I've Never Been (un)Happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

  I retreated further and further into myself. My personality had already undergone a considerable amount of change and as my teenage insecurities grew I transformed even more.

  A year ago, while Alia and I were in the process of packing up and moving into our own house, I stumbled upon a gold mine—a dusty case of old home movies. Within minutes we were in front of the TV laughing and hooting at the antics of our tiny selves. A seven-year-old me burst into the frame, dancing and performing for the camera with, frankly, far too much enthusiasm. ‘Darling, do you really have to be in every single shot? We can’t see anyone else,’ came my mother’s patient but weary voice from somewhere off-screen, as I suddenly jumped up in front of the camera, waving at it with a gap-toothed grin and eclipsing everything (i.e., Alia) behind me for the eleventh time in a row.

  Present-day Alia turned to look incredulously at present-day me.

  ‘Oh my god! Is this really you?’ she said. ‘I forgot you used to be like this. What happened to you?’

  As I watched the unencumbered, unbridled joy of my younger self, my smile faded and my amusement gave way to deep, enveloping sadness.

  What did happen to me? I’ve been this timid version of myself for so long now that I’ve forgotten I was ever anything else. I’ve forgotten that I once used to be free. It was when I was sixteen and had somehow, against all odds, made my way into college (my mother cried with joy when I got 73 per cent in my tenth standard board exams, that’s how precarious things were) that one of the most damaging elements of my depression—insomnia—made itself known to me for the first time. When you’re in the throes of what feels like all-consuming pain, sleep is respite. It’s your last refuge from the unrelenting guerrilla attacks carried out against you by your own mind—and here I was, unable to sleep.

  At the start of it I would toss and turn, wrestling with every negative thought I had while willing myself to fall asleep, though never succeeding. I’d get into bed at night, lie there wide-eyed, exhausted and stirring until morning and then get dressed and leave for college, often subsisting on no more than an hour of sleep each night. This pattern would repeat itself for days, leaving me disoriented, unable to function and almost always sobbing with fatigue. When my mind and body finally crumbled beneath the weight of sleeplessness, I’d drift into fitful, nightmare-ridden sleep, which I sometimes found less preferable to no sleep at all. Nighttime soon became my own personal hell, and I’d become consumed with dread as soon as the sun would set.

  I eventually gave up trying to sleep at all on nights like these and spent my time finding creative ways to be self-destructive instead. I discovered alcohol when I was sixteen-years-old. I discovered it like most teenagers do, with friends, and like most of the lot we spent an inordinate amount of time chasing its highs. I loved how alcohol made me feel. It was an instant tranquillizer, making me blissfully numb to the flood of bad feelings I was otherwise unable to contain. I soon discovered that if I drank enough, I could impose on myself the lack of consciousness I so desperately needed.

  Binge drinking wasn’t a big deal when I was a teenager because everyone else my age was doing it too. We all got carried away with the new-found freedom of college under the illusion of finally being adults. All sleepovers at friends’ homes involved stealing alcohol from the bars of their slumbering, blissfully oblivious parents. All socializing came with the pursuit of alcohol and getting into clubs.

  But the numbing effects of alcohol didn’t last long—the more I drank, the less it helped, and ultimately it began to exacerbate my pain instead of dulling it. It was only when I was in my twenties and the novelty of alcohol had all but worn off that I realized I used alcohol as a crutch during depressive episodes. I wasn’t an alcoholic; I could stop drinking for months at a time when I wanted to, but I had my alcoholic father’s genes, and every time my mood plummeted my abuse of alcohol soared.

  In the times I drank to escape I did it to hide from my feelings because it was too agonizing to confront them. It took me years to learn that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t outrun my feelings and the antidote to them definitely wasn’t at the bottom of a bottle. Even today drinking and partying requires constant self-awareness and is no longer an option when my mood is low.

  Depression and substance abuse form a cycle according to Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon and a long-time sufferer of depression. People who are depressed abuse substances in an attempt to free themselves of depression, and in doing so damage their lives to the extent that they become further depressed by the wear-and-tear it causes.

  I’ve found that for me this abuse isn’t restricted to substances like alcohol alone. I’m an emotional eater and my relationship with food, much like my relationship with myself, is a troubled one. It is said that most addictive behaviours are caused by underlying mental and emotional issues. When you’re depressed or anxious you’re desperate to feel good, or at the very least desperate to feel less bad. In order to avoid feelings of stress and sadness we turn to not-so-great things that will help us feel better; things like alcohol, unhealthy food and endless reruns of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

  My parents had long realized that something was wrong in those teenage years, even though, like me, they didn’t quite know what the problem was. I had slowly walled myself off to greater and greater degrees until there came a point where I would no longer leave my room. What eventually emerged was more surly panda—I had dark circles down to my toes—than secretive teenager. My parents were disturbed by how much of a misanthropic loner I was growing to be and they, like me, were reaching a breaking point.

  Teenagers are incredibly innovative when it comes to hiding things from their parents, and they’re also frighteningly good at it. No matter how well you think you know your teenage child or their various exploits, trust me, it is only the tip of the iceberg. I was blessed with open-minded and liberal parents and I rarely had cause to lie to them. As a result, they were more aware of my escapades than most of my friends’ parents were of theirs. Despite their understanding and my mother’s hawk-like attention to my life, I had carefully hidden away a whole distorted inner world that I allowed them no access to. This left them with no other option but to discipline my wayward ways as strictly as they could, and while it did keep me out of trouble, they were unable to figure out the driving force behind this quiet rebellion, concealed as it was.

  Truly, I was ashamed and afraid of how I felt. I hadn’t yet come to terms with my feelings and to tell my parents about them would be to admit they were real and I was too weak to deal with them on my own. It took a much darker phase in my life for me to finally admit that I needed help.

  « »

  I first contemplated suicide in the very nascent stages of my depression. So early on in fact that even I am quite surprised by it. I was introduced to the notion of suicide in a magazine article detailing 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 romanticizing of suicide in the way it was reported. 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 cessation 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.

  Nevertheless my perception of suicide changed when I got older and witnessed death 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 was every bit a part of our lives and she cared for our family like we were her own. We laughed, we fought, we even shared a room. Sharda died unexpectedly in a road accident one humid August evening. She
was twenty-eight. 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. In our family I took the news of her death the hardest. I plunged further into the far reaches of my depressive hole, by which time the romantic notions of death and suicide I once had—that it was my one path to salvation—faded away. As the reaction intensified, all idealistic notions were replaced with despair; a horrid 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. When low, 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.

  Nothing sums up my feelings in those days more aptly than the words of David Foster Wallace in his seminal novel Infinite Jest:

  The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. 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. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’ can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

  Like Wallace describes I too felt as though I was trapped in a building going down in flames and my only way out was to jump from the window. But I was lucky enough to have the common sense to be terrified by the prospect of the fall as well, and I couldn’t seem to work up the nerve for it.

  Young people, more than most, seem prone to the belief that death is not an irreversible cessation of consciousness, and it’s why young people, more than most, are likely to be impulsively driven to suicide in the face of negative events in their lives, as revenge, punishment, or in order to prove a point. The depressed who have religious or spiritual beliefs purporting the existence of an afterlife also seem to believe that death will somehow improve their circumstances.

  The truth is only this: there is absolutely no way to know what awaits us in death.

  In 2006, I finally reached the end of my tether. No longer able to grapple with the unending darkness inside me, I made an attempt to take my own life. Mercifully I failed and was unable to go through with it. The insanity and sheer desperation of that moment was like an electric shock that jolted me back into my senses. In its aftermath, the terror it invoked in me made me realize 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. 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 cycles 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, from the irretrievability of suicide. 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 since I was fourteen-years-old but once the thought of suicide left me, 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 that you’ll find me curled up crying on my bathroom floor. ‘I imagine death so much it feels like a memory,’ writes Lin-Manuel Miranda in the award-winning Hamilton: An American Musical. Never has a sentence resonated with me so much.

  It seems alien and absurd to me now that I ever 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 it is, 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 do its best to help. But no, it’s just one thing after another with the reckless 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 twenty-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 in a test tube.

  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. 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 this 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, 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.

  « »

  Some say the only way you can describe depression is through metaphor, analogy and allegory.

  The only descriptive words we have to try and communicate pain—words like ‘sadness’ and ‘grief’—don’t even begin to reveal the complexity of the emotions they’re assigned to. It’s why we must resort to likening depression to parasitic monsters that drain us of our joy or dark shadows that consume us.