Of Unspoken Maladies
The pandemic was a productive period in my life regarding weight loss. I was exercising six days a week, exerting enough mindfulness to take the mandatory 24-hour-long rest. The world was in shambles, but distant celebratory notes bellowing something about nature healing could be heard above all the din. A new dichotomy of people emerged - those who shared the hope that everything would soon go back to as it used to be, and those who waited for the apocalypse with bated breath. Special as I was, I belonged to a third category of enlightened beings who oscillated between the two.
The brown shadow around my eyes were indicators of character development. âYou are taking yourself too seriously. You have no real reason to be sad.â I repeated my professorâs words in my head like a mantra, as I laboured towards the daily goal of two hundred crunches. He was right too. What real reason did I, a 19-year-old who never struggled in the entirety of her life, have to be sad about? Basking in the warmth of the sun rise after a night coloured by insomnia, Iâd tell myself, as if indulging in some forbidden pleasures of the flesh, that it was okay to have private griefs. If no one knows about it, no one will question it. I didnât have struggles real enough to be left incapacitated by some strange, illusory thoughts anyway. And life went on, for months on end, in the confines of the four walls of my bedroom in which I exercised to a point where my mind and body conspired to make me give up. And then, life went on, for hours on end, where my brain would shut down, rendering my body immobile. And life still went on, minutes on end, where I wouldnât realise my eyes were swollen and crusty from all the tears that rolled out without my permission. Life went on, and making it through each second became a choice I had to make all over again.
It's ironic how some chemical imbalances in the body make an atheist call out to a higher power and beg for some reprieve. My limbs would extend in an effort to reach out, only to be interrupted by the slight spikes in dopamine by the courtesy of Pinterest. There I found a comfortably endless joylessness, uninterrupted by the psychological taxation of being perceived online by concerned friends and ambiguously motivated acquaintances. Comfort is a funny thing â funny in its capacity to distract you enough from worries real or otherwise.
In a few monthsâ time, a professional ruled that all this suffering was merely an ill-of-ease. There is nothing wrong with you, it is not your fault â contradictory assurances were given by well-meaning adults, who were forged and beaten in the fires of adulthood way longer than I was. But despite their guarantees, the implication was that something indeed was wrong with me; the protein structures that were handed down to me by my ancestors, which ensured that I made it to life and that sustained me throughout, had made some errors in its coding. Somehow it was my own fault â my brain made involuntary lapses in its chemical judgements. It was not my doing; it was my bodyâs. Me and my body became two separate entities, one working against the other. It wasnât the fault of the adults who failed me or the world which hated me. It wasnât the fault of the economy or the society. It was the fault of my flesh.
Two authors that spring to my mind when I contemplate depression, trauma, and the powers that be, are Suzanne Rivecca and John Green. Rivecca in her Ugly, Bitter, and True gives us a testimonial on depression, outlining the condition in all its visceral hideousness. Her realistic portrayl of depression - the struggle to âpresent some cohesive semblance of personhood for [the therapist] to analyse and respond toâ, and that phase in life where âsleep was the only tolerable state of beingâ - were too real. Greenâs The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centred Planet is expanded and compiled from his podcast, and in these essays, he connects his traumatic personal experiences as a person with OCD, to his passion to impart knowledge. In each essay Green reviews an aspect of the Anthropocene age on a five-star scale â from the Notes App to Viral Meningitis - and explores it through a cherished or a traumatic experience. An essay that struck me was one about the now extinct Kauaâi âĹâĹ bird which touched upon the all too familiar, unfathomable devastation of loneliness.
To conclude on a more positive note, I believe that I have grown as a person. I do not blame myself anymore; now I blame capitalism for everything. I hold on to the dictum, âPessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,â as I push through the drudgery of life in late-stage capitalism.