April 2018, 8 am: A regular fight with my partner just wouldn’t settle. I grew restless at work, called her twice, but she didn’t take my calls. The restlessness was exploding inside, so I left my office and drove to her place around 1 pm, only to find her and her son basking in the sun, enjoying lunch.
At that moment something inside me exploded. The next eight hours were like a horror movie. I created a scene, threatened her, forced her into the car with me, shouting. Things got so bad that she got out of a moving car. Then came the guilt, the concern, the damning voice in my head that said, ‘What is wrong with you?’ This voice was telling me to stop, screaming, ‘Get help!’
But no help was available. Calls to three or four therapists revealed that the earliest I could get an appointment was after 30 days. So, I let it pass.
A month later, it struck again. This time the trigger was harder: my partner broke up with me. My reaction, more damaging. I did things that scared her, made her move houses, all in 48 hours. Me? I was on a train headed home, googling ways to kill myself. I felt like a burned dog, to whom even a wisp of air caused excruciating pain.
Mental health is not a topic I am unfamiliar with. Twenty years ago, I studied for a Masters degree in Clinical Psychology, but impatience with the subject made me change track. However, I continued to maintain my friendships. Consequently, my best friend today is a clinical psychologist. Over the years, I have interacted with her colleagues and classmates. This also meant that I always had three or four trained professionals to reach out to, but because they all knew me, I could never get therapy from them.
However, they listened when I reached out last year and also gave me a provisional diagnosis: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The more I researched BPD, the more I realised I fitted all the criteria: childhood abuse and neglect, history of difficult relationships, difficulty staying in jobs, acting out. At one level, it was reassuring to know what was wrong with me, on the other, my suicidal thoughts were gnawing at my core.
The therapist best friend (in the US) convinced me that first we needed to sort out the basics. May 2018 was also a time that I was without a job, living alone and not feeling that great physically. It was the living alone that we both agreed was the biggest threat and hence I took the train to my parents’, returning only after an entire month.
My relationship with my parents is like what most people in my generation (I am in my early 40s) have. We give the semblance of ‘good’ families but never ever talk about the real issues. So I told them what they were comfortable hearing: that my loneliness had caught up with me and that I had recently lost my job. Like all parents their generation, they helped with what they could. We never talked about anything deeper, but being at home helped. It made me come to the dining table to eat with others, and mostly it gave me five other people around the house to have some interaction with. You will understand loneliness if, like me, you have lived alone for the last 20 years. When just seeing another human face can be a blessing.
However, my suicidal thoughts were relentless. My therapist friend called me every day refocussing my energies on the basics: was I sleeping at night, eating my meals, doing some physical exercise. Luckily, all these I was!
One of the things I have learnt is that for each weakness in our personality there is also a corresponding strength. Mine is discipline and routine: I take to it like a fish to water, no matter how harsh the routine might be. So, while my BPD symptoms danced their evil dance, at home, I put myself into a routine of getting up at 5.30 am, cycling for 20-30 kilometres, eating two proper meals with family, sleeping by 11.30 pm and doing a structured job search. And yes, I played every day with my six-year-old nephew. As the month progressed, I felt my symptoms ease up a bit. Basic routine and self-care helped. I also got a blood test, which revealed some severe iron and vitamin deficiencies. B12 deficiency, I have come to understand, plays havoc with your nervous system.
Three months later, I was working a full-time job and began therapy. Unfortunately, neither of the two therapists I went to for almost eight months, could help me beyond some basic understanding of why I might have BPD.So, I was once again forced to look inward, drawing upon my own strengths.
I turned to a Chinese breathing exercise that I had learnt in college. Somehow, it calmed me. Slowly it helped me reconnect with myself, with my body, and helped me watch my mind.
My mind, I have come to believe, is another organ in my body — that I shouldn’t take my thoughts too seriously. Imagine if I took each beat of my heart to mean something and acted on it! I refuse to be led only by my thoughts now, often sensing how events and people feel in my entire body.
It has been over a year since I experienced the last horrifying incident, but that is not to say that my distorted thinking has completely healed. But I no longer feel the sense of helplessness that I once felt. I am able to watch my thoughts and see the distortions in my thinking, not act on it. I know they have a 24-hour life, so I tell myself to give it 24 hours. I have learnt to ask for a lot of help, because when things are not going well, every small gesture of help matters — even a friend coming home to spend the night. Mostly though, I have found help within, and that is the biggest life saver.
In this series, we feature first-person accounts of people who have accepted, acknowledged and sought help for their mental health challenges
