LOST SHADOWS
by Ayushi B
I was 30 years, 2 months, and 20 days old when the first crack in the uneven mirror of my life came into existence. I call it the first because the months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds that followed were a gradual breakdown of the same. Having lived with Bipolar disorder for nearly 7 years, I had succumbed several times to my illness, which took me on a rollercoaster of plenty of highs and lows. It is here that I would like to pause you from predicting that it is just about my illness and the struggles that came along with it. Just walk a few steps with me. This crack that came into existence does have its origin in my illness as it was facilitated by it.
The year 2020 had started on a good note for me. Medically, I was in good shape; my medicines for Bipolar and other illness that were a return gift of the disorder had gone down, I had hit a century in 2019 in terms of my weight which were a consequence of multiple factors, but I had finally been able to lose 20 Kgs so the new year started on quite a good note. I was rebuilding my confidence by interacting with people, which is to say that I was not as socially awkward as I was at the beginning of 2019 and it felt like I was getting back to where I was 7 years ago.
However, by April, things started turning dark. I started slipping into Depression. Things were not merely gloomy, they became dark quite fast. Since I was a seasoned player, I quickly identified my progression towards the rabbit hole. Situations around me and my family were not conducive, the lockdown had just begun, and accessing doctors was difficult but we managed. Some medications were tweaked, some more visits to the doctor were needed but with family support, I was able to pull it off in a short span of time, unlike my previous experiences. Usually, when I would come out of the dark space I could see the light and I would run towards it. I thought I would do it this time too, stretching my hands to reach the light but to my surprise, my legs were frozen. I did not move an inch. Being still was almost nerve-wracking, I was standing and my blood moved from my legs to my mind.
I felt discomfort and detachment from everything and everyone including myself. This was something that I had never experienced before. The situation pushed my thoughts further as I could not help but think about why I felt this way. I was very aware of how it feels to be depressed or sad but this time it was neither one of them. It was nothing but absolute chaos. For the first time, I could physically feel the power of my mind. for the record, it’s a great feeling but it does scare the hell out of you. I was unable to contain my thoughts so I decided to put them down in words. The first set of thoughts that I penned down was titled “Pain” since it was the first time I was addressing the pain in my life. Even though I had experienced pain before, it seemed momentary as my focus was always to get rid of it.
“I feel pain is very angry towards me, it demands something out of me which I haven’t been giving it all these years. All that pain wants is respect and acknowledgment. Earlier, I was on the dark side. With the help of medical sciences, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel but this time something has changed, I have.” I wrote about Pain, Power, and Companionship and shared it with my dear ones. One of my friends read my blogs and asked me if I had some thoughts to share about identity. Thoughts did not flow instantly as it was initially self-driven. It took me time to think about it. Organically, I decided to think about my present. I could only highlight gaps in my personality: the things I was not. I am not referring to what I was not in comparison to others but what I idealized about myself. Traits such as social awkwardness, poor communication skills, lack of spontaneity, etc. were contrasted with being a social bee, having good communication skills, being spontaneous and a people’s person (for convenience sake) to an introvert in many aspects. Now, for such a sharp comparison all that I needed was time travel. I found myself comparing my current ‘Me’ to a highly romanticized ‘Me’ 8 years ago.
You may ask what changed 8 years ago. Well, it’s fairly simple. I entered the world of Bipolarity. Now, I only intended to go 8 years back in time and come back. I did return but something did not really make sense to me. It was almost like a shark being drawn to the smell of blood as a reflex. It was like revisiting moments that I was never conscious of but now were glaring back at me in a non-linear chaotic timeline. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that it was the opening of a Pandora box where I was interpreting images of memories I had never accessed. All the situations, people that I engaged with, embarked on my journey of differentiating the ‘I’ from the ‘Other’. Everything was magnified; I was able to clearly see how I engaged with others, mainly people who held some importance in my life (which were many). I looked at it as having a large canvas with ‘Other’ (the people I interacted with in my day-to-day life) as multiple colours, with an aim of creating a reflection of the ‘I’.
Gathering my thoughts, I attempted to represent my chaos in words while ensuring that I did not make it very personal. I wrote, “I loved how I romanticized my personality that existed before I was diagnosed and what it is now. But as I am engaging with experiences of life; this fundamental question of “who you are?” made me reflect on how with a change of time and space I always had a different “I” while engaging with the “Other” in the social context. Please note these were not masks that I put on, but faces, my own face different to different people. As I eroded my memory wall it took time to accept and identify “Who I truly am” amongst the many I have been carrying on with me all these years.”
Yes, the journey was filled with chaos and was extremely unsettling but at the same time, I had never felt so much peace and a sense of being alive. In this process of constant time travel, I realized that I always had this deep fear of being alone despite having people around me who loved me and cared for me. For any species, the most fundamental instinct is survival; your mind and body respond to any given situation and enable you with a coping mechanism that you may not even be aware of. For me, I responded to this fear by ensuring that I was always surrounded by people. Almost like in a relationship between two people where only the other existed without realizing that soon your anchor or “sense of self” is defined outside, i.e through ‘Other’.
This led to my creation of several Persona’s, something common yet my trouble was that this fundamentally stemmed from fear. It ensured that the locus of my ‘self’ would always be in others. Nothing felt real like an almost disillusioned reality that I had inhabited. When the origin of your thoughts lies very deep on a bed of disequilibrium, you can feel it physically as well. I could physically feel a core but could not really identify it. In this process, I realized that there is something fundamentally innate that forms my core. My life experiences definitely add and evolve my sense of self but the fundamental core always stays the same.
I need to give myself that time to look inside, to connect and understand my core and my ability to understand myself beyond the polarity of illness that is everything that I am in between the Bi-Polar world of existence so that I am a balance between my ‘face’ and my ‘lost shadows’.
