The Doppelganger

She was storming around violently in the other room. Throwing books of shelves, tossing around chairs and the occasional side table. I shivered under the blankets, they were my only shield against her. I'd be safe as long as I remained under them I consoled myself. 

Then, a scarier silence. Had she managed to enter my room? If I peaked out from under my blankets would she be standing, grinning maniacally over my head? I mustered some courage slowly uncovered my face and looked out. Nothing, nothing but the ceiling. I knew she couldn't be hiding under the bed or behind some furniture, I had long since learnt to sleep in a bare room, with no nooks to hide in. 

I turned on the lights in my room, gingerly tiptoed around the house, setting it ablaze with lights. Painfully aware that she would have set the house ablaze. I crawled into bed and waited for my friend to arrive. 

15 minutes later, a patient but unsympathetic friend arrived. She had had enough of my stupid doppelganger fear she said. I agreed, that's why I'd I called her, to distract myself from my over-active imagination. We went around the house shutting off lights and settled down in front of the TV for the weeks fifth slumber party. Comedy, romance, action on the agenda. No horror involved. 

'Don't dwell on it, distract yourself' I was following my therapists advice. My amused psychiatrist had told me not to take my thoughts too seriously. I knew, they knew, we all knew that I knew it was an irrational fear. That I wasn't really scared of my doppelganger. That I didn't really expect to come across myself, lurking in some corner of my living room, hiding behind the curtains, testing the knives in my kitchen.  Yet I wished that someone would take my fear seriously. Surely it meant something. Alas, all my therapists were boring and behavioral, Freud and Jung seemed to have gone out of fashion. My homeopath had taken me seriously, without prompting he had asked me whether I was scared of something, I told him about my doppelganger fear and I could see him earnestly scribbling away 'is scared of ghosts'. sigh....

It was Saturday and after five nights at home, my friend and I were restless. We decided to get dressed, get out, get high and go dancing. Well, apart from the high part - I wasn't allowed to mix meds and mojitos just yet. I was willing to take 3 out of 4, which was not enough. At the club, I sat around bored, it never failed, without alcohol, I just wasn't a party person. The music was too loud, grating, I couldn't dance, my dress was uncomfortable and the smoke made me cough. Don't dwell, distract yourself I repeated my mantra to myself and began looking around, people watching, trying to spot the idiots, trying to score cheap laughs of them. When I spotted her. There she was, yelling at a hapless waiter, picking up the glass and throwing its contents on his face. Bursting out in cackles of laughter, amused at what she'd done. 

My heart was pounding furiously, I wanted to hide before she spotted me. I tried to duck under the table, but it's base was solid. The couch was pushed against the wall and there was no space behind it. It was 12:30 in the night and my friend was lost in the sea of dancers. As I furiously hunted for my friend, all I saw was her. She pulling the hair of her female companion. she treading on a guy's foot with  6 inch stilettos. She burning bits of paper with a lighter. She playing with the knife on the table.  Friend or not I decided to leave and ran out of the room, messaging to let my friend know. Face bent over my phone I ran right into her just outside the club. 

She looked at me, sizing me up. Even though we could have been twins, I could feel the differences. I was shivering, she was composed. Mousy little me next to her. We were wearing the same clothes and yet it was I who was dressed up while she must have casually sauntered out of her house. And then she spoke - 'I should have had you kicked out for my bad behaviour, it's like I'm looking into a mirror'

And then there was a crack. She must have overpowered me and pushed me into a ditch. As I regained consciousness I tried yelling for someone to come save me, but no one could hear me over the din. There were hundreds of voices yelling and screaming, and bright flames licking the night sky. After a while fire engines began to wail and then silence.  In the morning I was finally freed by the police in a manner of speaking. The police refuse to believe me, they refuse to believe that she set the club ablaze. No one remembers her. No one remembers that quiet little thing.

Letting the write one in

It was the night of the Lunar eclipse, witching hour and the three of us stood outside cackling curses at the clouds. There they were, making sure we wouldn't see, that we couldn't see, the moon. It was very rude of them, we sulked, to come and spoil our fun.

Disappointed and embarrassed, the pointy hats had come out for no reason and our neighbors were now staring at us for want of nothing better to look at, the three of us trooped indoors.

My sisters left me to brood the unfairness of a lunar eclipse devoid of occult experience. I had been sure that something would happen, I had pinned my hopes and happiness on something happening.

It wasn't new. I have been pinning my hopes and happiness on something happening for a long time now. Indicators of something happening have included, online horoscopes, the number of mynahs I spotted and wishes made on shooting stars (which must have been airplanes). I was willing to dress up, make believe, party, make an ass of myself, be self-deprecating, day dream, build fantasies but I was not willing to work, try something, fail......

When a scream interrupted my inner monologue. My sisters came flying out of our bedroom. Followed by a bat. Followed by my mothers ultimatum to stop screaming and get the bat out! Balcony doors were opened and because of the power of the witching hour, with the help of my polite but firm directions the little spazzed vampire found an exit and left.

The pointy hats came out again and the three witches sat and dissected the Bat episode. It was renamed the vampire episode, the significance of the lunar eclipse was discussed, perhaps we had discovered a vampire-werewolf hybrid. We disagreed over which one of us it had come to meet or eat. We agreed that it was the power of my sisters screaming and the help of my imagination that made it look like the bat left after my directions. We cackled gleefully and my mother called us batty. Which made us cackle some more. I went to sleep with a smile on my face, something had happened.

Something which made me want to write again. It wasn't easy, I wrote and rewrote this post a hundred times over. I added a phrase, or a line, or a paragraph every week. I excised awful alliterations ('clouds cutting into a celestial conga line'), entire themes which were ahem clouding the post. I started laughing at horoscopes again and I stopped wishing on plucked out eyelashes. I started an internship, I applied for a job and I got a job. My confidence in myself increased.

But those single mynahs continued to plague me. So tonight, on a night which is simply a hard days night I've finished the post. I've written the last few paras, I've reworked the alliteration into the post (even if I had to use a parenthesis) and added one more. Tomorrow when I see two mynahs, I'm not going to wait for something nice to happen, I'm going to come back and change the have in the fourth paragraph to a had.

The chicken or the Egg

Which came first? The chicken or the egg? According to The Second Book of General Ignorance, it was the egg. Well, duh!

But which one is the egg and which one is the chicken? Are these feelings of insecurity caused by depression, or am I depressed because I've always been a little insecure.

It's been a long year. It's been exactly one year. And it's been a horrid year of unbroken depression. At the end of it, I find myself, crippled, unable to take on even the simplest of tasks without straining myself, second guessing my beliefs and finally acknowledging the fact that I seem to have lost all direction. Useless, is the word I'm beginning to associate the most with myself.

I need to know which came first. If insecurity is the egg that hatched the depression, well I need to make myself useful, build a little self-confidence, the onus is on me. If it's depression,I can wallow some more and pray that the medication works.

I hope it's depression. I have more faith in meds than me.

Paranoia

As I lay awake last night, I could hear myself in the other room, walking around, turning on lights, opening drawers, pulling apart curtains, looking for something, searching for someone. I waited for the door to burst open, for me to enter, maniacally happy to have finally found the person I was looking for, me, shivering in the night, cowering under the sheets.

Some people are deathly scared of death, others of ghosts, dogs, dustbins or snakes. I don’t need a boggart to show me what I’m scared of, a mirror will do.

I thought of locking the room, but a calm voice in my head assured me that it wouldn’t help, I was already in the room, there was no keeping me out. I was already there to talk, to taunt and to hurt.

When I’m showering I make sure I never close my eyes, I check underneath the bed and behind the curtains whenever I enter an empty room and I’ve removed the bed from my hostel room.

I know what I'm scared of, but I don't know why, maybe it's all in the head, my head.

Spent the last semester a little stir crazy. Spent half of my time wishing to fall down a rabbit hole, spent the other half trying to make that happen by doing a lot of crazy things.

New semester break, new city, new internship, new medication but same old heart break. There were a couple of posts written about learning to walk, walking out of the woods, but the truth is that I seem to be walking in circles.

The gentleman with thistle down hair

For someone who dishes it out as much as I do, I am painfully slow when it comes to detecting other peoples sarcasm, lies and general deceptions. Essentially I’m a cheerfully oblivious kinda person who accepts whatever other people tell me as the gospel truth. Like the time I was five at the republic day parade and my mom told me that the dinosaur on the float was real. I believed her, I had no reason not to, except for science and I knew nothing about it back then. Then there was the time I was in 4th Grade and our science teacher took an extra class during the computers period, and announced in unmistakably icy tones that those who were more interested in playing on the computers could get up and leave. I got up and left, I still wasn’t too fond of science and I thought she meant it.
Then there are other stories I was told as a kid, such as the one about my cousins grandma owning a little menagerie, which contained peacocks, rabbits and tiger cubs amongst other animals. It took me 15 years to doubt that story and the 7 year old in me still wants to believe that it’s true, that anamma actually owned 3 tiger cubs. Reading people has never been my forte.
I’d like to think that my 4 years in college where I have had the opportunity to observe human nature and behaviour up close has made me more adept at detecting deception. But it’s not so. When I read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I believed that the footnotes were carefully researched out references to “magic” books that actually existed, until I hit the footnote which began to talk about England’s Faerie King. My science may be weak, but my history is a tad better, and the believing footnotes stopped right there.
It’s a good book, a tad confusing, but fun to read. What really drew me into the story was its antagonist, the gentleman with thistle down hair. The gentleman with thistle down hair, holds people captive in his faerie kingdom of lost-hope where he forces them to dance the nights away, while in the human world these captives withdraw into shells, drowned in misery, unable to talk about their troubles, unable to sleep, eat, or live an ordinary life.
How often have I longed to track down the gentleman with thistle down hair whose been holding me captive, and stab him to bits and pieces, which as wishes go is slightly more acceptable than wanting to stab my teachers, assorted auto drivers and occasionally myself.
Anyway there you go, caustic, unable to read and therefore relate to people, mildly to moderately depressed and with a propensity for angry violence, it’s been a long time growing up and I’m still not done. The last bout of depression was particularly bad, I’m not yet out of the woods, but I’m finally up on my feet, walking and trying to get out.

Feeling Better

I haven’t written anything in a long time. I haven’t been able to, I’ve been too busy. Busy wallowing in equal parts of self pity and self loathing. Depressed, dejected, feeling dumb and dull, I’ve lost the ability to articulate my opinions. Have a conversation. Write. Think.

I’ve spent the last couple of months eating, sleeping and sleep walking. I’ve “done” quite a bit, but none of it has registered over the persistent throbbing dull, sad feeling. The only things that come to mind are unpleasant breakdowns I’ve had, failures and dead ends I’ve hit in the past few months.

I’m being dragged through college by family and friends for a degree and the promise of something better after (just) one and half years more. I’m due to give my third repeat exam and at the rate my CGPA is dropping I wonder if I will be able to convince my college to let me out with a degree, much less convince some other college to let me in without a capitation fee.

I’ve been waiting for something to happen. Every day, every hour, every minute of my existence I pray for something to happen. Something which will come, sweep me out of this funk I’m in. But nothing happens unless you make it happen and the only things that I feel I can make happen are, to put it bluntly, not pleasant.

So instead I am going to write about what all has already happened to me, what I’m grateful for, and what some of my coping mechanisms are. It’s a little gratitude post, it’s going to tell me that all is not lost, that I still have a life worth fighting for and the means to fight that battle.

One of the most important things that has happened to me is blogging. It’s been a year since I started blogging, and words cannot express how much it means to me. Nonetheless I will make a short feeble attempt at explaining the role it’s begun to play in my life. Blogging gives me a sense of accomplishment, something that I badly need in the face of my failing academic career. I’ve been accused of TMI on my blog, but I don’t really care, being brutally honest on my blog has helped me deal with personal issues and insecurities with a sense of humour, it has helped me come to terms with a myself that I wanted to hide. It’s helped me understand that these insecurities are shared by others and that if I say it out aloud, I will have received and given empathy. Blogging is an outlet for a great deal of frustration, whenever I find myself in what would earlier have been a stressful or anger inducing situation, I now tell myself to take a step back, observe the situation with a sense detachment and humour so that I can blog about it later. And when I fail to achieve that state of detached humour, writing invariably calms me down and helps me sort out the very strong opinions and emotions I feel.

I owe blogging to my friends and sisters, hereinafter referred to as friends. I owe a lot to my friends. They read my blog, they listen to me and they love me. I doubt that anybody will find so perfect a combination of love, craziness, intelligence, individuality and spirit than what’s housed in my hostel. Often when I listen to other people talk about their friends, I find myself pitying them for not having mine. From my school days (when I would walk around alone in the lunch break, eating food continuously, trying to look busy, so that no one would notice I had no one to hang out with) to today (where I have in my room a wall painted bright red by my friends, so that as they explained to me, when I’m depressed and have locked myself into my room, I can look at the wall, and remember that I have friends, that I am a person people want to be friends with) I have come a long way. And it’s because of them. I’ve found my happily ever after.

Then there are the parents, they listen, they counsel, they support, they put up. I have faith in them. They are individualists and I know that whenever they have to make a decision regarding me, they think of what I would want, instead of what they want for me. They understand that I’m not them, that their values aren’t necessarily mine and that I will do things differently from them when the time comes.

So, I’ve written. The tears which prompted me to write this post have dried up. I’m feeling a lot better. From tomorrow, I will begin taking baby steps towards even more betterhood.

Instead of sleeping for hours and hours in my room, I will sleep in various rooms across the corridor, while the owners of the room do whatever it is that they’re doing. When you’re depressed and not in a position to talk to others, laugh with them, this is an easy way to gently ease back into a social life. I will resume jogging, I have no self-control when it comes to stimulants of any variety, food, music, alcohol. Jogging is a “safe” stimulant, but I end up abusing jogs as well. Once I’m in the routine, my body begins to yearn for the jogging high, I spend the entire day waiting for when I can go jogging, unable to do anything but look at the clock, when something threaten the jog, like rain or a dinner plan with friends, I get panicky and worked up. When I’m jogging, I find myself unable to stop until I’m exhausted. I will not let that happen. I will listen to anyone else who needs to talk. Because to know that you’re not alone, is the most important thing. I will ask for help when I need it.

(for those of you who are wondering, I started writing this post on the 9th of January. That day all that I could write before I gave up was the first line, also I have given and passed my repeat since then)