Mira Saraf's Blog, page 2

COVID19 & THE BATTLE FOR CIVIC SENSE

[image error] Photo by Tonik on Unsplash

The first reaction is always fear. That’s what I felt when I thought about getting tested. 

In our mind’s eye – even us, the ultra – privileged – we picture the government storming our house and seizing us, and holding us captive in less than sanitary treatment facilities where poor hygiene would kill us before COVID would. 

No matter how eloquently we wax on about civic duty, we all feel this little spot of selfishness. I know I did.

But I was returning from Goa, and had developed a stomach infection of sorts, and I was due to travel to visit my parents. I couldn’t risk it.

What struck me at first was how easy the test was – much easier than a blood test. 10 hours later, I had the result. I was negative. 

Although what I know now suggests I should have waited a few more days, and I’ll never really know for sure, I am fairly certain I did not have the disease.

The day I was due to travel, my mother had a fever. Since she seemed to be on the mend, I decided to stick to my travel plans. It had been eight months and I missed my parents dearly. But I did insist that they both get tested.

The joke was on me – the day after I got home, they got their results: both were positive and highly infectious. 

Okay, I know what you’re going to say. “Why did you go? Why couldn’t you just wait one more day? That was irresponsible.”

And perhaps it was. But it was my mother’s birthday, and emotion took over. It was a flawed decision. But it’s done and I can’t change it now. So you can judge all you want but there is hardly a point. 

Since then, we have had to learn to live with COVID in our house. The first order of business was to inform everyone and to ask them to get themselves tested.

On day one, more exhausting than COVID, was the number of phone calls about COVID. “How the hell do I know how it happened?” My dad exclaimed in disgust after 30-40 phone calls. Each time he reassured people about how careful he was. How he constantly sanitized, and barely went out. How he had almost been paranoid about it.

But the questions drove him nuts.

And while people don’t seem to ever remember that they are speaking to someone who’s ill, and that they’re not exactly bursting with energy, I get it. That’s the fear again. 

It is akin to that burning desire to know all the gory details, when a 35-year-old dies of a heart attack or someone who seemed really fit and healthy passes away in their sleep. Did they have health issues? Did they show any signs? Was it their genes? Or just bad luck?

The real question they’re asking is “Can it happen to me?”

Whether we like it or not, we all fear being another tragic story that a few privileged folks “tsk tsk” about at a dinner party. “So sad. Can you imagine what that’s like?”

Pity: something that helps little.

Anyway, back to COVID Central, I was supposed to return back to Mumbai after 4 days – too early after exposure to my parents, to take the test. 

According to a doctor we spoke to, I would have been safe to fly for 2 days after initial exposure. My first reaction was to look at flying back within my “safe” window. I even looked at all possible flight options.

But then I did the math. 

I’d have to social distance from my partner and our help. We could put the others in the society at risk. We might have to manage housework and cooking plus working and potentially falling ill. We could transmit it to his mother, who is a diabetic.

And even if a doctor said I had two days of non-infectious time to fly, what if I was infectious earlier than what was standard? How many people might I infect then? Yes I have the face shield on, but I have to move it if I want to eat or drink anything.

And what if my parents’ symptoms become worse?

I decided I wouldn’t be able to live with myself and the unknown damage my selfish action might cause. But I had to think about it for a moment. It wasn’t as easy as I would like to say.

I cancelled my return ticket, and made the decision to stay. I still have at least 3 days before I could test myself, but I’m taking all the precautions I can. 

Both my parents fortunately, so far, have relatively mild symptoms – my mother’s slightly worse than my father’s. But our living situation has turned extremely awkward. 

We have to all watch what we touch, where we sit, where we breathe. They have live-in help, a young man who has already been tested, but the result has not come – so we have to watch his exposure to my parents, and our exposure to each other. 

I picked up the landline earlier today and realised my dad had just used it. I spent a few moments wondering how to sanitise the side of my face, before I settled on a good face wash instead. 

We are doing the best we can, but we keep making small mistakes. It is a very unnatural way of living, yet it is 100% necessary if I want a shot at going home any time in the near future. That is, assuming my parents’ symptoms don’t get worse. 

The ripple effect of my parents has been enough, but still we see among the potential exposures, a reluctance to test. The fact that my parents got a call from the government inquiring about their result, I’m sure does nothing to help matters.

But ignorance is not bliss in this case. A test does not change the fact of having or not having the disease. Still, somewhere in our subconscious we would rather not know. 

The thing is, COVID is here to stay. How we react when it enters our midst, is a test of our civic sense. The responsibility we must take is easier said than done but do it we must. 

This means we often have to put our own interests behind what is for the greater good. We won’t do it perfectly, but we can do the best we can. We are only human after all.

Let’s just hope we do better on it than we did with the Diwali firecrackers.

The Violence in Our Minds

One day, years ago, I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. I will never forget what they said.

They said that what happened to Anne Frank – all the tragedy that befell her – is the typical experience of a Jewish person in Europe at the time of the concentration camps.

It’s just that our minds cannot wrap themselves around the fact of so much pain and suffering.

We see Anne Frank as an individual, but it is unfathomable to us, that there were so many others who had it as bad, if not worse.

We can really feel it for an individual but not hundreds or thousands of people. Our weak little hearts just can’t handle that.

I’m feeling this way after reading the news for the past few days.

So many questions come to mind after reading the horror that is the Hathtras case.

Why does a crime have to reach this level of graphic detail for us to start talking about it?

Do the graphic details do us any favours? A cut tongue? Mutilation with an iron rod? Our brains fixate on this details and we lose sight of everything else – that the act of rape by itself was horrific enough, but we need it to be at this level for us to talk about it.

And also – where does this violence come from? Why is there a need to go beyond rape to break another human being? Where does the anger come from?

Then we hear denial and excuses – caste doesn’t matter, why was she out at night, it wasn’t rape, that there’s a reasonable explanation and many such things.

We, as a society have accepted it’s okay not only to rape a woman – which in itself is an enormous act of violence, but also to mutilate, to break, to murder – to destroy.

As for the ones responsible – do they feel bigger for having done it? Is there remorse? How do they look themselves in the mirror?

When we read accounts of people during genocides, one of the things we see is a certain de-humanization of the oppressed and victimized.

How have we got to the point where we start only reacting when there are broken bodies and death involved?

Only the most brutal of the cases go viral because compared to the violence of these sensational cases, regular sexual assault and single perpetrator rape doesn’t seem so bad.

We rage and storm about social media, we argue about the finer points of the case, somebody invariably says something outrageous and we rage and storm about that as well.

And while what we are doing is human – we are expressing shock and grief at things that affect us – things that disgust and revolt us – I can’t see how we can mend our broken social fabric.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the fact that a group of human beings felt it was okay to do this to another person, is a major problem.

It is a problem that no argument on social media can fix, no blog post (mine included) or speech or castration or jail sentence can fix.

The people who commit these crimes are not children that you can condition with a slap on the wrist.

They are fully capable of thinking for themselves and making their own decisions. An education and affluence or a lack thereof does not, in itself, cause violence.

It comes from our minds. And perhaps mob mentality – the most horrific cases we have seen of late, are gang rapes. Does the group dynamic allow for something that an individual crime would not? I don’t know but wondering torments next.

It’s ironic that we are around the corner from World Mental Health Day because this is kind of a sickness. It may not have a name but I can’t see how this could be anything else.

And we have varying degrees of it – from those of us (myself included) who need that shock factor for us to sit up and take notice, to those who defend the perpetrators, to those who actually commit the crimes.

A friend (and fantastic writer), Vijaylakshmi Harish, very aptly described this. She said in recent times, it’s like we, as a society, are being gaslit – we are in a relationship with a sociopathic power, one that denies things in spite of facts in front of our eyes.

And slowly we give up our fight and lull ourselves into complacency.

There is that famous anecdote – the one with a frog and a pot of water which I’m sure you’ve all heard. Drop a frog into boiling water and he will jump out. Put him into the water and boil it slowly, we can boil him to death.

In case it’s not clear: we as a society, are the boiling frog.

Privilege and Shame

[image error]Photo by Chris Slupski on Unsplash

My first book of 2020 was a book called Can We All Be Feminists. It is a collection of essays examining, dissecting and discussing intersectionality and feminism. It is a stellar book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who identifies with the word “feminist”.

The concept of intersectionality got me thinking about my own privilege.

Yes, as an Indian woman I face gender-based discrimination, I face unwanted attention from men sometimes in professional settings where it is hard to mitigate, and I look over my shoulder when I find myself alone in dark lonely spaces.

But I am also privileged.

I am privileged never to have been the victim of any serious sexual assault. I am privileged to have a family that supported me in education and in living and working for myself, a family that did not define my success in life by my ability to bring home a suitable husband.

I am privileged to have the means to have access to an education, a roof over my head, food to eat and access to clothing.

I am privileged to have a partner that treats me as an equal, that doesn’t put me down, respects me and as far as I know is loyal to me.

Though I have been fat-shamed and body-shamed, there is a privilege to having a body size that is close to the norm. I am trying to choose my words carefully on this one, as the essay by Selina Thompson on fatness and feminism, and our own agency over our bodies. The further you are away, the more dehumanised you become.

I am privileged to have had many opportunities to live and work abroad as well as the privilege of growing up in India. I am privileged to belong to a sexuality and a gender identity that does not expose me to the ugly whims of insecure prejudice.

I am privileged in a seemingly infinite number of ways.

If I claim to be a feminist, an identity I struggle with often for a while host of other reasons, I want to be a feminist in the pluralistic sense of the word, at least to the best extent that I can be as a flawed, biased human being.

I think it’s important we recognise our own privilege – because the privileged rarely like to admit they are so. As someone who is as infinitely privileged as I have described above, I know I don’t like to admit mine.

But admit it we must, because it is only when we recognise the good fortune, we have in ourselves, that we can empathise with those who are oppressed for reasons we would never be. It is only when we can understand this, that we can help others.

The shame, at least for me, comes from guilt. I feel guilty for my abundance, and it makes me want to deny and hide it. It’s difficult, at least for me, to admit that I am fortunate. It is easier to focus on what I don’t have.

I don’t like feeling like I’ve had things handed to me. I’ve worked very hard for a lot of the things in my life, and I want to feel I can celebrate my accomplishments. But if I’m to be totally honest, I had some advantages that helped me in doing those things – access to resources that is far from equal.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t fight against the oppression we face. If we don’t fight for ourselves, who will? But in my humble opinion, we could consider recognising the oppression we don’t face, because someone out there is facing it, and wishing we would just understand how lucky we are.

I am making this pledge this year, to be more sensitive to the experiences of other human beings, and my own blind spots that have led me there because of my privilege.

My Complicated Relationship with Body Image

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I have always had a complicated relationship with my weighing scale. I was a chubby child and teenager, and have struggled with body image and my weight, for as long as I can remember. 

In school, I was bullied and called a fat and hairy bitch. In university, for a few years I worked out regularly, maintaining a healthy weight, and then I discovered the curse that is relationship weight gain, especially when you’re with someone who eats a lot of Nutella, like my college boyfriend.

When I moved to New York, I got better – but then I went to Italy, for 9 months, I ended up becoming an exercise fanatic, eating sparingly (but still a lot of red wine and chocolate things) and lost weight to the point of unhealthy.

Before you all start pouncing on me with eating disorders, yes, what I went through was about thinness, but it was more about control than being skinny. I was terrified of losing control and undoing all that I have done.

To this day, I don’t completely understand the triggers that caused it, but needless to say, I was not in a good place mentally or physically. I stopped menstruating altogether. But something telling was that when I visited new York for a week for my (non-Nutella eating new) boyfriend’s birthday, I put on five pounds almost instantly. 

When I came back to India after Italy, I gained weight again – much to the dismay of a well – intentioned but misguided trainer at a small gym in a community marketplace near my house. It was like a switch flicked, though I did get a few lectures from a very concerned mother. 

I had since then, tried to avoid owning a weighing scale. I have done my best to stay fit –  I started doing yoga – which taught my to love my body – and acroyoga – an activity so fun that I hardly noticed I was exercising. 

To me that is the ideal – exercise that doesn’t feel like working out. I think I hit my best weight around 2017 and looked and felt great.

Fast forward to 2018 – a B12 deficiency hampered how much energy I could devote to physical activity. Then, in August, I fell on my left side while cycling on a Finnish island (as one does!).

I didn’t realize it then, but I suffered a shoulder injury that ended in calcification, which made my shoulder unbearably weak for better part of two years. I had to stop doing the majority of the yoga I was practicing, and I struggled with pain and limited mobility which seemed to ebb and flow with the seasons.

Sometime early this year, I decided I needed to start making myself accountable for my weight again, and I bought a weighing scale. I lost a few kilos and then sometime around the start of lockdown, I stopped weighing myself.

I think it was just too much – between work, studies, writing and the new puppy my partner and I had adopted. It was easier to live in denial. 

My clothes did fit more snugly, and I found myself feeling more sluggish. Until I stepped on the scale the other week and realized that I had gained 5 kilos. 

Since then I have been dogged by a mixture of emotions – shame, at letting it get this far (I’m not sure why but I always feel ashamed when I gain weight), guilt, apprehension (“is everyone looking at how fat I’ve become and judging me?”), and then somewhere, though often I have to dig deep, the zeal to overcome it glimmers through all that darkness.

Another ray of hope was a very good physiotherapist I found, who has helped me recover 95% of my mobility and much of my strength. 

My relationship with my body image is complicated for many reasons. Yes, to a certain extent when I am heavier than I would like to be, I feel uglier and ashamed. But on the flip side, it is because it is incredibly important to me to be healthy.

Diabetes runs on both sides of my family and I have had high cholesterol (genetic, not life-style related) since my twenties. I like the way I feel when I eat healthier and dislike oily foods and junk. 

[image error]Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

I lost my sweet tooth towards my late twenties, making an exception only for chocolate – preferably dark. 

So while the negative feelings that cloud me when I remember the weighing scale are not ideal, this is something that is not just important to me because of societal norms. One could argue that I like myself better that way because of societal norms, but my body actually feels better. 

I do not write this to make any arguments about body positivity or fat-shaming. How we keep and maintain our bodies must always remain a personal choice. It’s just that my personal preference is not what I see when I step on the scale today. 

And so, I start work on this area of my life again, one kilo at a time. I don’t know how long it will take me this time, but I am hopeful that I can find my happy place again – body and weight-wise.  

Would love to hear some lockdown weight loss / weight gain stories!

My Search for my Ikigai

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When I was 28 years old, I was working in a fairly straightforward 9-5 job in Mississauga (close to Toronto), Canada, leading a pretty boring life, where days and nights blended into each other. 

I had moved from New York and missed it terribly. New York was a place that inspired me, while Toronto was nice, but it was not my city.

A year and a half later, I was watching a movie, based in New York. I felt a pang of something – I wasn’t sure what. This feeling of being completely in love with a city or a setting – something that fuelled my imagination and brought me great joy.I suddenly sat up and asked myself, “what the hell am I doing with my life?”

I didn’t hate my job, nor did I love it. I didn’t love the place I lived. Would this be all there was? I had always dreamed of a job that allowed me some creativity. More than that, I had wanted to be a writer for as long as I could remember. When would I do it? What was I waiting for?

So I decided to quit my job after a few months and make some fleeting changes in my life. Let me tell you, there is no time or less stress in any job than that of when you know you are leaving. Consequences cease to matter and in fact you end up over performing. 

But life threw me a plot twist: I got promoted. 

So, I started to irritatingly care about my job again, and the combination of a difficult manager and low self-confidence found me frustrated again after a mere few months. Then I finally decided – in November 2009, to quit.

It was all very romantic. Wherever I looked I saw narratives of people giving up cushy corporate life for pursuing their passions in things like writing or yoga. For a little while things worked. An internship at a free local weekly led to an internship at The Walrus seemed Canada’s best magazine.

But towards the second half of that year, things started to slide. I met and got involved with a complicated man at The Walrus.

My single-minded focus towards my future started to fray at the edges. One reason was the level of drama in my relationship – much higher than that of previous ones – including one very angry ex-girlfriend flying across the country, parking herself in my boyfriend at the time’s house, and trying with all her might to get him back.

This was completely new to me.

I always thought in order to write, I needed some passion and heartbreak in my life, and truly – once it started it didn’t stop. That is till many years later.

Getting a job was another headache. I was advised to put in another six months into working for free. People asked me for free writing wherever I went (“But I thought you love to write!”). 

In addition, dating someone in the same field gave rise to a slight competitiveness that soured things between us at times. 

It was when I was in the final round for an interview, which paid half my last salary at my corporate job, and I was rejected for someone with much more experience, that I realised the fantasy was over. 

Pursuing my passion wasn’t enough. I was turning 30, and didn’t want to live in a basement apartment, and think twice before every purchase I made. I realised, much to my dismay, that I was much more material than I would have liked to imagine. I wasn’t willing to give up what to would have to give up, to make this work.

There were several misguided things about what I had spent my time doing. Firstly – the writing scene in Canada is small and can be somewhat cliquey – and I most definitely did not fit in. 

Secondly – my love has always been fiction, not journalism. That was my passion as a reader, and this was where my interest should have focused as a writer. I was never going to be a hard-hitting journalist who wrote about meaningful issues, but I could create change by weaving stories. 

Storytelling – the made-up kind – was my passion. 

Third – my life in Canada was devoid of stimulation. I had nothing to say. My writing shifted perceptibly after coming back to India, where something as simple as getting a pipe fixed was often accompanied by unanticipated adventure.  

Lastly – my love of writing was a manifestation of my love of human psychology and motivation. Why do people do the things 

It was only recently when I learned about the concept Ikigai, that the remaining pieces of the puzzle fit. Ikigai – that sweet spot between what you love, what the world needs, what you’re good at, and what you can get paid for – is something I wish I had realised in 2008. 

[image error]Image courtesy of https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrismyers/2018/02/23/how-to-find-your-ikigai-and-transform-your-outlook-on-life-and-business/#5e34176e2ed4

Writing by itself was difficult to sustain myself – particularly in Canada which had a small and competitive writing scene. I ended up writing about a lot of things I didn’t like in order to make progress. 

My Ikigai as well as all those little bubbles around it all required stimulation. There are people who are all about writing, or all about yoga, or all about healing or some other vocation or interest. I wasn’t one of them. 

I was always going to be someone with simultaneous projects in different areas of life. 

I have recently started learning coaching and suspect I will find some of my Ikigai there. However, it has been a life-long search – for that sweet spot that combines creativity, my love of human psychology, and being able to do something I feel proud of. 

Have you found your purpose yet? I’d love to hear stories from other people on this elusive concept!

Being a Compassionate Employer

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According to a recent article in the Economic Times, 5 million salaried people lost their jobs in July in India. This brings us to a total of 18.9 million jobs. Although the validity of this particular study has been questioned, we don’t need numbers to tell us that many people have been let go across industries, cities and career levels.

But what these numbers don’t show, is the true number of people who have suffered, which includes those that may still have a job, but who have been subject to pay cuts and increased pressure to perform.

The COVID19 pandemic has been tough on business, small and large alike, though arguably harder on the former. Many businesses will not be able to survive. We all know this already of course, and that’s not why I am writing this. 

What has been disheartening though are the instances where there is undue, and rather opportunistic pressure placed on employees. 

As a corporate trainer/facilitator, I speak to people – both within and outside the HR function, and I’ve heard many stories of people not being able to make ends meet, who were working for companies that did not appear to be in any kind of immediate cash crunch. 

One person told me that members of a certain community within their organisation received full pay, while others only received 25%. Somebody told me that their spouse has to work full Saturdays now because another person in their department was let go, and there is an implied pressure not to take leave or flex time.

Now, it’s not my place to judge individual organisation’s ability to pay or not to pay their people. Everyone’s cash flow situations are different, and I’m sure some cuts are coming because there is literally no other choice. I also will agree that perhaps that many have explored all other options, and come back with this as the only alternative. That is for their accountants and finance teams to figure out.

But where we do have a choice, and it certainly sounds like in some cases there is a choice, is it really the right thing to do?

Anyone that’s taken Human Resources 101, knows that the Human Resource is such that you can make 2+2=5 or 2+2 = 1. I forget the exact analogy they use, but you understand what I mean. Our people are our best resources, and it is in our best interest to look after them. 

When people have to stress about making ends meet, that will become something that distracts them from being the best they can be for you.

But looking after them does just not mean throwing money at them, but it means showing them you are with them in good and bad, and that you support them, so long as they support you back. It is a relationship, and like most relationships it is nuanced.

As employers, often it is not just a salary package, but the small gestures we make that earn the loyalty of our people. Whether it is treating them and their situations with compassion, or making them feel secure that you are doing everything you can, it is important that we spend some time on this. 

Consider also that today, in the COVID19 context, our teams are working longer hours, as the boundaries between home and office blur. Their lives have turned into a series of Zoom and Google meet sessions, punctuated by small periods of rest in which they have to complete the rest of their work.

Some have children, others elderly parents. Some have demanding in-laws, and others have to share working space with their partners who have as many video calls, if not more. 

Morale is low, stress levels are high, and mental health is fragile. Small things make a big difference.

A final point is that as business conditions are tough, the one resource that is in the best position to help carry us through, is the human resource. Show them you care, and they will go above and beyond. 

So if you are in a position to pay someone their full salary, please do so. If you are in a position to make them feel secure and comfortable, please do so. It is the right thing to do, from an ethical standpoint.

Also while they may need us as employers right now, more than we need them, this situation will not last forever.

 If we don’t build their loyalty now, when things are tough, one day, when things are better, someone is going to throw more money at them, and they’re going to jump ship without looking back. And that may happen at a time you need them.

They will remember the small things we do, whether they are in a position to react right now or not.

Is it not best to make sure that those small things are the right ones?

On Depression, Suicide and the Death of Hope

The death of Sushant Singh Rajput has not hit me hard because I was a huge fan, or even followed his work at all. In truth, I barely followed him or his work. 

Yet hit me it has, mainly because he was 34, five years younger than I am, who, it seems, felt like the only thing better than breathing another moment, was never to breathe again. That was how hopeless he felt. 

When things like this happen to celebrities there is often a slew of opinions: preaching positivity, detachment and the benefits of meditation or yoga, of gratitude, and many other such things that are great in principle – but ineffective in reality.

Nobody who suffers from or struggles with depression can just cheer up. Nobody who struggles with anxiety can just calm down. 

More positivity, more gratitude, changes in perspective, yoga, meditation and all those other wonderful things can benefit people who are already in relatively healthy mindsets. They may help some in people who are struggling, but in others it will just remind them of failure.

Of failure to be positive, failure to be happy, failure to be able to meditate it all the way. And in that space of darkness, those small small failures can be the boundary between life and death.

Don’t you think if it were easy for them to cheer up or calm down, or be positive, they would just do it and be done? 

Depression and anxiety are strange beasts, because alongside feeding on your sanity, they feed on the way you feel about yourself. Nobody is proud to have depression. Nobody is proud to suffer from panic attacks. 

Those of us who struggle with these things seek to hide them away. Someone once told me that I shouldn’t tell men I would like to date that I’ve struggled with self-harm. It is not something people want to know about.

If that brief moment of my life was too much for someone, can you imagine how difficult it would be for people to speak about ongoing mental illness? 

Depression (“but you have so much going for you!”), or anxiety (“no need to stress so much about everything!”), let alone things like bipolar disorder and other less known illnesses, are not as cut and dry as a scraped knee, which simply needs some antiseptic and a bandaid. 

They are much more complicated than that. 

What if we were to show people our vulnerabilities in public spaces and get comfortable speaking about them? What if we were to acknowledge that not all is wonderful, that some of us shed tears for no reason, some of us can’t bring ourselves to get out of bed in the morning, and for some of us, loneliness and rejection leaves us feeling so hollow that we can’t remember that this too, shall pass, and that we might smile again?

If we showcase our wins, should we not have the courage to share our losses? Because maybe, just maybe, we can help someone feel that it’s okay that they’re struggling. It’s okay while some are achieving milestone after milestone, that they can only just manage to get dressed? That it’s okay to not be okay? 

What if we were to share all those times we have sought help, because it was all too much to handle on our own? What if we weren’t ashamed to say we spoke to someone because we didn’t know what to do next? 

This is particularly important during the lockdown, when our screens are almost our only connection to the outside world. What we see can lift us up, make us feel supported, or it can plunge us deeper into darkness. 

Understanding that it’s okay to speak to someone will not cure someone of anxiety or depression, the way quality mental healthcare might, but it may make them feel supported enough to seek help. And in that space where all other options seem closed, where all hope seems lost, perhaps a small ray of light might emerge. 

That light may save their life. Of course it still may not be enough, but it is better than nothing right? 

There are so many devoted mental health professionals helping people struggling during this time, but until someone initiates the conversation, there is no way to know that they need help. 

The irony about mental health is the onus is on the person to get themselves help. Unlike a physical accident where someone can see a bleed, or an illness where there are symptoms. 

The only person that can truly understand that there is a mental health issue is the person who is suffering. And the very nature of these illnesses makes it difficult to get help. 

I don’t know what Sushant Singh Rajput went through in those last moments, but whatever pain he had couldn’t be scratched out by a change in perspective or some positivity. Whatever haunted him was not simply a low mood, or frown to be turned upside down. 

It was more powerful than he was, and when you’re up against that kind of fight, you can’t just brush it off and cheer up. 

You need something a little stronger than that. 

‘Senseless Worries’: A Story about Anxiety and the Power of Being Alone

 

[image error]Photo by Prasanna Kumar on Unsplash

As a young woman I had all sorts of ambitions of where I would be at 30. Successful, surrounded by people I loved (including, perhaps, one special someone), and generally on an accelerated upward trajectory towards achieving all of my dreams. I was to be wildly successful, because, like all millennials, this was my destiny.

When I actually turned 30, I was unemployed, had just been dumped by a functioning alcoholic, and was generally battling insecurity and self-doubt. I had spent the weeks leading up to it alone with painful thoughts and memories of what had just transpired. 

It was Christmas time, probably the worst time to be alone in Canada, where I lived at the time. The previous four months had been messy and had pushed me to my limits, testing everything I thought I knew about relationships. I tried to get to a place of peace in order to understand it all, but it was really difficult. 

I felt all alone. 

This is the starting point for my story Senseless Worries, the third story in The Boundaries of Sanity. Rock bottom. 

What happens when we realize that none of those things, we considered rocks in our lives – our partners, our careers, our success – are forever.

The anxiety that creeps in at times like this can be toxic. But there is also a sense of weathering the storm and coming out more unscathed than we thought we would on the other side.

In Senseless Worries, Tanya needs Amrita to need her, and this sets her up for failure, and is likely an undercurrent in all of her relationships. We see hints of tactics she pulled with an ex-husband and underlying it all there’s this anxiety that has crept in and is permeating everything she does. 

Anyone that’s dealt with anxiety knows it’s an unforgiving monster. It taints everything you see and do. There is always this doubt lingering at the back of your mind, what if? And then there’s this sense of shame as you cross line after line, feeding this beast, which is never satisfied with any amount of reassurance.

You’re always wondering if there is something else that could go wrong. But then, you’re also not proud of the things you did or said, in that valiant aim of reassuring your own mind. At least this was my experience: a constant push and pull between two extremes. 

It is too easy to give in to it, to slide into that downward spiral and end up in a no-man’s land where friends are lost, and relationships broken. In a way, this has already happened to Tanya. Somewhere perhaps she knows that the relationships weren’t worth saving, but her anxiety about being alone pushed her into it.

As a child, I was a largely happy solitary being. Perhaps it was in puberty, when my sense of self was a slippery thing, prone to influence from others, that I started to think I should become more social and popular. 

I spent a long time trying to be that person, making plans, trying not to spend my weekends alone, always having something to go to, or someone to hang out with. It gave me short-lived satisfaction to have places to go and people to meet. 

This came to its peak around 2015, and although I had some lovely friends then, I found myself physically and emotionally exhausted from being so connected all the time. I realized much later, that being a social butterfly has never been my nature. At my core I am an introvert, and I need to be alone to recharge my batteries, from time to time. 

When I moved to Mumbai in 2016, I found it very difficult to meet like-minded people. I either met people who didn’t care to invest time in getting to know someone new, or I met people who were incredibly needy. 

Finally, because I didn’t have a choice, and I found most social interactions draining and unfulfilling, I decided it was better to be alone and focus on reading and writing, then to try and surround myself with people. 

I didn’t realize how naturally this would come to me. I found myself super happy to spend a Saturday evening working on a writing project or reading a book, or listening to greatest hits of the ‘90s, without speaking to a single soul.

The unintended consequence of this, is that I learned I didn’t *need* others, and this was super empowering. The discovery of loving my own company was the greatest gift I could have ever received from enforced solitude. Understanding that I could be content taught me that this idea of needing another was just an illusion. 

Tanya is struggling with this very concept – her perceived need of others. She isn’t treated very well by these people, which is perhaps partially her own doing. But she is unable to see life without these people, who ultimately are not that great for her. 

I wrote Tanya’s character based on things I have myself experienced: anxiety about rejection, a fear of remaining unloved and worries about ending up alone. But what I didn’t know then, and what she doesn’t know now, is that if we can’t love our own company, on our own terms, then what can we offer to others. 

If we know that we do not need something, then we won’t be so afraid of losing it. In fact, in many cases I learned that losing someone – breakups and endings – were often accompanied by relief that I didn’t have to deal with certain things anymore. I realized that some relationships were a losing proposition from the start, and others become so over time. 

I am not anti-relationship or friendships. But for me, quality is better than quantity: I am not capable of having relationships with as much depth as feels authentic, with more than a handful of people. Today I have a handful of very deep friendships and a wonderful relationship that I wouldn’t give up for the world. 

But I didn’t need to covet them before I had them. I was great before, and while they add something to my life, I made sure that my life was complete without it. 

In fact, these days, with our abundance of zoom communication, WhatsApp, social media and the like, I find myself craving my solitude – spending a few hours without speaking to anyone. There is an exhaustion to virtual and video communication that somehow surpasses in-person contact. 

Solitude and the need for time for myself are things I protect fiercely, often to a point that others find unreasonable. But what they sometimes don’t understand is like they crave human contact I crave time without it. Two sides of the same coin.

Self-dependence has helped me a lot with my anxiety. While it is not a cure by any stretch of the imagination: anxiety is a sizeable beast that takes years if not lifetimes to defeat, in my experience, it can go a long way towards grounding myself and creating some peace of mind. 

Senseless Worries is the third story in my debut short story collection, The Boundaries of Sanity, which is available here on Kindle and via Kindle app on your laptop, tablet or phone.

Toxic Adaptability: Why I wrote ‘Spilling Over the Edges’

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Photo by yulia pantiukhina on Unsplash

Almost every woman I know has had at least one relationship where she has willingly allowed herself to be treated poorly for months, or even years. This is not a judgement, rather an observation. Some are lucky enough to escape these relationships, others not so much.

As girls growing up, I think many of us were conditioned to be accommodating and adaptable. Now don’t get me wrong, these are very good qualities, but combined with poor self-belief they can be toxic.

At least I can speak for myself.

I have struggled a lot with low self-belief. High school bullying left me with this permanent sense of feeling and being ugly. A natural tendency towards anxiety, brought with it, a veering towards self-doubt.

Poor self-belief wasn’t necessarily because I was a girl. I know men who struggle with it as well, of course. This in no way is to belittle or make light of their experience. But I think our tendency to think we must be the ones to give in, to compromise, as seeped in so deep, that it’s hard to know when we are going too far.

I had an insecurity about feeling loved. Although my childhood was largely a happy one, the bullying (which by the way, wasn’t even as bad as many people faced), left a lasting impression. I felt ugly, disgusting and unlovable.

In relationships, I found that I would go along with things, I would subdue who I was, and absorb much of who the other person was. I would subtly adapt to their habits, their preferences and their choices.

I also had a tendency to “fake” it: pretend I was present in a relationship, and that I was on board, okay with the rules, and ignore the gnawing doubts in my mind.

In a way I would pretend that I was the person that my partner expected us to be or wanted me to be. When people have said “I love you,” I have said it back, without meaning it. When people have taken a budding relationship at a pace that I was not comfortable with, I have just gone along with it.

When those same people have turned around and said that it was moving too fast for them, I have said nothing, letting them place the blame on me.

I’m no victim, I wasn’t coerced into doing this. I had an innate tendency to adapt, and a low belief in my own value, so I just assumed that I should follow someone else’s lead.

But what I did notice, is that I started breaking out of my confines, acting out in ways that pushed boundaries, when I found myself trapped in these relationships.

My protagonist in Spilling Over the Edges fakes it, and places her self-worth in the hands of an abusive partner. By her own admission, she feels average. She feels lucky to have found someone willing to marry her.

At the same time, she realises she is not the person that he wants her to be, and it starts to eat her up inside.

In a way, though perhaps not the same way as my protagonist, I did spill over the edges of who I was supposed to be, acting out when it got too much, and not in a healthy way.

For me, the realisation that I needed to change occurred somewhere in 2018, ironically around the time that The Boundaries of Sanity was in the works. It had been a challenging few years, with a lot of ups and downs. Workwise I hadn’t yet found my footing, and I didn’t know where I was going with my life.

I had been going through a lot of mood swings and general anxiety, possibly triggered by some medication I was on, but somehow this opened my eyes to this persistent problem, that when I thought about it, had likely always been there.

My entire day would be positive and negative based on feedback I received from outside myself. If my boss didn’t tell me I did a great job, I wouldn’t feel it was great. If my partner didn’t compliment me, I didn’t look good. I felt unsure and insecure, and doubted what I had to offer the world. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but I knew it wasn’t good.

So I sought help.

From my psychologist, I learned that by placing my own self-worth in the hands of others, I was setting myself up to fail.

I realised that all along, I had been placing my own self-worth in the hands of my partners. I put up with more than I should have, because I did not have enough confidence to stand up for my opinions and preferences.

Now I have good days and bad days. There are still some days I slip into that bad habit of looking to others for approval. However, I try and catch myself, and correct course. I am lucky enough to have avoided the mistakes that my protagonist has made.

There are pieces of me in that woman, who digs around for her sense of worthlessness, who sees herself as flawed and gross in every single way. She was born in some of my darkest moments and embodies some of my deepest fears. In a way, that part of myself is a security blanket I retreat into, when the outside world is too frightening.

I have moments where I am right back there again, in front of the mirror in the darkness, feeling my sense of self crumble to dust. I have times where I want to undo everything and redo it as a better, smarter, more evolved, healthier person. I have times I wonder if I even have the faintest idea how to be a well-adjusted functioning adult.

For the most part, I’ve managed to quench this need for reassurance, and feel comfortable in my own skin. Writing, meditation and plenty of exercise and sleep help me maintain my inner balance.

My protagonist, with her deep dark secret will struggle further, and she’s got it a lot worse than I do. Will she overcome it? Is there any hope for her? You’ll have to read it to find out!

Spilling Over the Edges is the second story of my debut collection: The Boundaries of Sanity published by Readomania.

The Boundaries of Sanity is available on Kindle or downloadable on Kindle app on any device.

Changing the Narrative of My Own Story

 

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Photo by Pineapple Supply Co. on Unsplash

I got into a fascinating discussion on Twitter the other day, courtesy of Women’s Web, with Manreet Sodhi Someshwar, speaking about her book The Radiance of a Thousand Suns, which has now made its way onto my TBR.

We were speaking about Margaret Atwood, and what made her characters so powerful (I’d been watching The Handmaid’s Tale for the past few months and women’s bodies and the violence inflicted on them were top of mind).

It was then that I understood, what was so appealing about June Osborn, the main character in The Handmaid’s Tale: her agency.

As a result, in my own small way, I could finally put my finger on what I wanted for Mrinalini, the protagonist of my story Solitary Confinement (published as a part of the collection The Boundaries of Sanity last month).

I wanted her to have control over her own life. A character that could make mistakes and own up to them, confront them and try to move past them.

In my own, albeit inexperienced, way, I wanted to give her that power, that she was a master of her own circumstances, and not just a poor victim of cheating, a husband that left, and broken friendships. I wanted to give her the power to see it and understand it.

In the story, Mrinalini finds herself in an abandoned house in what seems to be an isolated island. Where she is, really isn’t important. But what is important is the mix of sorrow, grief and indignation she feels at all the people around her.

Over the course of the story this evolves, and she starts to see her story in a drastically different way than she did before.

To change the angle of our story and our role in it as being an active agent, is not as easy as it sounds. Accepting responsibility in something that had severe negative consequences in your life is uncomfortable, and not always possible.

For me, this was something I started to practice in the last decade or so – not to focus on what is being done to me. When I started owning the things that happened to me (though as it turns out you can also take that to an extreme!) I felt much more in control and happier about the things in my life.

While I found temporary comfort in blaming another for doing something to me, I didn’t want to let someone else’s actions define who I was. The best way for me to move past this was not to let it become who I was, but in fact to seize a role in it. It was taking my own space and agency back.

My turning point came during an innocuous conversation with a classmate – it was when I had moved away from my college town, Montreal. I can’t remember where I was, but I had moved to pursue additional studies in New York first, then Italy.

I had told her all about my college boyfriend, how he had been so mean to me, explaining how I had been justified in doing everything I had done. What a horrible person to cause me so much pain, right?

Finishing up with a flourish, I waited for the sympathy I was sure would come my way. Instead the girl looked at me, raised her eyebrows and said:

“Wow, you’re really bitter.”

That stung. Up until that point I had seen myself as the injured party and him as the instigator, and a horrible person. Because I was in my mid-twenties and things were black and white, good and evil. One person was wrong, and another right.

But after I soothed my ego, I started thinking about what she had said. Yes, I’ll admit here, I cared that she thought I was bitter – I cared what she thought. Of course, the fact that I have no recollection of who this is, means that I obviously couldn’t have cared that much.

However, in addition to that, I started to think about the way I looked at this story. I had always assumed that I was right, and he was wrong. Yet I had tolerated the behavior I disliked; I had allowed everything that happened to happen. Was I not also responsible for what had happened?

I could have left at any time, but I didn’t. Yes, yes, I had reasons – and I am not totally to blame. But I did stay for 3 years, and then felt indignant enough to be bitter about it. I wanted him to be someone he was not, which was extremely unfair to him.

My unrealistic and unreasonable expectations apart, I realized also how that bitterness was poisoning my insides. Everywhere I went, I carried this label of injured party. Did I want that to define me?

No, I decided. That would give him too much power over me. And it would be a poor reflection of the reality of the situation, from a purely objective standpoint.

None of us are entirely responsible for all of the things that happen to us. We can’t control or plan everything. But there’s that little piece of it that is there for the taking, that can be ours.

I wanted that piece. For me. For Mrinalini.

My first protagonist isn’t wholly responsible for everything that happens to her. But she is responsible for some of it, and this becomes a turning point for her, and a chance at second chances.

She could carry that burden of injured party for months or years, but it was already drowning her in toxicity – and that too all self-imposed.

If she could claim responsibility for what she has done, she can re-write her story on her own terms.

And that, will change it forever.

The Boundaries of Sanity is available on Kindle, or Kindle app (downloadable on any device).