How I faced the strangeness within me and saved my life

For as long as I can remember I’ve been afraid. My greatest fear: connecting with people. More precisely, the inability to connect with them. Something so easy. Impossible! From the earliest age filling me with terror. While my cousin or my brother, easy in their skin — fun, funny and smart — knew instinctively what to say, with self-possession, betraying no self consciousness or shyness, I was behind them, crippled, my words crushed in my chest. For fear... of what? Failure, humiliation, being exposed as... empty, strange? I don’t even know. But from such an early age. I was doomed. Seeing the world around me, I kept it to myself. I learned to display the surface mannerisms and attitudes of a well-adjusted girl.

And I worked diligently, I studied hard, continuing along a well-delineated path toward success, masking any strangeness I felt. But certain ruptures occur in life, revealing a terrifying universe beyond plans. When I was 19 my father developed a brain tumour. He went for exploratory surgery that was a disaster: it paralysed him. No time to say goodbye to the father I knew. For a year he died slowly at home, full of the same rage I locate within myself.

What I’d previously felt as a creeping but manageable strangeness turned into a depression from which I could find no reasonable way out. Two things impressed upon me repeatedly during this period of my life: Death was imminent, and the life I had learnt to play along with was suffocating, leading toward another kind of death. At this point I needed to talk to someone, or find an outlet. Earlier, I might have taken comfort in books, but I needed something living, visceral. To dance, to drink, to have sex, to make mistakes. But this was not an easy thing to do, the space for it in my world was hidden in shadows. I saw shame, suspicion, the need to be spotless, the increased demand for success. Do well in school. Study hard. Get a good job. Marry into a good family. Do the GRE. Go to America. Do not slip up. Do not fail. Achieve. Be a valuable member of society. I became reckless anyway. I lashed out, damaging myself willingly, enjoying myself in the process, damaging myself more in my enjoyment, confronting the need to connect by bypassing normal behaviour, by heading toward oblivion. Yet the need to talk did not diminish. So I went to speak to a psychologist. But he only displayed an exaggerated interest in my sex life, encouraging me to describe acts that had not happened. I left, but not before jokingly suggesting he give me Prozac, to which he very casually said sure, and filled out a prescription. I was on Prozac for two years. I’m not even sure it worked. At best I felt a numbness that sat atop the numbness I already felt, an incubus, a night hag, a day hag. A fog. I continued to damage myself. I had suicidal days.

Three things, I can say now with some distance, saved me, if save is not too strong a word. The first was meeting someone who listened to me, who did not judge, was not ashamed, and was patient while I suffered. The second was yoga, which gave me the physical discipline to control my mind. The third was the desire to use my mind to shape the world creatively, to write. I reduced the Prozac dosage and finally stopped. Aside from having someone who understands, I don’t advocate for anything: yoga is not for everyone, Prozac or other medication can be incredibly helpful, essential even, to others.

This is my own brief story, and there’s no moral to it other than to say these feelings exist, and they’re nothing to be ashamed of.

(This article first appeared in India Today Woman.)