All of me, even the bad parts
I’ve had to learn the hard way, since I graduated into adulthood, that I am every bit a bad person as I am a good one. That for all the charm, there is manipulation, for all the charity, there is greed and for every speck of generosity, there are pockets of envy. What happens when you grow up around extraordinarily good people is that you are determined to be one yourself. And while that may be a noble pursuit, this drive for perfection will only lead you to shame’s doorstep. This I learned from experience. And also from Brene Brown. She says, when perfection leads, shame is riding shotgun. And this perfectly vicious and balanced ecosystem cycles endlessly within me. It does not suffice to say that it took a lot to come to terms with it. Because, when you look at the bad parts of yourself, you are confronted with not just your own misgivings but also of others. It is an exercise to not swim in self-loathing, or chip at your self-esteem, to not shame and not to allow others to shame — and most important to underline here — to not shame others. For those of us who come with an emotional inheritance that includes a fear of failure, this sort of homework is far from pleasant. Homework I say — and there is no word that fits better because your mind is your home.
When you realize that despite all the books you’ve read, and the feminism you’ve practiced, you still assign yourself a score (any numerical value in fact), it’s a failure. When your self-esteem chips away in these little bits, it’s as if the floor you stand on is holding back lava. The gaps allow the bubbling fire to shoot through. The sting of envy or jealousy as the unknown becomes more known, as patterns are revealed, as partners found, as your friends birth and begin, all these stories unravel and the sitcoms you once laughed at becoming your life, and your life becoming “content” (noun rather than adjective) and you find yourself a tiny droplet of the ocean — it all becomes too much. You’ve stretched yourself too thin.
The first sign of this was in 2016. I didn’t know it back then of course but I do now. I even took a photograph that now serves as a reflection of my own mind. It is of my room- bathed in the afternoon sun. The gauzy curtain filters the rays and shadows cast on the walls. My bed, framing the photo, is creased pleasantly. Whenever I look at the photo, I can hear — despite the lack of dynamism in the picture — the sounds of children playing cricket on the ground floor far below. It was most likely a warm day — just as most days in Gujarat are. My perspective is that of an observer standing at the far end of the room. My diary lies on the sill, pages open to the sky. There is supposed to be warmth in the picture but I have chosen to suck the color out. In the monochrome, the light feels cold and the shade dark. It is vulnerable and sad. And that is exactly how I felt.
When I go back to my diary entries from those days, I find a belly of words scribbled furiously. Loud spinning sentences, agitated, and unsettled feelings that have nowhere to go. What do you do with so many emotions? And so, I wrote. I had no trouble filling empty pages. The more I removed the vocabulary temporarily from within, the more stable I felt. Yet, if I read them now — they are incoherent. There is pretense. I distract myself from the worst feelings. I embellish, I subtract. But I never get to the point: my mind was falling apart and I only have that one photograph that truly evidences it.
I have never spoken about mental health before largely because I have only suffered impermanent voids, or so I have believed. I was an extremely happy child and continued persistently throughout teenagehood to project a sense of self-satisfaction. I had no regrets. My world back then uplifted me. In this manufactured pedestal, I settled in comfortably. But like all pedestals — they are really just cabins on a Ferris wheel, you come down at some point. And so did I. I touched ground in 2016 — and then couldn’t get up afterward.
It is on the quietest days when the hollow roars the loudest. If you track my photographs from that year and the one after, you can discern from the cadence of my words the tempo of my mind. I see in the objects I have chosen to capture — symmetry, order, new dawns, mist, freshness, contact — all that was absent within my own life. The more I have curated an album to self-present as grateful, the more I unraveled within.
A few months later, life served me sufficient distractions. I busied myself with work, with a hibiscus plant, with a Patti Smith obsession. I moved cities, spoke a different language, and felt like a new person. It was suddenly over — this emptiness. I assigned it to be just a speed break in my organically positive outlook on life.
I reassembled my life but in doing so, I forgot that the more my neurons wander, the more I need to create a foothold for the ambling thoughts that visit. In the years that have passed, I have learned to be vulnerable with several parts of myself but not all parts of myself. With this cheaply constructed footbridge, I tried to weather all the seasons. But it was an endeavour intended to fail — and when it did, I realized what I did not do was the more important task of all.
Can I accept all of me? I now ask of myself. Even the worst parts of me. A therapist would say, ‘recognize the qualities you are not proud of’. As architects of our character, all our designs are trimmed to fit the social fabric but without that would these qualities have any moral heft? Nature does not distinguish. These are just qualities. They exist to exist.
Yet, all the self-help diets in the world are aimed at extinguishing this. Pettiness is meant to be squelched. We are meant to string a constellation of successes but ignore the realities of what makes us human. Nothing projects perfection as much as an honest, imperfect life yet we airbrush our vulnerabilities even from our own diaries, notes, and self confessions. Instead, I realized that the task that is ahead of me was to console and accommodate first. And then maybe I would be able tame my worst.
This is not to say that you must condone crime or felicitate immorality. When thought turns into action, it departs from the realm of philosophical and will be dealt with by the more tangible laws of justice and societal judgement. Inside your mind, however, your feelings are free, and pay no bills to you for the inner turmoils they force you to endure. Ironically, the more attention you pay them and the more compassion you gather for yourself, you will find that it is much easier to accept the paradoxical nature of most human beings. It is almost as if a universal key is handed to you — one that reminds you that the same object can free and jail simultaneously.
And so, I spent most part of the pandemic reestablishing my sense of self. Drawn into the labors of higher education and then flung into a career, it took a world-bending virus to halt not just the affairs of the external world but also to highlight the state of affairs of my inner one. Therapy helped — needless to say. But so did nature. So did conversations. In an almost quixotic turn of events, I realized that once you no longer wish to capture and immobilize the free radicals of your mind, you are no longer bound by them either. Freeing them freed me. I allowed myself to admit that I could be jealous, small-minded, and avaricious in ways I never dreamed. Along with a sense of ambition came a streak of meanness. Focus and perseverance danced often with a side of cold disregard. As my empathy expanded so did my willingness to turn it off and remain numb.
If unfettered, this can turn into an almost dangerously off-track sense of self. The world, even on its best day, can serve to embitter and if I carried every sour lemon thrown at me, you can guess which qualities would occupy the center of my personality. So I am glad I was able to catch it, at least for now.
However, the work is far from over. I have had to admit with reluctance that I am still held sway by the seasons. Depression fogs my brain for a good half-year when the air is cold and the chill bites into the walls. But when the month is June, the weather is warm and I feel in full possession of all my faculties: emotional, physical, and mental, I am at least able to write this all down. If not for anything, but to show myself, six months hence, that I once survived the onslaught of my own demons.
And so, come December, I will be able to do so yet again.
