An Indian Millennial’s Story of Mental Health: Part 4

March 15, 2019March 15, 2019 ~ Lavanya Narayan ~ Leave a comment

Note: This is a series about my mental health journey and how specific experiences led to my diagnosis of clinical depression and anxiety. For the full context, please read Part 1, the letter to my bullies, Part 2, the letter to my school friends,Part 3 and the letter to Farrokh Bulsara, if you haven’t already.

Part 4: In sickness and mental health, ’til death do us part.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: relationships are hard. If someone tells you that they are easy, especially if it’s a chick lit book about how two people have never fought during the course of their relationship, it’s an absolute bald-faced lie. Relationships are built on getting things out in the open with each other and it takes a lot out of each individual. We tend to be governed by fear about hurting the other person, whether it’s through our actions or our words. As human beings, we can be our own worst enemies.

When you add mental illness to this mix, it is a whole different ballgame.

My partner and I have been together for a little over three years (we started seeing each other in February 2016). We have pets together, we have seen each other through suicide attempts, we have been separated for months at a time, we have cried with each other, we have fought with each other, and we have also been abusive at times with each other. It’s not pretty, certainly. But it is the most real relationship either of us have been in. We feel lighter when we let out our frustrations with each other and we help each other in working through them. However, our individual mental health issues go back to way before we even knew that the other person existed.

The biggest anchor weighing me down mentally is that I tend to dismiss a lot of what is real and hope that if I ignore it for long enough, that feeling of dread will go away. Growing up, I wasn’t able to voice a lot of what I was feeling, mostly because I thought people didn’t care to listen to me whining and bitching about stuff that everybody goes through. So I retreated into my own mind; a lot like the main character of this film called Tideland.

In Tideland, Jeliza-Rose is an abandoned child with drug addicts for parents. The first night in a remote farmhouse, she loses her father to a heroin overdose, after also having lost her mother to a drug overdose. Rather than acknowledging her father’s death, Jeliza-Rose retreats into her own imagination and turns to her doll heads and a differently-abled brother-sister duo who end up enabling Jeliza-Rose’s delusions.

For me, it was the media that convinced me that nobody would ever truly love and accept me the way I was. If anyone I was in a relationship with tried to correct me or give me constructive criticism, I would spiral into my own thoughts and doubt my entire existence at times. Most importantly, I was convinced of the fact that relationships had to be perfect or it just wasn’t worth it. Oh boy, how utterly and completely wrong I was.

I would run away at the first sign of adversity in any relationship, burrowing myself either in my work, TV shows, or alcohol to stop me from even forming coherent thoughts about whether the possibility of me being wrong ever existed. It was the other person’s fault, I would tell myself. And then I would fully forget that I had fucked up at all during that relationship.

All that changed when I got together with NS. For the first-ever time in my life, I actually felt accountable for my actions. I was responsible for someone else’s feelings other than my own, because I finally realised that it wasn’t all about me. I still struggle with that sometimes. I often become this selfish asshole who just couldn’t give a shit about anybody around me except myself. It’s all about me, me, me, me, me. I hate that. I hate that the ugly side of me is selfish and self-involved, especially because I used to think that I cared only about others.

The truth is that I used to care about other people in the context of how they made me feel. And when you have anxiety, it’s like throwing gasoline at fireworks that are already destroying property. I am still scared of confronting tough situations sometimes. I act out of cowardice and I really don’t want to.

But the difference between life before NS and life with him is that I’m slowly learning how to forego myself completely at times when others need me and need my support. No, it doesn’t mean that I have lost sight of who I am. Ultimately, the only person who can truly take care of me is myself. But I know there are more than a few times when it is not about me at all.

NS, on the other hand, has never had trouble voicing his thoughts. However, his temper would reflect in the things he would say and do, which would often be incredibly hurtful to me, and ultimately both of us. Unlike me, he has never hesitated to admit that he is wrong. It takes him time to apologise, but he does it the right way.

Growing up, NS had similar experiences to mine. He said, and I quote, “I think there were people who hated me simply for the fact that I was still breathing.”

To hear that from the person who makes you have stars in your eyes is a shock, to say the least. You can’t fathom that people can’t love the person you love and you often wonder whether you’re doing right by them and loving them the right way.

Through NS’ biggest flare-ups, I have seen the root of them all; his burgeoning insecurities. Being told and reminded that you’re unlovable throughout your life tends to make you wonder whether the person you’re with actually loves you or not, and NS has wondered about that. A lot.

Has it been challenging to take him away from his insecurities and convince him that the love is real? Yes.

Has it been easy? Fuck no, we still cry like leaky faucets.

Has it been worth all the trouble? Fuck yes. I feel lighter every time I let it out with him. And I hope he does too.

Reading about dysfunctional relationships on social media can really fuck with your world view of what your relationships should be like, especially when both people have mental health issues. You wonder about what is objectively right and wrong when it comes to your actions and words. You worry that the people around you could disapprove of certain things in your relationship. You are scared to death that you, your partner, or both of you will be publicly shamed for the way you choose to conduct your relationship and the things you go through.

You know what I have learnt in the last hour, after crying and wondering whether I should be open about my relationship?

FUCK. THAT. SHIT.

Your friends and peers mean well and sometimes, leaning on your friends is essential. At the end of the day, human beings are social beings. Ultimately, you need to be able to strike a clear and understandable balance between your thoughts, how your partner is treating you, and what people you trust have to say about it. This is one of the reasons why therapy is an essential tool to help you figure out what could be holding you back in a relationship. It helps bring in a third-person perspective, with the least amount of bias, that you would not have been able to consider in the situations you have faced and the advice you have received earlier.

However, if you truly feel like you are unsafe in a relationship, reach out to someone and seek help. There have been people who have been driven to death by a relationship and that is not okay (please watch the video; TW: suicide, physical abuse, stalking). There is a huge difference between riding out the constant frustrations of a relationship and feeling like your days are numbered because of a relationship.

As human beings, we are all learning. And as mental health patients, NS and I are learning how to live, really. It’s a long and unwieldy road, but I can’t imagine going down it with anybody else.

A Letter to Farrokh Bulsara

March 15, 2019 ~ Lavanya Narayan ~ 1 Comment

Note: This is a series about my mental health journey and how specific experiences led to my diagnosis of clinical depression and anxiety. For the full context, please read Part 1, the letter to my bullies, Part 2, the letter to my school friends and Part 3 if you haven’t already.

Hey there, Freddie.

I don’t know if you can see me from wherever you are. Wherever it is, I hope you get to read this. You have made a difference in so many people’s lives. So bloody many. You have books, films, documentaries, monuments, and organisations created for you. For your undying legacy.

And yet in the case of most of the people whose lives you touched, very few know the real you. Hell, I am not sure if anyone truly knew or knows the real you. But whatever little the world and I know of you, we truly admire. I don’t think you will ever stop being loved.

So I am going to talk about what it is that makes you special to me. Why is it that I consider you my primary role model.

I knew you existed for the longest time, but it was in 2009 when my school’s musical, based on your work with Queen, utterly butchered one of your greatest works. I was drawn to the music you made with Queen. Simultaneously, I was drawn to you. I couldn’t put my finger on it at that time, but the truth is that you are the biggest queer icon who has influenced me.

It was all of you. The unabashed overbite (that you said you didn’t want to get fixed in the fear that it would mess with your singing), the outrageous costumes that made you a symbol for androgyny and everything camp, and the frank yet rare interviews you had with press throughout your life.

Your music is one of the things that saved my life at the time. It made me realise that I could let go of the life I was leading at the same time and adopt one that I actually wanted to live. Your persona made me realise that the possibility of being loved, no matter how ‘weird’ or ‘odd’ the world thought you were, existed. And to add to that, you taught me that anybody who didn’t love you could simply fuck off.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BWApIY6lLZl/

Over the last year or so, people have been talking about how you are portrayed in Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic about you and your journey with Queen. Now, Rami Malek, the person who played you, has won the Oscar for it. Can you imagine it? An actor winning what is considered the highest honour in cinema, all for portraying you. I mean, people haven’t even won it for portraying Elvis, Ike and Tina, or Johnny Cash. It was all for you.

Truth be told, I wasn’t terribly impressed by the biopic. They got a lot of things wrong about your life and your history with Queen. I was sceptical of it last year itself, when I said that the biopic wouldn’t measure up to the other ways in which people have shared your story. Your closest friends, your family (your mother was utterly adorable, by the way) your bandmates, your managers, your collaborators, and your fans have all done you great justice (for the most part) by presenting you in the same way that you presented yourself.

But I welcomed it then and I welcome it now. I see it as a gateway for people who know nothing about you to fall in love with you (and maybe hate you a bit, because the film showed quite a few alleged instances where you were an asshole) and then discovered the better side of you; the real you.

The funniest thing about my admiration for you, to me at least, is the fact your life ended way before mine even began. You lived vicariously and happily and created a legacy for yourself even before my parents decided that they should procreate. And yet, I feel like as though as I know you a great deal. Not just because of your surviving associates, but because of what I saw of you in interviews, behind the scenes when recording and messing around during video shoots.

I saw your drive in making the people you cared about most happy in whatever way you possibly could. I saw your passion to create art, not just music, when you decided to perform with the Royal Ballet and especially with Montserrat Caballé, who I feel brought out something deep within you, waiting to come out. A true creative surge. I saw your deliberate yet careful confidence about how you shared stories from your life. One thing I do wonder about, however, is how proud you were to be Indian. You did change your birth name to Frederick Mercury and rarely mentioned in interviews that you were Indian.

By citizenship, you weren’t Indian. I think that you seemed exotically ambiguous enough to your fans in the ’70s and ’80s that it didn’t really occur to them that you could possibly be Indian. But you and me, Freddie, at the heart of it, we are both Indian and hella confused about our heritage at the same time. You studied in a rigid Catholic school in India during your formative years and were surrounded by Indian people. I studied in an Indian school outside India and was surrounded by Indians and people of other ethnicities. Over time, our stories reversed. You spent most of your adult life in a nation where Indians were quite a minority and I came back to the mothership. And the most relatable of it all? Both our parents had dwindling faith at certain points about what we would make of ourselves.

I think if I was alive back then, I would have tried to become friends with you. I don’t know if I would have succeeded, though. You, on the other hand, would have killed it even if you were alive now and built your legacy during this time. You would have been celebrated for being a person of colour influencing millions and being queer too while you were at it. Superwoman beat you to the punch for this century. Not for life, though. At the core of it, you are, in fact, the first queer personality of South Asian descent in the fucking world.

You saved me. You saved from myself, my low self-esteem, my inability to find things about myself worth being proud of, and the (sometimes) lack of people who understood me. But you understood me, without being there in person, through the way you were. You made me realise that I am queer and that I can be the best version of myself because of it and despite it. You even made me a better actor, even though you weren’t one yourself (not professionally, anyway).

If you hadn’t left this world because of a horrid virus that shouldn’t exist, I feel like you would have been campaigning for the rights of people who are HIV+and LGBTQ+. You’d be standing next to people like Magic Johnson for photographs and Lady Gaga while she clutched at her countless awards. You’d still be dressing outrageously and beautifully and abolishing the rampant ageism in the entertainment world. You would have your trademark moustache, except I am not sure what colour it would be. You would not just be pushing boundaries, you would be blowing them to smithereens before people even realised what the fuck was happening.

Most importantly, I know you’d still be making music. Music ran in your veins like blood. You created some of your best works just before you died. And you’d be happy to know that your wish has been fulfilled: you have never been boring. To me or to any of the people who love you. That word doesn’t exist for you, Mr. Farrokh Bulsara. The words that do exist for you are genius, visionary, and trendsetter. And you’d better believe it.

An Indian Millennial’s Story of Mental Health: Part 2

March 14, 2019March 15, 2019 ~ Lavanya Narayan ~ 4 Comments

Note: This is a series about my mental health journey and how specific experiences led to my diagnosis of clinical depression and anxiety. For the full context, please read Part 1 and the letter to my bullies if you haven’t already.

Part 2: Am I going to look ugly forever?

In the last two stories you have read, you have gotten a clear idea of my formative years, before I turned 18 years old. The collection of those less-than-pleasant experiences definitely took their toll on a lot of things that impacted my personality. My self-esteem took a hit that was the equivalent of laying it down on a race track and running over it repeatedly. It is no exaggeration to state outright that I was a mess.

It goes all the way back to when I was five years old. As a young ‘un, my parents obviously had the responsibility of determining my appearance. Since we lived in a desert country and I spent a lot of my time outdoors in school, they thought it was best to have me sport what Indians refer to as a ‘boy cut’.

It wasn’t the best idea, given the school I went to. The girls in my class would tease me for not having long hair like they do and the boys would not want to be friends with me because they saw me as a girl. Completely harmless in retrospect, to be honest with you. But considering I did want to fit in with my peers, I kept goading my parents to let me grow my hair. When I told them that it was because I was being teased, they said what every Indian parent would say:

“You should just learn how to ignore these things, kanna. We also went through the same things when we were your age.”

Given the knowledge I possess now, I cannot fault them entirely for responding in that way. The truth is that being raised in the ’70s in middle-class households in Bombay, and going to schools with a state-run syllabus, did not afford them the luxury of standing up for themselves or even having their parents defend them. However, if I was the parent today, I would certainly march on over to that school and give those students, not to mention the teachers supervising them, a piece of my mind and to remind them that teasing a student for their appearance was and never will be acceptable.

I decided to follow my parents’ advice. But it wouldn’t help me one bit when I hit that dreaded time in every teen’s life: puberty.

My relationship with puberty was quite like the fucked up relationship between Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood referenced in Raiders of the Lost Ark (except there was no pedophilia involved). It was like puberty was telling me, “You knew what you were doing when you decided to develop a vagina in utero.”

Armpit and leg hair, pimples, breasts, love handles and fat in places I didn’t want, a frizzy and curly hairdo, periods; they all decided to come at me in a frightfully short span of time. I started seeing the evidence of all appear in my closet, bathroom, and my mother’s involvement; Nair hair removal cream, wax strips, trips to the beauty parlour, mud masks, shopping for skin-coloured sports bras, and bundles of sanitary napkins. It’s like I had been given a kit to eliminate all of the ugly that puberty had flung my way.

I remember my first-ever period. I was 11 years old; already a fair bit confused by life in general. My mother simply told me that this happens to girls at my age, with no why or how or what to expect. Do not enter the prayer room and don’t touch your grandmother when it happens, I remember her telling me.

I also distinctly remembered crying when I saw a long thread of congealed blood coming out of me. It made me worry about my school uniform for sports, which included a bright white skirt. What in the world would happen if I started leaking out of my pad? While I was incredibly lucky to have dodged that bullet, I still always felt dirty every time it came around.

The pimples were the worst of it all. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I had a crowd of pus dominating my face and being the ignorant teen I was, I thought picking them would make them go away. My biggest folly. It left clearly visible scars and black spots that my mother would lament over constantly. Whenever she had time, a new mask was applied to my face to see if any change would take effect. My father, from whom I inherited my skin’s urge to break out, would try to reassure that I was beautiful (and fail miserably). They both spent inordinate amounts of money on skin treatments and dermatological appointments which didn’t help in the least bit. And if my face wasn’t enough, the acne extended to my back, crowding mostly around my shoulders and below my neck. Wearing anything to show off the back was completely out of the question, not just because my mother wouldn’t let me wear it. When it came time for my junior and senior proms in Grades 11 and 12, I purposely chose dresses that wouldn’t show off my back or too much of my hammy legs. I was so afraid to wear a saree for my high school farewell that I asked the parlour lady to wax my back (no, the hair on my back wasn’t very noticeable, but who knew what sort of comments I would have to endure).

Luckily, after I turned 18, the pimples faded away, like a spirit or a ghost in a horror movie that was appeased after a sacrifice; the sacrifice of my self-esteem.

Even the hair on my head wasn’t spared by my insecurities. Having curly hair meant that I almost always looked like Monica Geller, when she lands in Barbados. I always thought that a cut and blow dry would be the permanent solution to my problems, but washing my hair would crush my dreams over and over again. My mother flat-out refused to pay for a straightener or even a straightening treatment. To this day, I can’t say for sure whether she saved me from my teenage demands or made me hate my hair and my appearance as a result. It was much later in life that I realised that sporting short hair, like I’d done as a five-year-old, was what I truly felt comfortable doing. The irony presents itself, really.

Not being able to mentally fit into your body is one thing. Not being able to do it when you’re queer and non-binary (and haven’t even realised it) is a whole other battle in itself.

I remember discussing sexuality with 3S and another girl who was once a friend. I reticently asked them what they would think if I was bisexual and they scoffed at me as though I had a screw loose. I never brought it up with them in school after that. It felt too dangerous to reveal to anybody that I was anything but straight.

And so, until 2011, I suffered from body dysmorphia and the inability to accept that I liked more than just boys. I silently had crushes on certain girls I met in school and certain actresses I saw in films and TV shows. I recall getting incredibly aroused, and then shell-shocked, when I saw Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body, emerging out of the lake butt-naked and even sharing a steamy kiss and body fondling with Amanda Seyfried. It felt wrong whenever I was in school, but it felt so right when I would watch it secretly without my parents ever knowing.

How does being queer and non-binary relate to self-esteem, you ask? You feel wrong in the body you were born with and blame yourself for not being able to change it. You feel ashamed to say a word to anybody you know, whether it is your friends or your family. You feel scared that you inadvertently blurt out something that may change people’s gaze of you into a homophobic one. And until you get out of that environment and meet queer people, you never truly feel safe.

I didn’t even feel safe after 2011, once I had discovered my sexuality. I lived in a country where being anything other than heterosexual was an outright crime, punishable by imprisonment and possible deportation. I kept this information closely guarded to people I was close to, never once letting my parents even get a hint of the fact that their only child is queer and non-binary.

It was only when I left home in 2014 that I felt some semblance of regaining my long-lost self esteem. I was in a new place; a place where people were more accepting and more interested in getting to know me. I knew that it was the place where I could come out freely and dress exactly the way I wanted to, without the interference of my parents or the care of what people may think of me.

I became more confident, more brazen even. People attracted to me would offer me drinks, tell me that they found me sexy, and even take me home with them. If I were to describe it in the words of Jhumpa Lahiri, I would use the words she did to describe the new life of the character of Moushumi Mazoomdar in The Namesake, when she moves to Paris:

She gave herself openly, completely, not caring about the consequences. She was exactly the same person, looked and behaved the same way, and yet suddenly, in that new city, she was transformed into the kind of girl she had once envied, had believed she would never become.

But rebirthing your self-esteem completely comes from one thing alone: accepting yourself for who you are. And that took time. I had to tell and convince myself over and over again that the remnants of my acne scars didn’t matter, that my tummy fat and love handles didn’t matter, the hair on my arms, legs and pits definitely didn’t matter. Being in a stable relationship now for three years has helped see that in its entirety, but I’d like to think I have also owned up fully to who I am, of my own accord and efforts.

Loving yourself is a journey. Embracing your unique weird-as-it-as identity is a journey. If I can do it, people can and should. In the words of the great Christina Aguilera, “you are beautiful in every single way.”

An Indian Millennial’s Story of Mental Health: Part 1

March 14, 2019 ~ Lavanya Narayan ~ 7 Comments

Note: This is a series about my mental health journey and how specific experiences led to my diagnosis of clinical depression and anxiety. More parts will be coming shortly.

Part 1: Childhood, home and school.

I have struggled with mental health issues for the last fourteen years. However, it took 12 years to diagnose, during a hastily scheduled therapy session in the small cube-shaped office of a psychiatrist in Bengaluru. She immediately diagnosed me as having anxiety and clinical depression.

Over the last two years, I have juggled a precarious combination of therapy and medication. However, I am not alone in my lifelong war with my brain. My life partner and my closest friends have each been diagnosed with mental health issues; novelty badges handed out to commemorate the disorders that plague them in every facet of their lives.

Mental health in India is becoming more and more talked about and written about than ever before. And yet, despite all the attention being drawn to it, a significant percentage of the population believe it doesn’t exist. Why? Because they can’t see physical proof of it, like a fever-inducing cold, a spate of stitches on a deep cut, or a broken bone wrapped up neatly in a cast.

Which is why I want to talk about it, from my perspective. Don’t you dare feel sorry for me; it’s my way of telling my story. I am doing it because I believe mental health needs the attention it deserves.

Before I start this series, I would like to clarify a few things. I am not a mental health professional, nor am I an investigative reporter attempting to do a shocking exposé with fancy numbers and percentages and other people’s harrowing accounts. This will comprise aspects of my journey, coupled with experiences people I trust have gone through (revealed with their consent, of course). It’s going to be angry, biased, and full of Charlie Brooker-esque metaphors. It is also completely true.

While I have been toying with the idea of talking about this for a long while now, it was my friend’s article in The Wire about her mental health struggle that sowed the seed for its need. SB, I can’t thank you enough for that and I applaud for being brave to talk about it.

And NS, you are my rock. The only person who has truly understood the twisted workings of my brain and has lived through the roughest of times to speak of them.

Sir Thomas Browne gave us the most modern and known version of the phrase ‘charity begins at home’. If you’re the only, first-generation, spawn of over-achieving Indian immigrant parents (or a middle-class Indian kid, really) and if school was your second home (quoted directly from my first-grade Arab social studies textbook), that phrase would be ‘brainfuckery begins at home’. At least, it was for me.

Having the combined expectations of the two people who gave birth to you weighs down on you like a son of a bitch, especially when you have the horrible luck of repeatedly letting them down. As novices who had just fallen off the back of the parenting truck in the promise land of oil and gold, they believed that their child deserved the best education she could get. This meant the most expensive Indian school in said land (so as to stay true to their roots) with the most intellectually challenging curriculum conceivable. What this curriculum truly is, however, is a marathon to see which special child can cram the most amount of universally unnecessary education, vomit it out onto an answer sheet, and score meaningless grades. I am, obviously, talking about the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) and the Indian School Certificate (ISC). Buying toilet paper with my hard-earning money has been a more proud endeavour for me than being tossed those two marksheets.

Nothing ever felt right, at home or at school (for some details of the experience in school, this piece of mine will elaborate; I won’t be repeating them here). I failed classes repeatedly and got sent by most of my teachers to the supervisor’s office. They, in turn, would call my parents to remind them that I would never do anything useful with my life.

Because, you see, the school I attended is no ordinary school. It is a school for privileged over-achievers whose parents can afford to educate them in places like Stanford, Yale, and Cornell. Every child that goes through their school needs to be nothing but the best, in order for them to make something of themselves in the real world. And if you didn’t fit into this definition, you might as well resign yourself to becoming a loser and being reminded of it every single day. You would become nothing, not unless you pulled up your socks, worked hard, and helped this school maintain the fact that they were producing junior Hawkings and Curies, Ambanis and Sandbergs.

In the last five years of my schooling, my parents felt that spending all my non-school time studying and attending tuition classes would be the best and only way through which I would pull through with a respectable score and get into college. My friends and their friends’ children, not to mention their relatives’ children, were all doing well academically. Why couldn’t I?

The truth was that, subconsciously, I already knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to write. I wanted to act. I couldn’t do either of those things because, A. the school’s academics focused on anything but that, and B. all the extracurricular activities, like drama and debate and press club, were off-limits to me, thanks to teachers who picked their favourite students (some of whom were quite undeserving) to helm said activities.

I remained stuck in an infinite loop of bad grades, lectures from my parents demanding promises that I would do better next time, never-ending tuition classes that sucked the life of me, staring at a textbook endlessly for hours without being able to assimilate anything, getting anxious every time I had to start writing on an answer sheet, and looking dejected as my teachers would toss my cross-filled exam papers back to me (while most of the people around me would be rejoicing and figuring out who scored the highest grades).

To this day, I shiver every time I see the results of a test. I shiver when I have to step into a one-on-one meeting with someone. I feel triggered by the slightest amount of criticism, even if it is said constructively.

What about friends, then? Yes, I did have a group of people in school one would call friends. But I kept my sorrows about my grades and my bullying to myself; simply immersing myself in the fact that there were people who liked me for who I was.

All those lectures from my parents and trips to the supervisor’s office had made me ashamed to ever reveal that I was not a good student. I lied to them about my grades out of the constant fear that they would stop being friends with me (something my parents tried to convince me of). They cared, but barely enough to notice that I was struggling, probably because they had their own personal demons to battle.

Of course, there was one person for whom doing well in school was not a problem. The person I once called my best friend. She and I grew up together; our families knew each other socially before we had even started school. However, it took me a massive amount of adulting and reflection to realise that she was not my best friend. She was nothing like a friend is supposed to be. You can call her 3S.

Socially in school, 3S was the target of bullies just like me. Unlike me, though, these bullies didn’t seem to faze her. One thing that she had, and probably continues to have, is her academics. She consistently remained among the top ten students of the class and secured admission to a fantastic school. What I later realised, much to my disbelief, is that our entire friendship was a competition for her. She knew she was better than me at the stuff that seemed to matter at the time and she never missed a chance to remind of it. My parents would cry over what they had done to deserve a kid who couldn’t be as great as her ‘best friend’.

Much after we graduated and I was in journalism school, I came out to her. When I told her that I liked another female friend of mine while we were in school, I remember her asking me, “Why couldn’t you like me?”

When I relayed my sexual experiences to her, she borderline slut-shamed me, without ever really saying the words out loud.

I don’t speak to her anymore. And I don’t intend to, because that toxic relationship made me doubt my self-worth for years. It still does sometimes, in my dreams.

My life at home is what one would call unusual. My formative years were dominated by my maternal grandmother, because both my parents worked long hours.

My degrading academics was the main point of contention in our family. Each failed attempt at picking my grades back up would prompt my parents to either take away something I already had or not give me something I truly wanted and needed. It was the reason I could not attend a lot of parties and outings with friends, attend a drama course that could have kickstarted numerous opportunities, use the Internet for two years, switch to another school to explore more options, or leave the country for my bachelors degree education.

My relationship with my grandmother was no picnic either. We constantly fought about whether I was studying or not, the food I ate, and the little money I spent on outings with friends. Despite this, we have managed to find a balance, probably because we don’t spend a great deal of time together anymore. Even so, she was there when not a lot of people were.

My parents are a different story. I continue to fear them, deep down, and loathe to talk to them about my life. Telling them about anything life-altering and positive for me barely ever comes with a tone of joy and support in return. I feared them when I first told them about my life partner, I fear them whenever I tell them that I have quit a job, and I fear to tell that I may need financial support at times. It is a crippling fear, fueled by all the anxiety in my bones.

For now, I feel like this encapsulates it. There will be more. There is always more.