Timeline of my mental breakdowns

(believe me that was gonna be a temporary name to this piece!)

Art and illustration by - @the_artsane

I’ve tried being brave, and I’ve tried being a coward, what I didn’t try was accepting the emotions until today. The concept of mental health and its importance is something I was taught about when I was in 9th grade. You see I was a person who people used to call a nerd, but I was famous among the students of my school for various other reasons, for example, slapping guys in front of the whole class, back answering teachers, and some usual teenage stuff that every highschooler goes through. But, when it came to the staff rooms, teachers usually liked to call me a “good student”, so when my grades started going down in 9th grade, I started worrying about it a lot, not because I cared about those grades, not at all, even as a student I always knew these marksheets will never decide my future, these are just a piece of paper that my parents are gonna use in front of our relatives, neighbours, relative’s neighbours and neighbours’ relatives to show off their parenting skills (which was totally unfair, they didn’t help me a bit while studying!), but I was worried because I was that competitive kinda student, and well, during my teenage I had other traumatic experiences, like a boyfriend who was a bully, an uncle who was a pervert, so, I started having my anxiety attacks. Actually, this wasn’t the first time I had my anxiety attack, but it definitely was the first time my parents noticed it, and I would agree that it became more visible and severe during 9th grade. I remember when the symptoms first showed, my parents thought I am showing symptoms for asthma, when we finally went to a doctor, he prescribed me some pills and asked me to try therapy, which I never really did, but I really think I should have, and well I really think everyone should try therapy once in their lifetime, our brain is a pretty crowded and complicated place, and also a very important part of our body. Anyways, moving on, when my parents understood my anxiety and the importance of mental health, it brought a lot of changes in my household, my parents started acknowledging mine and my sister’s mental health before taking any decision, and well it did make me happy that my parents are wandering over a topic that’s sensitive to them. As for me, I started meditating, and taking my mental health seriously.

Later in 10th grade, I started getting into a lot of trouble at school, basically fights outside the school, involving local goons and my other classmates, but I tried to hide my anxiety, because, I was ashamed of it, you see I still thought that I’m a freak and nobody can know about it, it affected my appearance at school, for example, did I mention that I always loved performing, it could be public speaking or dance performances, in fact once I performed with a fracture in my hand, I was that obsessed with performing, but when my anxiety started getting on me, I started limiting my stage appearances to public speaking that too when I was forced to go on stage and there was no other option but perform, I rarely danced in front of people.

And then starts a whole new different phase of my high school, 11th grade. Well, the year started off smooth, but things started getting rough near the half yearly exams, you see I opted math as my optional subject, but slowly I realized that without a good teacher I’m gonna fail the subject, so I decided to change my optional subject to Computer Science, and that was 10 days before the half yearly exams, well this is where my pain in the ass anxiety paid off. Since I was so anxious about passing the exam, I worked my ass off, and a miracle happened, I topped the subject I started working on just 10 days before the exams. It was all smooth, until I found out about my boyfriend, he was cheating on me, or if I put it technically, he was already dating someone else, and he just didn’t really think that it was important to confront me about moving on, well, that kinda broke me. We were dating for a long time now, more than 3 years, I’ll be honest with you, I agree towards the end, we did start losing the chemistry, it barely felt like I have a boyfriend, but our relationship was more than that, or at least that’s what I thought, the fact that I wasn’t important enough for him, that he didn’t even come and talk to me about the break up, he just disappeared, without any warnings, that really bummed me out, and that’s when I started falling in a deeper and a darker pit. Post breakup I went through several phases, the worst ones were where I blamed myself. I thought that it was because I wasn’t pretty enough, he broke up because I was fat, so first three months, I would scratch myself in the shower in disgust, degrading myself every single day, in the meantime, I started looking for something to distract myself, I basically started looking for friends with benefits, online, I thought that it will make me feel good about myself, but honestly, it didn’t, because, there was a void inside that couldn’t be filled with these meaningless relationships, anyways I still continued doing it. These weren’t the only road blocks by the way, I kind of started pushing away my friends, I managed to get rid of a lot of them, but the best ones stayed no matter what. In middle of all this mess, I kinda dated one of my very old friends, for a week, until we realized that we were better off as friends, till date we talk about our marriage as a joke, apparently his whole family always thought that I was always his girlfriend. God, that was stupid!

Moving on with the story, after sometime, I realized that I should get rip, I should get hot, I don’t know why, but anyways, I started working my ass off, I lost lot of weight, in fact, there was a time when I had abs (I wonder if I’ll ever be that hot again). Amidst all this I had a new friend, he and I came really close, we could talk to each other for hours, I could be myself in front of him, and he could be dumb in front of me, he did like me at first, but after I offered just being friends, he moved on and was in a relationship, But, it would be fair to say that that didn’t really work out great, so I kinda persuaded him to break it off, and no one was more happier than me when he was out of that relationship. Well, slowly after things started slipping out of hand, and we came quite too close. We even considered being together, but I knew that I wasn’t really ready, and I didn’t want to use it as a rebound. Between jumbling through all these emotions I completed 11th grade with decent grades and we entered the last year of our high school, actually the last year of our school. But, I was at my lowest in context to my mental health, my anxiety attacks increased to 10 from 5 times a day, and again my parents noticed these symptoms, this time when we visited the doctor he offered me anti-depressants, and I took them. Antidepressants are the drugs that aim at the chemical imbalance in the brain which is causing extreme anxiety, it is usually known to release the dopamine in the body that helps the brain to fight the overthinking which is one of the major causes and effects of anxiety. I remember this phase so vividly that I can play the events in front of my eyes anytime, I remember crying myself to sleep, I remember spending hours in the shower so that I don’t have to deal with the world outside, I remember scratching my skin in disgust, I remember smiling and laughing in the classroom and then running to the washroom to cry without any reason, I feared every serious relationship, I was afraid of making any new commitments. I know it sounds very sad, but however hopeless this sounds, it actually ends pretty well.

So, did I mention that every time I had to avoid public interaction due to anxiety, I used to lock myself up in my room, and there was always one of these three activities that helped me lighten up my mood, solving mathematical equations/problems, dancing, or reading something. I always found a safe place between an old book, I always thought that it was easier to relate to characters when you read them from a book, because even if it's specified in the book, you imagine the character through your own eyes, and while we are on the topic, there are two sets of literature that I admire a lot, The Fault In Our Stars by John Green, and the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowlings. So just out of boredom, I was browsing J.K. Rowling one day, when I read her story, she was in depression too, but she got out of it, by writing, I think of it as her way to accept that she has these emotions and instead of avoiding them, she faced them, she embraced them, that’s when it strike, I need to accept the fact that I have anxiety and other emotions and instead of piling them up I need to start expressing them, actually that’s when I started writing. I still remember my first piece, it was a short poem, I wrote on Christmas, it didn’t really make sense, but, it felt right in that moment, and after that, all I did was, write my emotions, the best part about it was that when I wrote those words, it stayed between me and that diary, so those words were far away from any kind of human judgement, that’s how I started dealing with my anxiety and I use it every time.

This whole piece might seem silly to some people, and to some others it might seem like a mirror to their own lives, either way my final words won’t change, ‘embrace and express what's inside you, because believe me, life is more beautiful that way’.