Battles Inside Out

  My life is an open book by now I guess, so I might as well turn a few more pages for you to read. The day I saw my psychiatrist, he diagnosed me with anxiety, depression, and sleep disorder. Why am I saying the same thing? Well, I’ll tell you. The anxiety part was clear as day to me, with far too deep an interest in psychology and psychotherapy and with all my tremors, breathlessness, and feelings of fear. However, that depression part came out of nowhere. For people with moderately acceptable mental health awareness, it must be very clear that depression and sadness are very different notions. If you want to know more, feel free to ask me or I might even dedicate a post to it. That is beside the point. Since I am very self-aware and self-critical, I thought I knew exactly what problems I was facing. I never thought depression would be a part of my mental health journey. Yes, I have felt extreme sadness owing to a lot of things this past year, but never thought for once that I wa...

“Without mental health, there can be no true physical health.” I do not remember whose quote that is. I just know now that it is true. Alibi? Sleepless nights, falling barely into a slight slumber at 7 in the morning and waking up at 2 in the afternoon, tired and grumpy. There wasn’t a part of my body that didn’t start aching at some point in the day. Too exhausted to take a bath, have lunch or dinner. Felt like throwing up in the middle of meals. Who needs to eat if there’s no will to live, not even to survive . Breathing is a chore. That was the story for a year until two weeks prior to the day I am writing this.  And then I decided to open up. Not for the first time, but for the first time it reached people who were going through the same ordeal. So many of you out there told me how suffocating life had been in some way or the other. I might not have been able to share hearty conversations with these human beings in person, but the way I could relate to them made me hopeful. I ...