It's okay to be not okay.

These days there’s so much talk about mental health. The world around us never fails to remind us to be mindful of mental health – our own & that of people around us. Experts tell us not to keep things to ourselves & to reach out for help whenever we feel overwhelmed. Yet, do we really walk the talk? Except for the rarest of rare ones among us, we don’t take mental health matters ( in others) seriously. We fail to listen with empathy & understand the other person’s version of reality because we are in a hurry to bury their words with either scorn & impatience, or with condescending words of advice that are meaningless for them when they are trying to find their way out of the darkness. While most of us look away, even the handful among us who stop by, soon lose patience when they see that their quick-fixes and their moral-box-ticking is not working. Of course, it’s a different story when something hits us directly. Worse still, when it hits someone close to us & we don’t know what to do.

 It’s said that poets embrace emotions so that they may write about them. Writers, on the other hand, snare fleeting emotions & archive them for future references. As someone who’s done a bit of both, I have tried capturing everyday emotions of everypersons like myself in my posts, poetry & books. I have written about joy & sorrow, success & failure, life & death. And yet, curiously, like most people out there, I have never written on mental health. I have been guilty of scoffing at people who did, dismissing it to be an ailment of the affluent world. How horribly wrong I have been.

 Sometimes in life you do hit a wall and start questioning everything – your beliefs, your sense of purpose, and all that you stood for during the years that led to this day. Suddenly there’s doubt, a strange new kind of fear & a vacuum that sucks you in like a deep well without a visible end. All your past coping mechanisms fail to cure this sense of despair, powerlessness & loss of hope & faith on hope & faith. The universe seems to be hell-bent on stripping you down to your core, chaffing away all the externals you’ve assembled this far in quest of an identity for the container of consciousness that you assumed to be you. Life drains you and empties you drip by drip – physically, emotionally & even spiritually,  while you keep watching in disbelief like a ring-side spectator amazed at the unfairness of it all.  You can still remember your dreams & goals, but they fail to evoke any sensation in you anymore. Like an overcast sky that’s not seen the sun for so long that it no longer misses it. Like someone whose prayers haven’t been answered for so long that they stopped praying altogether. Old music falls away & no longer reaches your heart. Old relationships seem meaningless. Your past definition of success or happiness comes across as shallow & hypocritical.  And so much more.

 There is something terribly disturbing about discovering a new silence in a loved one, someone you thought you knew inside out & who has suddenly become a stranger. It is different from the other kind of silence that piles up over the night and which is always in a hurry to disintegrate at dawn. This is a  silence that keeps getting louder with time. Something seems to be slipping away and the decibels keep dropping off .

 So you keep listening. And try to label the silence with a name . To snare it in language & stow it away inside a faraway corner of your heart where you hide your fears, your guilts & your regrets.

 Arduous as it might be, ‘grief’ is perhaps a word that comes closest if one needs to name this silence. The problem with it is that it’s not a linear cause-effect emotion that has one trigger & a proven solution. It doesn’t. It’s open ended in many ways as listed below & several others that you discover as you uncover the layers of silence in the person in the clutches of it.

• It’s a secondary emotion that lacks the suddenness of a shock & the anticipation of a surprise. It holds no secrets.
• It’s an individual process. Each of us needs to arrive at, probe within & come in terms with it in our own unique way.
• It isn’t expendable over time. It accumulates. Stumbling upon buried pain & retrospective reflections. During abandoned rituals & discontinued anniversaries. At misty bends & messy ends.
• Has an annoying habit of coagulating & getting trapped in specific blocks of time. Sometimes, it’s the other way round, i.e. specific chunks of time get frozen to play custodian to specific triggers of grief.
• Doesn’t have an antidote in an opposite. You cannot replace a pinch of old grief with a dose of new pleasure. Or with other second hand alternatives –  other people, ill-written poetry, mushy songs, sad novels & bad movies.
• It is  a slippery mate. Harder you try to wriggle away, tighter it grips you by the throat.
• It doesn’t follow a playbook or attempt to change you. It merely cracks you open. And leads you by the hand, back to you.
• Shows up in unexpected strands of life . In the midst of all the busyness.  While you’re trying to get from Point A to Point B .Or to prove why X doesn’t equal Y.
• Throbs in its simplicity. No frills, no prelude. Just a sudden stab that halts your stupor. And slips in that much delayed pause, which gently pulls you back into a noisy vacuum.
• Reminds you of leftover embers. Forgotten fires, accidental tears, unexplained melancholy and abandoned prayers.
• Shows up in the list of things you want to remember, on certain days. And in the list of things you wish to forget, on other days.
• Leaves behind parts of itself everywhere. Like an absent minded soul leaves behind keys & umbrellas. At intermediate stopovers, at insignificant detours.
• Implores you to do something to escape it or reconcile with it. Your rearranged soul , with all its valor & vigor & dreams, then starts making resolutions that it knows it cannot keep.
• Tiptoes back in, amidst your solemn ceremonies effortlessly ritualized in place & makes a mockery of your sorted simplicities.

 So if you’ve experienced some of the above in yourself or in a loved one, don’t turn away. Stay there. Listen. Hold hands. And start a new chapter. It won’t be easy. But then, who said life would be an easy affair? 13.8 billion years of life & all those infinite combinations of events have led up to this event in your life. You cannot win against it by fighting it. You need acceptance & surrender. You need to replace fear with faith. There’s light at the end of the tunnel. There always is. Keep walking.

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That kind of silence

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So much of what we carry, lurks in silences.

The almanacs of ache, the tight-lipped angst

at unaddressed prayers, dried petals in fading

diaries, and half-remembered notes of music.

Linda Pastan said, what we conceal is so often

more prolific than what we  can ever confide.

Like a repository of lost language, stowed

carefully away in an old poem, we rise and

fall like a litany of a passing rain, drowning

a list of minutes we so feverishly conspired

to disown & bury. Lest they show up again.

Yet, this is  ritual of unbelonging, an ode to

unbelief, a secret sorcery of absences that

lives on. Like an ember in leftover ashes.

After the final word of the last prayer has

been uttered. And denied. And  the final

rumor about the death of Gods, spoken.

Like an allegory that lost half its storyline.

In lapses of incoherent calendars in lopsided

blue years ,we turn absolute in our resolution.

To deny an inheritance that’s  jinxed,

promising never to claim it again .

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(Ayon’s blog – December’23)