How it Started
Imagine sitting down, having the best meal you could ever have, or just watching your favourite movie on your laptop, or just reading a book peacefully. Suddenly, you feel this hit of nausea at the back of your throat, and you feel your mind running. Your heart thumps against your chest like there’s no tomorrow, and slowly, your breathing becomes a chore. Slowly, your jaws tighten up, your body becomes immobile, and you can do nothing. Yup, that’s exactly what I have been feeling for three or more years.
I am proud to say that I am a survivor of depression. However, I cannot yet say that I have defeated anxiety. Maybe somewhere along the way, I have made peace with the fact that, like thousands of others, I have this, and anxiety attacks are normal. That may be, by some twisted fate, this is my curse and maybe my boon, too.
Mental Health in a Brown Household
Growing up, there was no such nothing called mental illness. To be put very bluntly, people who suffered from such were branded “crazy” and still are. It is a rather sad truth, but it is what it is. So when I got upset after I failed my first class test in 11th grade, nobody guided me. Nobody told me that it was okay to fail and that I did not need to make it such a big deal. Instead, I was made to feel the guilt seething through my bones, and I started hating myself. That Archimedes spiral landed me in the crux of what we call depression today.
No, I never had the chance to even go to a therapist or a counsellor or seek someone’s help. Firstly, because no one knows at first that they are suffering from depression. The word is thrown around so casually nowadays that it has probably lost all its value. But, yeah, I was never technically “diagnosed” with it. So, how did I know?
It is pretty normal to see children getting beaten up over simple things in a brown household. Guilt is the first weapon, and backhanded comments are the second and third. Let me tell you, these are enough. Any child would crumble under the weight of these three. It’s almost an occasion to hear a parent saying this to their child- “son, I’m proud of you”.
On top of that, when you are born a girl, the difficulty becomes multifold. However, as an observant and curious child, I did find out a lot of things before my parents did. For example, the relentless crying and insomnia triggered me to search deeper. And when I tried to self-harm, I understood somewhere I needed help. Again, going to a psychiatrist when you are an Indian girl is much less seen as an effort to be better. It just feeds into the well of rumours, and yes, mental illness is branded as something “abnormal”.
The Abyss Called Anxiety
Anxiety does not arrive in a day. It is the result of pent-up issues, anger, sadness, and all kinds of emotions over a long period. It stems from a basic fact- that you need to have everything under control. The simple truth of nature is that it is the exact opposite. You cannot have anything under control except maybe how much water you drink in a day. Stress, failures, and obstacles are bound to come your way.
As a person who had never been exposed to the world, not even so much as to participate in a debate, I was shy. It is self-explanatory when I say that I was not the best at coping with changes. And definitely not when I lost people close to me. Losing my two grandparents consecutively was a big thing that I had never seen coming.
But life is unfair, right? It slaps you right when you are low and expects you to deal with it. I could not eat under the pressure of seeing death in front of me. I could not sit still for a moment, thinking about what my future holds. But life does not stop. I had to prepare for tests among all of this, and that’s when I got my first anxiety attack.
When I say this, remember that there have been many more attacks since then, and the experience level is higher now. But for a teenager who barely knew that her mind was coping with things beyond her capacity, it was scary. It felt like death was approaching. Heart rates go up in a second, your brain starts spinning at 1000 rpm, and it feels like everything is spinning out of control. And, of course, the underlying nausea and chest pains do not help.
These episodes would culminate in my frightened parents taking me to the hospital and returning exhausted and frantically scared. And for me, I would be filled with embarrassment, guilt, and the sheer thought that maybe something was wrong with me.
The Road Towards Healing
It took me a long time to understand what exactly I was suffering from. Heck, I swept off the first episode as indigestion and went on with life. But remember, an unattended wound keeps festering and might become fatal one day. That is precisely what happened to me as well.
Four years after my first episode, the pandemic hit, and we went into lockdown. The whole world suffered losses, and I did too. The death of my last grandparents hit me. Unknowingly, I went on without acknowledging my trauma or the grief. As expected, when it did hit me, it wasn't lovely. I missed exams due to constant episodes. I could not concentrate on anything. I would wake up with severe pain in my stomach, nausea, and sweating. All through the day, I would feel my hands and feet shaking and getting cold, and I could not find a reason. It took me innumerable anxiety attacks, losing 14 kg of weight, and the sheer will to live to accept that I need help.
I started with online therapy sessions. That is a journey in itself. Just like you need to find the right serum to suit your skin, you need to find the right therapist for your mind. I went through intense therapy for two years, and I discovered a lot about myself. In fact, I unlearned every principle that was taught to me and learned new things. I tried, with every fibre of my being, to remind myself that not everything is in control. Similarly, not everything needs to be negative, too.
It is a long path. And a mighty painful one. But you need only one thing- the right environment. The right one will automatically make you feel safe, loved, and calm. And that is where half the anxiety ebbs away.
The second thing to keep in mind is that the graph is hardly linear. You will take two steps forward and one step back. But that’s how growth comes. And there will be days when you wake up to experience another episode. On that day, it will feel like there has been no progress at all. But that is the day when you need to muster all your energy to feed your brain this- “Not every day is the same and I have come a long way from the first episode. I am on the path to healing and this is a part of it.”
Does it Ever Go Away?
Honestly, I do not know the answer. I have been trained to make this a part of my life and move along with it. Like a mole on my arm. And so I have accordingly exercised, meditated, taken precautions. But it might not be the same for you. It might stay with you for just a year and then go away forever.
However, it is safe to say that we, the ones who fall mentally ill, are higher in emotional quotient than others. While that makes us automatically more capable of greatness, it also induces a little bit of complications. Quoting my therapist, “Like some roads are more prone to accidents than others, some minds are more susceptible to such episodes than others.” But, if we look at it closely, it actually means we feel more, empathize more, think more, and none of those are bad things. In fact, those are what make us special.
How It's Going
It has been three years since I last took therapy. I won’t lie; I still get episodes, but the frequency is lower. I do not fear waking up to nausea anymore. I exercise, meditate, journal, and try to make myself happy. I feel that is the way to achieve self-love.
The part of my mind that harbours my anxiety is a dormant one. Yes, it does erupt sometimes, but not in a nice way. But that part of the brain also helps me survive because anxiety is basically an amplification of our fight-or-flight response.
I have understood that my mind needs as much taking care of as my body does. Neglecting one part of the body because of societal standards and age-old traditions hardly makes sense. And in that, I want to tell myself and teach the world to Be Unapologetically You!
