I've Never Been (un)Happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

  Over time, I came up with a very basic rule for when I’m depressed. The rule is that when I feel an episode coming on or when I am in the throes of one, I say it. I tell my loved ones that I’m sad, I let them know my sadness is not in any way because of them and I assure them that if I need help, I will ask for it. For me, this simple step of taking the guesswork out of the process has made a tremendous difference and has significantly improved the quality of my relationships during tough times.

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  The way I see it, it was this phase in my depression—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.

  This phase of rock bottom for me was ironically a very happy and transformative time for my family: my sister had bagged her first role, completed her first film and was on the brink of life-altering fame. The joy I felt for my sister and my pride at her accomplishments was absolute, but her success also threw the disorder in my own life into sharp focus. The insecurities I had as a child—fears that I was lacking—all came rushing back. Everyone in my family belonged to a single industry; my parents, my older siblings, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, and now my younger sister, all made movies. I was surrounded by deeply ambitious, driven, successful, famous people. And here I was—no more ambition than to leave my bedroom.

  For the most part, when I grew up I felt an internal pressure to follow in the footsteps of my family, even though deep down I knew that it wasn’t what came naturally to me. My value system had become muddled and complicated by the success of my family and for a long time, I chased career paths that would lead me to the sort of life I thought I should be living. Despite my outgoing personality as a child, I have, as a result of my growing experiences, become a more reserved adult. I’m not a performer or someone who knows how to live in the spotlight. So I was striving to be someone I no longer was. My reality is different from the reality of my father, mother and sister and it’s something I’m still learning to live with. People often ask me if it’s difficult to be the only person in my family who isn’t famous and my answer to that is: yes, of course it is, but not for the reasons you’d think. Having been a part of a ‘famous family’ and having witnessed fame up close my entire life I can tell you that fame isn’t ‘real’. My sister isn’t famous when we’re at home dealing with the monotonous details of our day-to-day lives and my father isn’t an award-winning director when we’re having absurd arguments that only fathers and daughters have. On every single day that does not involve a ridiculously long and tiring award show, my so-called famous family is just beautifully, mundanely human. The issue with fame doesn’t come from the value I ascribe to it, rather the value that others ascribe to it. There is a cultural reverence for fame and celebrity that has insidiously convinced us all that we’re not enough the way we are, and when the person in the bedroom next to yours is someone who’s wildly famous there is bound to be an extended amount of confusion. As Chuck Palahniuk’s Tyler Durden so poetically put it in Fight Club: ‘We’re the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war … our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.’

  Depression deprives you of a good many things on its long, winding course and one of the first things it divests you of is your sense of self. For me, depression’s finest feat was tricking me out of an identity, and that’s not the position you want to find yourself in when you’re surrounded by people with such towering, larger-than-life identities of their own. Devoid of an identity I made depression my identity. It robs you of your energy, skews your thoughts, dries up your motivation and when present, it can dramatically alter your personality, leaving you a stranger to yourself. Even when I had finally admitted to being depressed, I continued to fight it for a very long time. I didn’t know how to separate what I had learned was an illness from my sense of self. I still saw it as a fatal flaw. I began to see my symptoms as defining personality traits rather than what they were: side-effects of a troubled mind. When the people in my life told me I was negative, difficult and unfriendly, I believed that was just who I was deep down inside rather than attributing it to the fact that I was in pain. I embodied my illness and my illness became who I was in my mind.

  The realization that depression was not my identity came to me as an epiphany, but I can’t point to the thought processes that lead to this sudden understanding. I simply woke up one day tired of being boxed in by the labels I had earned over the course of the last twelve years, tired of being restricted by tags of negativity and pessimism. I wasn’t negative or pessimistic, I realized. If I was an inherently negative person, I would never have been able to survive the havoc my mind wreaked. The only reason I made it through so many of my darkest days was that I had hope, a sense of humour and a steadfast belief that my pain didn’t signal the end of my life.

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  The room is in disarray.

  Clothes, shoes and objects at random lay strewn all over the floor and the messy, unmade bed. The table beside it is littered with half-empty tubes of lip-gloss and about six brands of dried-out mascara.

  Every light in the bedroom has been turned on, its brightness giving the false impression that it’s 4 p.m., even though it’s closer to nine.

  From somewhere on the bed comes the muffled sound of a vibrating phone. It goes unheard thanks to the peppy, upbeat sounds of ABBA blasting through the small speaker in the corner of the room.

  At the heart of this disarray is me, my lips a tad too glossy. My hair is being clamped and tugged at by the arms of a straightening iron as I stand in front of the bathroom mirror doing a little jig to ‘Voulez Vous’. (Unrelated: I really shouldn’t have watched the Mamma Mia musical.)

  I rock back and forth, moving and singing along with the music as I force my hair to behave the way I need it to. My fingers accidentally make contact with the straightening iron and I squeal in pain. I turn on the tap and thrust my hand under the cool stream of water. This does nothing to deter the dancing, however, which embarrassingly continues. The energy in this room is markedly different than it was a month ago. Looking at me now it’s impossible to imagine that I could be anything other than the excitable, bubbly entity I currently am. The only remnants of the Feeling’s visit—a strip of sedatives and my journal—lie inconspicuously by my bed, unnoticeable to all but me.

  In the brief moment of silence leading up to the next ABBA song (‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’) I hear the phone announce itself and rush out of the bathroom to answer it. The phone call ends in seconds with a hurried, ‘Be down in two minutes.’ With a final look in the mirror, I fiddle with my hair and flash myself what I think is a winning smile. It’s the first time I’m leaving the house ready to engage with the outside world in weeks, and I’ve all but forgotten that fact.

  The Feeling has left, for the time being, and now that it has it’s almost impossible to remember what it truly felt like while it was here. My mind has chosen selective amnesia and wiped the worst of it from memory, so I’m left to contend with only a hazy fear of the Feeling’s return. In fact, I almost believe I’ve seen the last of it. Almost. I’ve been here a hundred times before, relaxed and forgetful, but I know now from all those previous times that it won’t last. As surely as I’m happy now, I will be sad tomorrow. As surely as the Feeling has l
eft, it will return. But that’s okay, because my life is no longer about running away from depression. It is about learning to walk alongside it.

  I grab my bag and waft out the bedroom door, leaving it wide open behind me. Above it, the clock, restored to its home on the wall, steadily ticks time away.

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  The way I’ve told it, it may seem like I’m suggesting my whole adult life has been nothing but a steady stream of misery with absolutely no bright spots. On the contrary, my life so far has been a rollercoaster of highs and lows, full of the joys of true love, happiness, friendship and companionship. But this is what depression does; it robs you even of joyous hindsight. It poisons your mind and obscures all the good in your life. All the positive, alive moments of life seem like distant, long-lost memories and all that you can see in the rear-view mirror is the pain you’ve left behind.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I remember asking my father one evening, many years ago. We had lapsed into a comfortable silence during an unrelated discussion when the question came bursting out of me.

  ‘Why don’t I know how to be happy?’

  My father surveyed me intently for a moment.

  ‘And why do you want to be happy?’ he asked.

  It seemed like an absurd question.

  ‘What do you mean “why”?’ I shot back. ‘Everyone wants to be happy.’

  ‘Why?’ he pressed.

  ‘I don’t know … who wants to be sad all the time? It’s not normal, and it’s exhausting.’

  He smiled slightly.

  ‘You want to be happy because society has convinced you that so-called “normal” people are happy all the time. You want to be happy because you want to fit in,’ he said simply.

  ‘And why should you fit into the parameters of some made-up definition of normalcy?’ he continued, as my brow furrowed in thought. ‘You’re exhausted because you’re always pretending to be something you’re not. You’re constantly trying to reach this non-existent, ideal state of emotional well-being. It’s not real. You’re being set up to fail.’

  ‘So then what do I do?’ I asked miserably.

  ‘Take off the mask. You aren’t happy? Fine, you aren’t happy. One day you will be. And then you’ll be sad again. Accept that and stop wasting your energy chasing something that doesn’t exist. You can’t spend your life feeling bad about feeling bad.’

  That sleepless night I pondered over my father’s words. He was right. The more I tried and failed at being content, the worse I felt because I was failing at yet another thing.

  This realization for me was the beginning of genuine acceptance, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that most of our problems in life stem from the quest for permanence. In this age of instant gratification we want everything in our lives to come without an expiry date. We want everything to be permanent—relationships, love, beauty, youth, happiness. But the truth is permanence is an illusion, and like everything else in life happiness also comes and goes. Trying to be happy forever is like trying to stop water from slipping through your fingers. It’s not possible, and the only way forward is to realize and accept it.

  The only permanent fixture in life is change. Change. Change. Change.

  And oddly enough, it’s this one truth of life that causes me so much distress and it is also the very thing that helps me feel better. On the one hand it’s the awareness of constant change and transience that sends me into a spiral of anxiety, while on the other it’s hugely freeing to realize that nothing I have now, not even my emotional state of mind, is going to stay the same.

  I chose to accept pain, even though I hated it. Pain, up to a certain degree, is good. Discomfort is not a bad thing, and it’s one of the few emotional states that encourages growth. Physical exercise involves discomfort, but it’s an example of a good sort of pain. Pain that helps you grow. Mental and psychological aches—to a certain extent—are good for you in a similar way. It doesn’t feel great while it’s happening but you are better for having lived through it.

  Happiness is a beautiful, enjoyable feeling to have, and we should, by all means, enjoy it while it lasts. But to me, it’s always been the least transformative of the emotions. Happiness is a one-note emotion that doesn’t challenge you in any way. I’ve learned so much about myself and who I am over the last sixteen years only because of the discomfort I’ve endured. The state of mind I was in forced me to question everything and that’s where learning begins—with questions. It is in sadness that I have travelled to the depths of my soul and become acquainted with its weather-worn exterior. And it is in sorrow that I have learned to tap into the abundant life-force held safely within.

  But acceptance does not come easy, and it’s the most elusive piece of the puzzle for most of us. Over the years and through my reading I’ve discovered the first few steps in beginning to tackle and accept depression are remarkably similar to the first three steps in the twelve-step addiction recovery program. The twelve-step program was initially established by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) as a set of guidelines to help people recover from addiction to alcohol. The twelve steps are deeply spiritual but as an atheist, I’ve been able to find my own meaning in them. The steps were formulated and designed to help treat addiction, but in this case, I’m going to recount, rephrase and apply these steps to mental illness:

  Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over our illness—that our lives had become unmanageable.

  Step one is reasonably straightforward.

  Step one is an admission that you are powerless over your state of mind and that your life, in its current state, has become unlivable.

  For me, this step took a long time. It involved a long process in which I first had to come to terms with the fact that there was a problem and then relinquish control over it, which meant to acknowledge I did not have the means to fix it.

  Step 2: We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

  Step two is open to interpretation and depends entirely on your belief system, but it is primarily about hope.

  Once you accept you are powerless over your state of mind, you agree that your mind (in this particular instance, your brain, your neurochemistry, your genetics) has power over you and that you alone cannot change this. You now seek a power greater than yourself, trusting and believing that it will help you.

  In my case, this power was science and medicine. I chose to believe that psychiatrists, therapists and the right medication were tools more potent than my own force of will and I needed their help.

  Step 3: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of this greater power as we understood it.

  Step three is about furthering the hope and acceptance of steps one and two, and making the decision to ask for, and most importantly, accept help.

  It is realizing that you alone do not have the tools you need to rehabilitate yourself. This doesn’t mean that you go where the wind takes you and you stop taking responsibility for your well-being. It merely means that you accept that you cannot control it.

  For a long time, I was in a tug of war between acceptance and resistance. I accepted that I had an illness, but I resisted the idea that I couldn’t be the one to cure it. I’m a control freak, and I don’t trust other people, and these traits as a combination don’t lend well to submission. So while I took medication and went to therapy, I didn’t submit to or engage with either, and I’d inevitably cook up excuses to stop both. This is the very reason this step requires you to make a decision. Resistance and uncertainty are inevitable; no one likes change, and we especially don’t like change when we can’t control its parameters.

  For a lot of people, acceptance signals failure or resignation, but in my understanding it’s quite the opposite. The only way to solve a problem is to accept that it exists in its current form. Additionally, solving a problem doesn’t always mean eliminating it entirely. For many people like myself, depression is an ongoing affliction, and it
isn’t something that can be completely stamped out. Acceptance also means I’ve had to readjust my value system based on the limitations that depression causes. For me, depression is debilitating and when it’s present, I’m unable to function. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that my mind is different and as a result of that so is my life. I couldn’t hold out for complete recovery because if I did, I would be waiting a very long time.

  I am who I am in the now, and I have to work my life around that. That isn’t giving up; it’s adjusting to the reality of my condition and giving myself a higher chance of living a successful life by not chasing after unrealistic goals.

  This sense of acceptance also eventually led me to something wonderful and transforming: gratitude; a profound sense of gratitude for what depression has given me, rather than what it has taken away.

  They say that in order to experience true happiness you have to have first felt pain. I am certainly no stranger to pain. I’ve experienced a great deal of it, as have so many of us. But the wonderful upside to experiencing all that pain is the deep appreciation I have for moments in which my life and mind are devoid of pain, and moments that even (shockingly) contain joy. The big-picture vantage point I believe I have, the one that has always underlined and highlighted the futility of life and the imminence of death, has also quietly done something else to me. Over the years it has discreetly, without my knowledge, introduced me to the things that truly matter. It has made me aware of how little the many things we place so much value on actually matter. One of the strangest things about living with depression is living with the knowledge that it’s always in my future. No mater how good or peaceful I feel right now, it’s always lurking around the corner. Walking around with the fear of when my depression will return is terrifying, but it’s also extremely humbling as it serves as a potent reminder of the truly meaningful things in my life. It has, bizarrely, made me a calmer person.