Dissociation

I won’t claim to know the symptom that dissociation is to many mental health conditions. I won’t be speaking about any mental health conditions; I have a very limited Google-baba knowledge about them. I have never felt comfortable calling myself depressed because I haven’t been medically diagnosed. I take depression seriously because it is as scary a word as cancer for a misinformed or selectively aware person or a person with limited awareness.

When I began telling people that I cannot recognize my reflection in the mirror, most of them heard it as a metaphor. I was talking in real life figurative terms, they weren’t literal. I was terrified every time I looked into a mirror or took a selfie or got clicked in general. The image that I saw outside wasn’t the image I had in my head. It was not even the image that people showed me or at least the one their choice of words did.

I was unable to relate any comment on my body or face or hair for that matter. I began seeing the things that led to those comments and those things meant nothing at all to me. It might sound fancy if I say my body and its image were meaningless. I felt burdened, as if I had a body that I didn’t ask for. I tried to trace this dissociation only to realise it wasn’t abrupt. It had begun ever since I began losing weight. Without a full body length mirror, I barely saw myself (I don’t even bother to look into a mirror while combing). I began having a view of my changing body by the way people began describing me. I should have been flattered. I was devastated. I didn’t know the girl they were talking about, I had never seen myself as someone getting attention for her body apart from the many public groping and sexual abuses. I didn’t ask for it. I never wanted it.

A year later when this dissociation was at its peak, I saw my face divided. Lips, nose, eyes, eyebrows didn’t make a single coherent face. My job made it difficult for me to relate myself on an intellectual level. I might have been someone who came up with at least one new idea each day and that idea never got on paper, or if it did, it ended up merely as a scribble in my diary. I wasn’t the person who went to office only to feel like everyone’s trying to own her. If there’s one thing I have always run away from or feared the most is the feeling of being trapped. I don’t take orders that I don’t agree with unless I am explained. I don’t believe that hierarchies cannot be broken. I don’t believe that society cannot change. I always have had the attitude of being the change while everyone waited. I tried to keep it away, to fit in. Surprisingly, I often use the phrase ‘fit in’ while never knowing exactly what I was trying to do.

When I quit my job telling my manager that I want to pursue research, he had asked me one question, ‘If you wanted to do Phd then why did you agree to this job?’ I was shocked by my response. I had told him that I always knew I’ll be marrying research; I just wanted to make sure all the temptations are out of the way because I get curious. I don’t cheat. It frustrates me. I don't stay if I don't feel valued. My manager stared at me for a while as I laughed at my answer. That’s the story of my resignation. It’s important because when I replied, I felt myself. I felt something had returned to me. I might not have valued myself ever but I had never been in an environment where I was asked to get used to constant devaluation.

All my life I have been driven by what not to be, questioning myself at every move simply because I am curious and unsure if whatever I am looking at has a constant supply of undying mystery to a degree to keep me interested. If I say, I am bored easily; fingers are pointed towards me for my impatience. However, I am one of the most patient people I now know of. I look at myself in the mirror now and recognize some things. It’s easy because I am gaining weight again or at least my bones don’t show as much as they did when I lost 10kilos. In the process of figuring out the possible reasons for such dissociation I began putting people’s perception and mine together only to realise I had little or no self worth. It was something my parents had warned me about, but I was not aware enough to understand it.

I tried to bridge the gap between who I am and what I think of myself. Having been a self loather all my life, relying on outside encouragement to keep going, I found it difficult to be kind to myself. I am trying but it is stressful because it is easy to fall back into old habits. Given I am not as interested in food as I used to be or dressing up for that matter, I wonder if I got better at all. I convince myself by saying that I have a bird’s eye for a goal right now and until I get it nothing might matter. It doesn’t change the fact that most of the times I wonder, what if I don’t get it? It's painful because it is just so difficult to convince myself that I am capable of it no matter what I am told.

I am twenty five. I was required to specify Ms/Mrs at a lab today to get a blood test done. I was required to specify it after mentioning my age. I am so exhausted that I wasn’t angry. My grandparents want me married, what am I doing in my life anyway or what have I done so far? Right now I am making character analysis of Brandon Stark from Game of Thrones for being a Buddha like figure who restrains without denying the material pleasure. I am suggesting that the viewer’s disrespect for Jon Snow denying identifying as Aegon Targaryen says a lot about how we look at chosen identity and imposed identity. I am calling out writers for making rape, violence and public humiliation tools to make a female character, Sansa Stark, strong. I am annoyed that romantic rejection is shown as a reason for Daenerys Targaryen going psychologically mad.  None of it matters, because what am I getting out of it? 

Every time I look at the mirror now, I stare straight into my eyes especially if sunrays are being reflected too. I have always liked how my eyes look light brown in the sun, that’s been the only constant in the whole process of dissociation and association. I don’t know what I have given up on but there’s definitely something. I am not the person who chooses to stay silent when people keep talking about her as someone wasting years. I am not silent because I have no answer; I just know that if I answer then I will voluntarily undergo the pain of making people understand knowing they might not get it at all. I cannot blame them for not understanding it. However, it might be frustrating if my experience is dismissed as nothing which it will be because it has no material representation of the output. 

Source: Kaha Mind Instagram page (@kaha.mind)

I had been called bipolar over and over again by people in the course of this dissociation. My state was called depression. After a point of time, I put out a disclaimer – you don’t get to throw mental illnesses at me if you’re not willing to walk the course with me. It’s terrifying. If I told you over and over again that your headache is a brain tumour while you know this particular kind of headache is something you’ve had since childhood, won’t it scare you? The idea that you have been sick ever since you were a kid without a medical diagnosis to confirm? You don’t dismiss it because something does feel different. So, it is a ‘what if’ that holds the thread to your sanity.

So, I request you to not throw mental health conditions at people, take them for a diagnosis instead. Know better, care more. For all you know, the person in front of you might be dissociating while you tell her how amazing she is because she cannot see what you see. That’s the thing about people without self worth, they think so little of themselves that they assume that anything that they do can be done by anybody. 

To quote Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) from The Imitation Game (2014): Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do things no one can imagine.

What if you are your ‘people’ as well as ‘no one’? Imagine the blindness.