Surviving 2019
A journey of overcoming mental health struggles
2019 began off as a disaster. I was plunged into a deep, consuming depression that made it hard for me to get out of bed. That’s me below from earlier today, at the end of the year, reading by a lake on a solo trip for my birthday. Self-sufficient, happy, free. I’m writing this post like a page from a diary to hold up a mirror to how I got my mental health from what seemed like a point of no-return to here. So that others struggling with mental health might see themselves reflected in it, perhaps even get some strength to fight through it. That’s at best what I can hope for with writing.
I have spent about four years (and half my savings) in therapy, few of those years being spent on anti-anxiety and anti-depression medication, few only in counselling. Many years ago, I survived a suicide attempt. It’s quite evident that I have struggled with mental health for a very long time.
By the beginning of 2019, I already had the wind blown out of me. I had a harsh, unexpected breakup with a long-term partner who I was planning to marry. My Masters degree and the 3 gold medals I had been awarded were withheld by TISS. I had almost no friends in Bombay. My UN contract was expiring and I needed a new job. My family’s health was failing (Alzheimer’s, blindness, surgeries…). I stopped eating. I stopped sleeping. I lost 10 kg. I was lonely, heartbroken, unemployed, underweight, unbearably depressed. This year, I worked really hard on myself to change that.
Note: I acknowledge and understand that most people do not have the privileges that I have had to access therapy, medication, healing spaces, education, jobs, and support structures.
“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” — Haruki Murakami
The first thing I did was get a job. In between a lot of drinking and smoking and counselling, I managed to study for and give a few job interviews. I wanted to start afresh, and I didn’t care that everyone said you can’t leave everything and move to a new place and just start over. I would find my own ways to heal. Turns out you can move to a new place and just start over. I took up a job in Delhi and I moved.
After I moved to Delhi, I was still in really bad shape. I was scared of being alone for a long time. I was scared of being left alone for a long time. I am so lucky to have friends who understood that. A close childhood friend friend let me live with him in his room for months in the beginning of the year. Even after I got a place of my own in the city, for a long time I continued to keep keys to his place and my clothes there. When I shifted houses for the second time in Delhi, a friend visited town and stayed with me for a couple of weeks every other month.
When another close childhood friend visited town, he stayed with me for a while, singing, partying with me, helping me with my laundry, and even cleaning off glass shards from my skin and bathtub one time when a glass cabinet collapsed over me in the shower. After two whole years, I was finally living in the same town as my three closest girlfriends — the four of us have spent all birthdays and special occasions together this year. I made a lot of new friends this year who by now feel like family. My friends have booked doctor’s appointments for me and taken me to the hospital and airport when I’ve been unwell. This unfailing support structure was crucial in getting me through the eye of the storm. Thank you, you know who you are!
A very understated but important thing I did this year was burning bridges. I indiscriminately and selfishly burnt all my bridges with exes and associated friends circles. That has freed up so much of my mental bandwidth. We’re told to be grateful for the people who come into our lives, and that is true, but I think we should also be grateful for the people who leave our lives. I am happier because of the people I no longer have in my life.
For the first 6 months when I moved to Delhi, I did not dare visit my family because I didn’t even want to be in the same city as an ex. In hindsight, it pains me to think that I stayed away from home for so many months to avoid a nostalgic city. It was not easy staying away from my mother. She is my best friend. Many years ago, when I had attempted to kill myself, it was my mother who had broken into my house through the window to find me. It was my mother who had booked a psychiatrist’s appointment for me, and waited outside during all my sessions for a month. When I couldn’t get out of bed for weeks, she had sat with me at home every day, day after day, painting and reading with me. Nothing I do in my entire lifetime will ever be as difficult as what my parents went through to raise me. It is now years since then, but slowly over the months, I have made my way back home. My parents get all the credit for letting me take my time to make home feel like home again.
People can help you a lot, but at the end of the day you have to get better yourself. So I had decided that I wanted to travel as much as I could this year. Apart from scuttling between Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, and Kolkata for work, I took some lovely vacations — some alone, some with friends, some with family. I visited Coorg, Kasol, Alibaug, Jaipur, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Udaipur. I met fellow travellers and listened to their incredible stories. I made some unforgettable memories. I sang old Hindi songs with a group of elderly locals in a tiny chai shop in the mountains around Chhoj village in Himachal Pradesh. I went on a desert safari in Dubai. I visited beautiful lakes, rivers, beaches, mountains, museums, art galleries, libraries, spas, and cafes.
On my travels, I began picking up new hobbies. On my Himachal Pradesh trip, I spent a lot of my time colouring in the balcony of my hostel overlooking the river. On my second day there, an intrigued fellow traveler joined me. By the third day, almost the entire hostel was sitting around in the balcony and common room, making art. It was beautiful — a bunch of complete strangers just creating art together. When I returned to Delhi from that trip in April, I framed and hung up in my room the art I had made with the fellow backpacker. When he once visited me in Delhi, I showed him the wall frame and he loved it.
Colouring felt peaceful and somehow therapeutic— it didn’t need too much of my mindspace while I was at it, so I could let my thoughts run wild onto other things while still keeping me occupied and away from anxiety. I had never made art in my whole life before. This year, I was determined to give it a shot. I bought some sketching and painting supplies in Delhi, and decided that Mandalas were going to be my cliché thing. I spent a lot of my free time this year mindlessly sketching and painting. Here’s pictures of some of the art I made.
After getting excessively enthusiastic about painting, I soon got bored of it. Once the initial thrill of painting began wearing off, the familiar anxieties started settling in in its place. So I began learning embroidery. Here’s some stuff I embroidered, some complete, some works in progress, hopefully to not be entirely abandoned once this thrill too wears off.
I’ve been cooking occasionally for 5 years now, but for a few months this year, I cooked three full meals everyday — breakfast, chapatis, sabzi, daal, rice. I’d do the cooking on my own — end to end, from buying groceries, all the chopping and the slicing and the garlic peeling, kitchen prep, cooking, and cleaning up. Cooking made me feel like I had some control over at least something — my appetite. I’d put on some calming music and chop-toss-fry. I cooked everything from everyday ghar ka khaana to house-party finger food. Here is a sneak peek into some of the food I cooked this year.
The one way I have always overcome lows in mental health is through working. So I dived into my work this year. I graduated Masters top of my class at TISS with two golds and a silver medal. A part of my Masters thesis got accepted by a feminist peer-reviewed journal. I wrote for gender publications. Law publications. Tech publications. Policy publications. Academic publications. Media publications. I gave public talks. I spoke on panels and roundtables around the country. I gave media interviews for tv, newspapers, and documentaries. I regularly put out and discussed my work on Twitter. I published some interesting research at work. In keeping with my determination to change the things around me that were making me unhappy, I even changed two jobs.
In hindsight, this is so easy to type out as a list. But it was so difficult to keep at it. I was not always easy on myself. I set impossibly high standards for myself. It’s especially difficult to have standards when you know you aren’t meeting them, which when you have bad mental health, is all the time. But standards are aspirational. They’re only there to motivate you to do your best and slowly get to where you want to be, at your own pace. Let me save you a hard-earned lesson: When you suffer from bad mental health, if you’re doing something 60% as well as you want to, you should feel good about it.
Politics was a very active and important part of my life beyond work in 2019. I put an enormous amount of time, energy, money, and effort in educating, agitating, and organizing as much as I could. I attended strategy meetings and consultations by women’s rights groups, I will hopefully soon be joining the women’s wing of a political party. I screamed my lungs out at a lot of protests throughout the year. I was detained around four times by the Delhi police for protesting. I got an informal notification for “leading innocent persons [adult protesters] into violation of orders” from the Bangalore police. Instead of breaking down when I was getting detained, my friend pointed out that I was laughing in one of the pictures of me getting detained that came up in the news. What is a revolution without laughing and dancing?
I had a rule for any piece of literature or pop culture I consumed this year — it had to be female or queer led, or having strong female or queer characters in it. Only women and queer authors please and thanks. Only women and queer led TV shows and movies. A lot of Indian content. A lot of political content. Bojack Horseman’s final season has a scene in which a character looks straight into the camera and walks you through handling an anxiety attack. Fleabag shows horny women on television. Dear White People and Pose show the hierarchies within black and queer communities. Television is getting real.
After I had a pregnancy scare (which just turned out to be a PCOS late period), my gynaecologist put me on daily birth control tablets this year. Honestly, I recommend all women to get in on birth control. I did have to initially learn to get used to the mood swings they caused (and it is terrible that non-invasive birth control forms don’t exist for women with minimal side effects), but being in control of my sexual health made me feel significantly more empowered and safe. I think all women could do with more of that in our lives.
As the year went along, I gradually decreased the frequency of my counselling sessions, and haven’t been to any after the first six months. I do not wish to discourage anyone from taking medication (please take your medications) but pills never worked for me. I had been on them for months a few years ago, but their side effects had just made me worse. I think we need to all find our own ways of getting better.
This takes a long time. I was winging it the whole time, trying my hand at different things, hoping one or the other would work out. But it took a long time to actually get a hang of it. I cut my finger while cooking multiple times. I burnt the jeera. Every time. I accidentally sprayed acrylic paint all over my desk and chair. I kept poking myself with a sewing needle. I did a hundred wrong stitches that could not be sewn out. I didn’t make it through some job interviews. Self-care does not look pretty. It’s mostly just doing things you probably wouldn’t even do if you didn’t need them for your life to go on. The hard ugly work of just being a person. So I decided to also post pictures of what a lot of my first few attempts looked like when I started out painting and cooking, to acknowledge my many, many failed attempts.
Getting healthier has meant that I’ve had more bandwidth, time, space, and energies to focus on myself and newer, healthier experiences. But you have to keep working through things. Whatever they may be. Painting. Stitching. Cooking. Talking to a therapist. Living with a friend. Traveling. Reading. Working. Fighting. All the time. It’s not doing just one thing or a few things. It’s everything you can think of. You have to keep learning the same lessons again and again with mental health. It is exhausting. Healing is not an outcome of doing those things, it is through the process of doing them through which we heal. Be down for as long as you want. Everyone moves at their own pace. But you have to be something else after. It gets better, but you have to do it. Every single day. At the end of the day, when the lights are gone and the masks are off, it’s you alone with yourself. That’s who you need to look after most selfishly.
It’s my birthday today as I write this. I took two days off to come on a solo trip to Rajasthan. I’ve spent my time here reading, reflecting, writing, rowing a boat across a peaceful lake, and strolling around getting lost in the streets. Most importantly, I spent time sleeping. The rest of the year I am raging, shouting, protesting, calling out. I just wanted to spend my birthday sleeping. Women are exhausted. We need to gift ourselves some rest when we can.
But I want to take a moment to reflect on how far I’ve come from being someone who was scared of being alone at the beginning of this year to sitting alone by a lake in a new city right now, writing this. I now love spending time with myself. The woman I am becoming has cost me people, relationships, spaces, and material things. Choosing her over everything has made all the difference to my mental health.
