I've never been (Un)happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

When you agree to create, you agree to destroy.

I want to separate. To isolate myself from everyone around me. I want to stop being looked at. I want freedom from the concern of people. Freedom from their love. I haven’t felt like this in a long time. This broken. This watched. I haven’t wanted out like this in a long time. I want out right now. No more. Not one more second of it. Enough. I won’t do it though. Never. But I want it.

I’ve never been subjected to or lived through anything truly horrific; nothing that is unique to just me, at any rate. The lifestyle I enjoy is not one I worked my way up to through hard labour, and a lot of the opportunity afforded to me comes from groundwork that was painstakingly laid by my parents. Along with the financial security my circumstances afford me, they also grant me the means to make demands for and exercise my rights to freedom and equality, which a lot of people in India, and the world over, can’t do. In short, I possess all the qualifications of what they call a ‘lucky’ one. I’m aware I am free in ways a lot of people aren’t.

a handful were enthusiastic but most were instantly uncomfortable, many of them seeing it as unnecessary oversharing.

On some days this bed is my home, on other days it is more like my captor. I’m unable to tear myself away from it, unable to even sit upright. Each time I muster the will and energy to lift myself up, I’m pulled back into its depths by some overpowering magnetic force.

I imagine falling off the top of a building, face forwards, arms outstretched. I consider what I’ll feel when I hit the ground and for how long I’ll feel it. These thoughts come unbidden; my mind always seems to lead me back here when I’m overcome with an episode, as if to test the waters, to test me.

It was around this time, shortly before I turned twelve, that I was made painfully aware of the superficiality and obsession with appearance that consistently seems to contour our day-to-day lives. I was at a precarious age, one at which the seeds of my identity and self-worth were being sown. Up until then my sense of self had come from my internal make-up and the way in which I interacted with the world around me—exactly as it should have—but all that self-definition was about to undergo surgery.

I feigned nonchalance, smiled, and walked out of the frame without a word. Behind me everyone oohed and aahed at the cuteness and perfection of this new, Shaheen-less picture. The chorus continued and soon the excited team had whisked my sisters away to a location that better suited their overall adorableness. As they walked away I wondered if I’d somehow learned to make myself invisible without realizing it.

As a child, however, all I took away was that I wasn’t good enough to be in those photographs. When I went home and looked in the mirror all I saw was a chubby, awkward girl who would never be as beautiful as her older sister or as cute as her younger one. I was already prone to spells of insecurity when I compared myself to my sister Alia. She seemed to flourish with a lot more ease than I did and it made me wonder if I lacked in qualities I should have possessed—and this experience gave my insecurity a whole new dimension. It was also the first time I realized I could be singled out for something I couldn’t control—the way I looked, and later, perhaps, the way I

Believing that my appearance was the sole cause of all this uneasiness, I began to deprive myself of food to lose weight. I gave my snacks away to friends at school, secretly threw food away at home and went to bed with an empty stomach almost every night. I didn’t realize it then, but I had unwittingly kick-started an afflicting relationship with food that persists to this day. In a short while I managed to lose most of the weight I had gained over the past year and by the time my thirteenth birthday rolled around I had earned the nickname ‘sparrow’ at school for my sparse eating habits. Finally, my weight was no longer the source of unrest it had been in the months before.

It’s the dead of night and I’ve been tossing and turning, drifting in and out of broken sleep.

‘No one understands how I feel,’ is in all probability the most frequently thought and spoken descriptor of depression of all time, and I think that’s because it’s true. No one can truly understand how you feel because the pain you experience is unique to you. Negative emotions draw deeply from who you are and your unrepeatable set of experiences and insecurities, which is why they’re so different for everyone. Your mind’s every response is a product of experiences that are yours alone and pain routinely taps into every single one of them. It takes your whole life, and every single incidence and coincidence that has ever happened to you, to make you who you are. Every cut, every scrape, every hurtful word, every heartbreak, every good or bad thing you have ever done, every mistake you have ever made and so much more come together to make you the beautiful, complex, perfectly messy creature you currently are, and it is precisely this self-definition that makes sadness such a solitary and isolating emotion.

Your pain, like your fingerprints, is unique to you.

In my opinion, the reason depression is so misunderstood is that there is no truly adequate way to relay what it feels like. It’s why the only people who really understand it are those who’ve experienced it first-hand, and even then, their experience of it may differ greatly from your own.

All the while, my mother had been hard-pressed trying to help me in spite of not knowing what the problem was. And all I did was shut her out and pretend I was fine.

I sat my mother down and slowly and shakily unburdened myself of the mountainous load I had been carrying all on my own. I told her about how sad, despondent and lost I had been feeling and how afraid I was. I didn’t exactly tell her what had prompted this long, overdue confession but I said everything I could to make her aware of the gravity of the situation I had found myself in. She listened quietly, her face growing from concerned to resolved.

no one can disrespect you or shame you without your permission.

‘Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with being stupid. I’m stupid,’ I remember my father saying, talking loudly to be heard over the sound of my furious, rather theatrical sobs. ‘Only stupid people can learn things, beta. Smart people think they already know everything.’ ‘But I’m not stupid, Papa,’ I said, tears streaming down my face. ‘Then what’s the problem?’

the person living with depression is not the only one who suffers at its hands. Every family member, romantic partner and close friend suffers too. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, living with depression isn’t easy but loving someone who lives with depression isn’t easy either.

You believe that the other person should ‘just know’ exactly what you’re going through, while the other person believes it is their responsibility to help you feel better … but they often can’t. The truth is someone is never going to fully understand how you feel unless they’ve been through the same thing (sometimes not even then, and they’re certainly not going to understand if you don’t explain it to them), and it is not their responsibility to cure you of your sadness. And that’s okay—it’s a survivable reality—but it’s a reality that takes time and effort to come to terms with.

the phase of anger, not the phase of suicidal ideation—that was my rock bottom. I say this because this was the point at which I lost sight of who I was. This was the point at which the empathy I believe defines me as a person was obscured by anger and frustration. I couldn’t help how I felt, and I had learned it wasn’t my fault I felt the way I did, but I had also learned neither was it anyone else’s. While I had begun to see how difficult it was for others to cope with my depression, I didn’t know where to begin taking responsibility for myself, and I blamed the world around me for what I had become.