It has been 12 days that I have been struggling. My Mental health knob is spinning between PTS, anxiety & sadness. I could point to the exact moment when it got triggered. It was something mummy said, something that in retrospect seems small, but that when it happened brought back memories from the past, fired up all my insecurities, and made me feel lonely & abandoned, which felt apt at an airport at night with no familiar face around. This later got reinforced when drunk relatives yelled at me, the match got canceled & there was nothing in the post for me.
I tried to do things to feel better. I tried to set a routine, stay away from social media, drink gin, not drink gin, quit coffee, drink coffee, read, listen to audiobooks, to songs, and watch tv shows. I tried to ‘do what your heart says ’I avoided calls. The ones I took, I cried after. I tried to put my anger front & center, to reach inside, yank my vocal cords & yell at people for hurting my feelings. I ended up apologizing after. I tried to let sadness lead the way, sat & I cried but was not convinced that my state was sorry enough. I wanted to seek help, but I have lost the mental list that tells me who is an ally & who is not. I didn’t know who to reach out to anymore, & how.
I called my therapist & spoke to her while Skype tried to cling on to life by my flimsy internet. She listened. After an hour of listening to my stories about celebrating birthdays on wrong dates as a child, being at airports with nowhere to go, being yelled at & having a match rained over, she spoke & didn’t tell me to “manage expectations”.
She said that we spend too much energy in suppressing bad experiences; Too much energy gets stored away into bad memories, even if we are doing it to put it out of our awareness. She told me to ask for a do-over. To refuse to put this birthday down in my logbook like this. To reach out to my loved ones and say “how can we make this better?”. To demand to watch Jab We Met with papa-mumma, for dadi to make kadhi, my best friend to write me a letter & send me a hair care product; To help them help me reach within & turn the knob to Happy.