How Becoming A Writer Changed Me As A Person

If I have one word for the 2010s, it's "tough". I started off the decade just fine, a regular school-going kid with a regular life. Then came the clinical depression diagnosis in 2013. The next 5 years were the toughest of my life. I had to wrestle with an all-consuming, invisible illness that I still don't fully understand, but the worst part was that clinical depression is rarely an isolated affliction. It brings with it other complications, too. For me, it was panic disorder. I've stated it before and I'll state it again - I would choose clinical depression over panic disorder any day. Depression is my life; I know how to handle it now. But anxiety, panic attacks? They bring me to my knees. There were many nights I was certain would be my final ones on this planet. I cannot put into words how taxing and draining those 5 years were, so I won't even try. Just know that it was bad, and I consider myself lucky to have made it out of them alive.

I formed a hobby over those years - writing. I wrote poems and short stories, merely for my own pleasure. You can read some of them on this blog. I've been reading novels since I was 4 or 5, and I've always idolized authors. It was a goal of my mine to become an author one day, and I believed in my ability to make it possible despite everything. Even when logic said that it was impossible, I didn't forfeit the dream to one day hold a book in my hand, one which said "Chandrayan Gupta" on the bottom. Of course, now I have two of them, but I'm skipping ahead.

You see, when you're 14 years old and your biggest worry is making it through the night without slitting your throat open, you gain a sort of... perspective. While other kids my age were doing, well, whatever it is that 14-year old kids do, I was in my room, writing and reading what I thought was important. Hint - Bollywood masala movies, Chetan Bhagat novels and the sex life of celebrities did not make the cut. I think I unconsciously reprogrammed my brain to believe that I wasn't just different from those around me, I was superior. Being an outcast was my badge of honor, a mark that I didn't get swept away by pop culture, that I stayed true to myself. Because I could see the world differently than most people, I was better than most people.

It was bullshit.

The truth is that I went to bed every night wishing that I could be more normal. Because I couldn't fit in anywhere, I made myself believe that I didn't need to. Everyone and everything else was "stupid", and I was the victim. I didn't realize that this defence mechanism didn't serve its purpose; it didn't make me feel better about myself, it made me feel worse. I wanted nothing more than to fit in, but every time I tried to, I failed. I kept failing to be normal. I kept failing to overcome my social anxiety. I kept failing to connect with anyone. In trying to lift myself, I ended up burying myself. I became my own worst enemy. Protecting myself against the duplicitous, back-stabbing world became my only goal. In trying to survive, I forgot to live.

All that changed when I penned the short story The Suicide in 2017. I won't name names, but my desire to become a writer was strengthened by one person's insistence that it was impossible. I was 16 when they told me that, that I was fighting an uphill battle, and would most likely fail. I used that as motivation, because the thing I enjoy the most in this world is proving people wrong. When I wrote The Suicide, it included only Radha Bose, a beautiful but damaged private investigator grappling with guilt over her father's death. I thought that it was an interesting concept - meshing psychology and mystery together. Why not write a detective thriller, my favorite kind of novel, in which the protagonist suffers from mental health issues, my favorite kind of protagonist? To my knowledge, it has rarely been done before. I know psychology, so I can write the character and her struggles faithfully, and I have what has been described as a very twisted and vivid imagination, so I could probably write a nice murder mystery plot as well. So I expanded on The Suicide. Second draft over, and still the only main character was Radha Bose. It was not until the third draft, in which I had to plug a major plothole, that I introduced Aditya Gokhale. Me, in essence. I put a fictionalized version of myself in a story. I made him say the things I wanted to say, do the things I wanted to do. I lived vicariously through Aditya Gokhale.

All my life, I had been a hardcore introvert who always kept his feelings bottled up. But then I wrote the final draft of what would eventually become Birth of a Duo, and I realized that self-expression is one of the most gratifying things in the world. I didn't need to keep things bottled up. I didn't need to keep everyone locked out. I didn't need to not let anybody in. I just needed a better screening process, and I needed to trust more selectively.

I started opening up to people I decided to trust, and it was wonderful. It was like being ushered into a whole new world. I became far more active on social media as well. I once scoffed at Instagram. Now, it's my favorite social media platform ever. I'd always held a strong belief that if I showed my true self to people, they would run away. Not only did they not run away, they loved me. I am so, so grateful to everyone who was there for me when I needed it.

In 2010, things were normal. In 2015, it was everything I could do to not kill myself. In 2019, I completed the final phase of my internal transition from a loner to, well, less of a loner. Don't be fooled - I still am who I was before. The packaging may change, but the product remains the same. All it'll take is one emotional disaster to throw me back to 2015.

My depression, which I once viewed as my biggest enemy, is a double-edged sword. It took away so much from me, but it also gave me the ability to empathize with people and their problems. It gave me perspective, and it gave me maturity. For the longest time, I thought that I became a writer despite mental illness.

But now, I see that I became a writer because of mental illness.