Tag: anxiety

Dream

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I

Do your dreams wake you up, too?
Do I haunt them the way you do mine?
Do I walk and talk in them, in old homes,
That now no longer exist in time?

Does the feeling of loss permeate
Through each moment of the dream?
And do you now dread sleep
Because of what might have been?

Does your heart fill with pain
And wake you up as it bursts?
Does your throat get parched
As your anxiety thirsts?

Was I but a dream to you?
Was your love something I dreamed?
Have I been such a terrible fool?
Was nothing what it seemed?

II

Dreams have you lying in bed with me;
Conversations are now not the same;
Maybe, they manifest to tell me
I was never just the one to blame.

Depression

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

The first time I was exposed to it, I was very young. My aunt, who I was very close to, had it. She married at 35 and was a widow by 40. She battled with it, her entire life. She used to tell me, she had this sinking feeling. She couldn’t really participate in joy. The last time I saw her laugh was when I put a Snapchat filter on her, a few years ago, during Christmas. The reindeer horns and Rudolf nose made her laugh out loud. I remember that laugh vividly and thankfully, I have the video saved.

She passed, last year. I am glad that she did, because she battled against this demon, for nearly forty years.

Most people do not understand it. They do not understand how emotions can get the better of you. ‘Be practical.’ ‘Let go of negativity.’ ‘Do things that make you happy.’ I am not saying that for them it’s as easy as a switch to be turned on, I am just saying that for them, being practical is easier.

I had my first bout of depression at 20. I was young then. I had my first love leave me. I remember crying, at nights, for months on end. Staying alone. Seeking some sort of understanding. I remember sitting on a water tank, up on my grandmother’s terrace, and thinking how easy it would be to lean forward and end the pain. I wrote poetry. Poetry has been a crucial vent to this surge into a pit of disfeeling. Time, family and friends brought me over through that time.

I experienced death quite a few times. I lost people I loved. I lost pets I have always regarded as my children. I have seen my mother battle cancer. I have taken the hard call to put one of my daughters (for people who want a simpler term, pet dog) to sleep. And I faced a crisis in my then-thirteen-year-old relationship. I faced this pit then. I looked into it. I dwelled in it. I came out of it, because again, life pulled me out. I was 38 then.

This year, it has come visiting me again. Tour de force. I have had a heart break. I have dealt with death again. I have lost two of my greatest support structures in one go. Family still rallies around me. I have populated social media requirements. But this time, it’s more difficult to bear because friends have to stay away – a pandemic governs the world. Fear compounds anxiety.

For the first time, in my life, I have to resort to taking a pill to sleep. When I sleep, I am wakened by vivid dreams of loss and insecurities. My eyes snap open. I am wide awake. I realise it is all true, and I cannot breathe. Panic attacks are common. The surge of emotion becomes so graphic that I cannot express the need to escape it. I will try to explain it.

My aunt wasn’t a woman of detail. So, I couldn’t understand it completely. Now I do. It is like an invader in your home. He has broken doors down like match sticks and entered into your space.

You know he is around. You know he intends to harm you. And you think, if you ignore him, he won’t attack. Because you know, if you call for help, no one will be able to see him. So, you try and do your chores. You answer messages. You talk to the ones you love. You make your tea. Then some object, some memory, around you, reflects him. And – you spiral.

He picks you up and puts you on the bed. Gently. Then he climbs on top of you. Straddles you. He places his elbows on your chest. And he is heavy. (Boy, is he heavy!) Your chest feels as though it is going to cave in with the pressure.

“Breathe,” you tell yourself.

“Breathe,” people, you reach out to, say.

“Try,” he says, with a smile.

And you look at him on top of you. Smiling. It’s a genuine smile. And you can see his eyes. They reflect your fear of loss. They are honestly telling you to breathe, too.

But you cannot.

And then you fall inward. Memories burn. It feels like you’ve hit cold water. Suddenly. And gasps tear out of you. There is no real escape. You hope that it will pass. You look back into his eyes, and say, “please”.

Time passes. You cannot realise if it has been a minute or hours.

Either of two things happen. He stops smiling, and with some power that governs even him, he increases the pressure. Or, your child comes up to you, asking to be taken down. Or your mother yells from somewhere in the kitchen to answer her. And he gets distracted. The weight lessens.

“I have to get up now,” I say. I can say that much.

He turns to look at me. He nods. He knows I love them. He gets off my body.

I sit up and realise I had been crying. I wipe my face. Stand up. And go to answer my kiddo’s needs or my mom’s call.

I turn to him, like a lover. He looks at me, his hands in his pockets. He shrugs. “I’ll be right here,” he says. “I won’t be abandoning you, you can count on it.”

I swallow to wet my dry throat and attend to my duties. Maybe, my mom notices my face. She grows concerned and from her concern comes fatigue and irritation. “What happened to you now?” She questions.

“Nothing,” I have learnt to say. “I am okay.”

I want to call my friends, whom I cannot meet. But guilt takes over. They have seen me through days, when things were unbearable. I wonder, if I am not capable of being strong. If I call them, they would wonder why I cannot take a grip on things. They have their own lives, why would they want to deal with something I cannot even explain properly. And my breath falls short.

Then, from over my shoulder, I hear him say, softly, “hey.”

Abandon

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I was reading up on abandonment issues. When I got to the research part of it, I was faced with a lot of terms such as personality disorders at worst and helplessness at best. The crux, as it always is, goes back to parenting, the social situation at home. I think the first abandonment happened when I had to leave Bandra. I still remember sitting in the truck and moving away from Ganga Vihar, and my grandmother, who I loved incredibly, weeping at the balcony.

I never expected company from my mother, who raised us without a word of help from her alcoholic husband. So I depended on my nanny, who moved with us to the new home. It was just her, my sister and me. But she had dreams of going abroad, and so she left us within the year, after she had helped in raising me for thirteen years.

The time was a tough one. I was coming into terms with my homosexuality, the transition into adolescence, a new home, a new school. I was the victim of severe bullying. Boys would follow me into the bathroom and ask for sexual favours, outside in the playground, I was singled out. I am sure it didn’t lead to any feeling of abandonment, but in my head, I remembered thinking that I was being punished because I had left my grandmother who had loved me so.

My father didn’t help matters. He was an alcoholic ever since I could remember. He never held a job ever since I could remember. So he would be home when I would return from school. He knew I was gay and he detested the thought of it. How did I know this? He would lie on a divan in the hall, and begin beating the wall with his fist. He would amble about the house and he would pick fights with me needlessly, which would end up getting physical.

So the move began most of this issue in my head. But as I grew, I achieved more confidence. I loved reading and I would consume everything I would get my hands on. I loved movies and they became my escape as well. My focus shifted to animals, because they wouldn’t leave me. My favourite movie became The Black Stallion, where the bond between the horse and the boy was unassailable.

The first boy I fell in love with pursued me. He wanted to be in a relationship with me. He was a student of music and was here for studies from abroad. I knew getting into a relationship with him would end badly. I told him so and also mentioned that I wouldn’t want to get hurt by it. But as it so happened, he was the first guy who held me and made love to me and there was no going back after that.

He moved in with me and we loved each other for the better part of eleven months. I remember sleeping and waking up with a start dreaming that he had left and I was left alone. The feeling of loss was so severe that I used to wake up in tears. The inevitable happened and he left for his home, and to this day, I can still remember him walking away in the airport and I was left standing behind a glass partition.

The depression and the anxiety that followed for a year later was something that has prevailed in my mind. I lost thirteen kilos over the course of that year. The rest of the abandonment was a gradual process. Broken promises and a measured weaning off of communication lead to another abandonment, where closure was something that wasn’t given to me but which I had to find by myself over the years that ensued.

During that time, my best friend married. She was busy setting up her own new life and left for abroad as well. I have never felt abandoned by her, probably because I was assured of her love and fondness for me. It was an upheaval though, because we lost touch for the better part of three years, but it was one I could deal with.

The point of this sojourn through the past is to understand myself a bit better right now. I just took a couple of tests and this is what they had to say:

Your romantic attachment style: Intense and Preoccupied
You have described yourself as preoccupied in your attachments. This suggests that you have more intense interpersonal relations than many people do, that in your romantic relations you sometimes feel really quite close, and at other times you feel almost estranged and cut-off. You probably have a hard time asserting yourself in a way that makes you feel you are really in control of your emotions. You may find that you often feel let down and as if you are giving much more than you get in your romances.

It’s possible that your partners feel as if you don’t really know who they are, even though you feel you are very intimate with them. You probably have a higher level of emotional arousal than most other people, both positive and negative, and this gets expressed in your romantic relationships. You may find it hard to be without a lover, and yet find that when you have a lover, the intensity puts a strain on the relationship.

Being preoccupied in romance is a matter of degree. A good lover thinks of the beloved often and holds the beloved in her or his thoughts. Mindfulness is a virtue and being mindful of one’s lover is highly regarded and a tremendous asset in close relationships. But there’s a difference between mindfulness and preoccupation. If you feel that perhaps you have been too preoccupied in love, it may be time for you to consider professional help. Being overly preoccupied in love is a condition that can often be successfully addressed in psychotherapy.

Remember that attachment styles exist in degrees, and in this test, the degree to which a style is true for you will make a difference in your interpretation. Everyone has to have some style or another, and the features of any one style only become maladaptive when they exist in the extreme.

There is also the result in which I scored a 100 out of 100 for abandonment. Apparently, I have what is termed as the ‘abandonment wound’. I don’t really think these are all that conclusive. I don’t really trust in most things anymore. It’s almost like planning your day according to astrological patterns. There may be some truth in the stars, but one can lead one’s life according to their predictions. Science is still so new and still so scary, almost like a volcano that keeps spouting new lava – viewed from afar but felt in the atmosphere.

I have no real idea of what is going on in my head. All I can do is be self-aware and these write ups are my way of dealing with what is happening inward. There are times when I hear a song and I progress inward. Hoping to understand myself more and realise what makes me who I am. And hoping that once I do understand myself the adapting into something else doesn’t happen soon. I wish to get to know Harpreet and what makes him tick. I believe he is someone, who is worth knowing, after all. Someone worth taking the time to understand and love.