents aside, that note is very solid proof of how far down the emotional rabbit hole I was so early on.
I was fourteen years old.
I was introduced to the notion of suicide in a magazine article that detailed the experiences of a twenty-year-old girl who took her own life, and once the idea had been instilled in me, I fixated on it. Looking back, now I know my preoccupation with the idea came from an irresponsible reportage in which suicide was romanticized. The article suggested that the young girl, whose life had ended tragically and prematurely, was now free. It subtly condoned the act by presenting it alongside a positive idea, when the truth is, suicide is not the path to freedom and liberation, rather the end of all freedom.
At fourteen I lacked even the most basic understanding of the implications and finality of death, and so I was incapable of grasping what it actually meant to even contemplate suicide, let alone go through with it. With my limited understanding of death at that time, I began to see suicide as a route to relief. The pain I was dealing with, while terrible, had not yet scaled the dizzying heights it would in the years to come. At fourteen, suicide was nothing more than an intellectually appealing solution to my emotional problems. It almost seemed like a logical fix—I wouldn’t feel pain if I didn’t exist.
However, my perception of suicide slowly changed as I got older and the effects of depression intensified.
It was November 2004. I had just visited a couple of friends in Mahim and I hopped on to the local train to Virar to make my way back home. It was 3 o’clock in the afternoon and the compartment was all but empty. Even though it was the end of November, it was an unusually muggy day. I stood alone at the entrance of the second-class compartment, staring out, entranced by the train tracks as they flew past me in a blur of rust-red colour.
It was a short journey home and I had only one thought as the train barrelled down its route: to throw myself out of the compartment. I remember the little voice in my head that egged me on. ‘Just jump,’ it said. ‘Jump and it will be over. Jump and you don’t have to go one more second feeling like this.’ I stood there in a daze until suddenly I looked up and saw the sign that read Andheri. In all my suicidal contemplations, I had missed my stop.
With what felt like enormous difficulty, I heaved myself off the train, not onto the tracks as I’d been so convinced I should, but onto the platform, and I made the now slightly longer auto ride home.
It was my sixteenth birthday.
As the pain and hollowness within me mounted it became more and more unbearable and suicide was no longer just an idea, no longer just a potential solution that was waiting to be picked off the shelf. It soon became vital and necessary. No longer a choice but an inevitability.
My notions and understanding of death also changed as I witnessed it more closely and suffered the gut-wrenching consequences of it.
When I was sixteen years old, Alia and I had a caretaker, Sharda, who was like an older sister and friend to us. She had come to live with us shortly before my tenth birthday and as a result was a part of some of the most important and impressionable years of my life. She was a part of our family and she cared for us like we were her own. She knew almost everything about me—what food I liked, what scared me, which boy I had a crush on. We laughed, we fought, we even shared a room.
Sharda died unexpectedly in a road accident one humid August evening. She was twenty-eight.
I will never forget the moment I found out about her death. My father’s words still ring in my head. ‘How do I prepare you for bad news?’ he asked me gravely on the phone. The absurdity of it all sunk in then. ‘I’ll be fine . . . you can tell me,’ I said, trying hard to control my voice from trembling. ‘She’s dead.’ I heard him say, after what felt like eternity. All my senses felt numb, my heart started pounding. I tried to keep my cool until I hung up. ‘I’ll be fine, Papa,’ I said. My voice was quivering. I sat staring into nothingness for five whole minutes before I realized what had just happened. I could feel my entire body rejecting the idea of the truth I had just heard. My head started screaming at me . . . all I could see was her face, all I could hear was her voice. Sounds rushed past my ears making absolutely no sense. I wanted to scream, I wanted to shout . . . I wanted to do so many things. Instead, I just cried.
Going home after the knowledge of what happened was the scariest thing I had to do. I felt blinded with the intensity of the emotions that hit me then. I found it hard to breathe. The idea that she wasn’t coming back the next day seemed bizarre. I opened her cupboard only to find a photograph of her, which was taken merely five months ago. It was at that moment, that very moment when I realized she was never coming back. Not to wake me up in the morning, not to yell at me for leaving my clothes on the floor, not to make sure I ate my dinner.
Stunned by this encounter with the after-effects of death, it was the first time I came face-to-face with the irreversible finality of someone simply ceasing to be. All of a sudden, this person, who was such a huge part of our lives, was gone forever and no amount of bargaining or wishful thinking would ever bring her back. It crushed me. In our family I took the news of her death the hardest.
I plunged further into the far reaches of my depressive hole and by this time (as a result of both the unescapable natural progression of my invisible illness as well as this horrific experience) the romantic and conceptual notions of death and suicide I once had—that it was my one path to salvation—had faded away. To me there was nothing beautiful or romantic about it. I saw it as the irreversible end of being that it was and I witnessed and experienced the insurmountable pain that the living who were left behind were so cruelly condemned to.
I saw death for what it was and I was terrified of it.
And still, in the face of all this learning, understanding and fear, death was all that was left for me.
All my idealistic notions had been replaced with despair, a gut-wrenching feeling that I was left with no other means of escape. I was barely sleeping and no matter how much time I spent doing things I loved or hanging out with my friends and family, I would always come back to the same dark, unrelenting, painful place in my mind. My moods had begun to border on hysteria, and I felt like I was trapped in a life I had no idea how to live. Now in my first year pursuing a bachelor’s degree in literature and psychology, I was attending classes even less frequently than before. Eventually, my college could no longer overlook my lack of attendance and I was understandably asked to leave. I had no option but to continue to pursue my degree through distance learning, but that meant a lot more time at home doing nothing, and a lot more time with my increasingly murky thoughts.
A few years ago, I came across this passage in David Foster Wall
ace’s seminal novel Infinite Jest and nothing sums up my feelings in those days more aptly than this:
[The] ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ . . . not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person . . . will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise . . . Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me . . . The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.
Like Wallace describes I was trapped in my own mind, and while the prospect of death was still terrifying, it wasn’t half as terrifying as the thought of being imprisoned by this pain forever.
It was 2006, and I felt I had finally reached the end of my already frayed tether.
No longer able to grapple with the seemingly unending pain inside me, I swallowed a bunch of Tylenol PM in my bathroom when no one was home, and made a feeble attempt to take my own life. The human body is a wondrous thing and the pills combined with the undiluted, courage-bolstering Vodka I washed my pills down with, made me sick enough to throw up. A few hours, some throwing up and rather a lot of disorientation later, it was like my body, fed up with what my mind had almost cost us both, decided to zap some clarity into me.
The sheer desperation of that moment was like a painfully overdue electric shock. It led me to the understanding that this was no longer something that I could safely keep to myself. I realized that I was dealing with something far beyond my control. It took a moment of staring into the abyss for me to concede and acknowledge that I needed serious help, and faced with the potential irreversibility of my actions, I was finally driven to confess the truth of my inner world to my mother.
Suicide is a notoriously permanent solution to a vacillating problem. As Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon observes, when depressive episodes come, it feels as though they will never leave, but that is rarely ever the case. A person experiencing their first depressive episode is more likely to attempt suicide, while someone who has lived through a few episodes has more or less learned how to cope with them, and more importantly recognized that they eventually end. My previous belief that I could never find respite was the driving force behind my suicidal thoughts and tendencies in my late teens. I hadn’t had the time or—infuriating as this word is to a teenager—experience to ask and answer vital questions about death and suicide that I needed to, but once I did, I was able to see the holes in the reasoning that had led me down the path in the first place.
‘It is impossible to know the consequences of suicide until one has undertaken it,’ says Andrew Solomon. ‘To travel to the other side of death on a return ticket is an attractive idea: I have often wanted to kill myself for a month. One shrinks from the apparent finality of death . . . Consciousness makes us human, and there seems to be general agreement that consciousness as we know it is unlikely to exist beyond death, that the curiosity we would satisfy will not exist by the time it is answered. When I have wished to be dead and wondered what it would be like to be dead, I have also recognized that to be dead would defeat the wondering.’
I’d been morbidly fixated on death and the idea of taking my own life since I was fourteen years old but after that experience, the thought of suicide left me, and it was replaced with an all-consuming terror of death.
The awareness I achieved as a result of my suicidal contemplations—of the inevitability of death and its irrevocable conclusiveness—sent me flying in the other direction so much so now death is always at the back of my mind. Saying this, I wish it were an exaggeration, but it isn’t. I spend the majority of my days actively pushing this fear away so that I can get on with actually living my life. I walk around with a tiny voice in my head, a voice I’ve rather transparently and ham-fistedly named Syl, after Sylvia Plath. Syl is always there to remind me that death is coming for me and everyone around me. Syl lurks in the shadowy parts of my mind, keeping up a running commentary that centres around my impending annihilation.
When the Feeling gains control so does Syl, and I can’t drown her out. When I’m steady, I do everything I can to muffle her nihilistic voice with my own life-affirming one. I fill my head and heart with as much positive noise as I can in a bid to make her quiet. But at times I can’t escape the stark and inexorable facts of life Syl constantly reminds me of, no matter what I do. There are days on which life will do Syl’s job for her and show me through example that death is everywhere, and usually it’s on days like these that you’ll find me curled up crying on my bathroom floor.
I still have days on which I wish that I simply did not exist. I have days on which I wish I had never been born, I have days on which I wish I would die in my sleep. I even have really bad days on which thoughts of suicide start to waft about inside my head again. I have these thoughts, but right now, I also have a kind of certainty that I will never act on them.
It seems absurd to me now that I ever seriously contemplated suicide, that I ever thought of hastening this inevitability I’m so horrified by. Time that’s passing me by is time I’m losing, and I’m terrified at the thought of my own end, especially since every moment is inching closer and closer to it. Every happy spell in my life is contaminated with the knowledge of how fleeting such moments are, and so most of my life is spent trying to disentangle this contingency from the moment at hand.
To forget.
To escape.
I wonder when I’ll learn that just like feelings, there are some things you simply can’t outrun.
It’s the dead of night and I’ve been tossing and turning, drifting in and out of broken sleep.
In the few barely conscious, wakeful seconds I take to turn over, a little voice in my head pipes up out of nowhere. ‘You’re going to die one day,’ it says, as if it’s been patiently cradling this little nugget of truth all night and waiting for the perfect opportunity to hurl it at me. In an instant my stomach drops and my eyes fly wide open in the dark. I’m taken by fear.
I’m wide awake now, my heart still pounding. I grit my teeth in frustration. There seems to be no end to the number of ways in which my mind chooses to disrupt my life. You’d think it would be on my side. But no, it’s just one truth bomb after another with the stupid thing.
In time my fear of death combined with pre-existing health conditions have given rise to a very inconvenient bout of health anxiety. When the anxiety is at its peak I can’t go anywhere that’s more than fifteen minutes away from a hospital, convinced as I am that I’m going to have a sudden medical emergency and drop dead. There is, of course, no reasoning with my stubborn mind and it refuses to listen to reason and accept that vaguely healthy thirty-somethings don’t just cease to exist for no reason. This fear is so great that I even carry around inhalers for asthma I don’t actually have. The idiocy of this isn’t lost on me. Some days I feel like I ought to be shrunk down and studied under a microscope.
I curl up and close my eyes, trying to push the thought of death out of my mind. It won’t budge. Soon my thoughts have spiralled downwards. I’m thinking about all those I’ve lost to death and all those I’m still to lose. It’s like a film of horrific hypotheticals playing on loop in my mind.
Thoughts like these would usually send me into a fit of tears but it’s been two weeks of this misery and I think my tear ducts have had quite enough and gone on strike.
Sleep is a distant memory now. I heave myself out of bed and trudge to the kitchen to make myself a cup of cocoa. Several minutes later I’m seated at the window sill in the living room, cocoa in hand, silently watching the velvety night sky lighten as the house sighs with sleep.
I haven’t realized it yet but this is the first time I’ve left my bedroom in a week.
Crawling
I had my first panic attack when I was eighteen years old, post TylenolGate, while getting a hair cut.
In general I
’ve always found salons to be unnecessarily stressful and anxiety-provoking places. Every person who works at a salon is effortlessly outgoing, dresses like they’ve jumped right off the page of some cool, hipster fashion magazine, and has the sort of flawless hairstyle that only Greek gods could pull off. Maybe years of salon-xiety (a genuine and should-seriously-be-recognized condition caused by feeling dangerously uncool whenever you are at or in the vicinity of a salon) finally took its toll on me, and I snapped. Maybe the overwhelming smell of hydrogen peroxide sent my central nervous system into a tizzy. Maybe having to sit still in one place for so long while someone tutted at my lack of hair care ritual awoke my claustrophobia. Honestly, I don’t know what made it happen or why, all I know is that I was suddenly sure I was going to die. As I looked in the mirror (already an unpleasant enough experience when your hair is wet, clipped above your head in five different places and poking out at weird angles causing your face to look like a giant squishy bao bun [every girl on earth knows what I’m talking about]) I experienced several wildly uncomfortable sensations, all at the same time.
First, my heart felt like it had suddenly and suicidally nosedived directly into my stomach while pumping at a ridiculous 600 beats per minute.
Second, every inch of my body instantly went cold and numb, as if its blood supply was cut off and its every nerve ending had malfunctioned and died.
Third, I developed a terrible case of tunnel vision and was disoriented by how everything was simultaneously in front of me but not at all in front of me.
I've Never Been (Un) Happier Page 5
