I cried for the entire night. I had people around me, yet I had no support and I felt lonely. I was cursing myself for I was being accused of causing pain to my dear ones. It was not intentional, that I’m sure of. However, the burden of the pain that I had caused lingered over me. At least I was made to feel guilty.
Why was I made a scapegoat by the creator? Why was I planted in this situation in the first place which made my dear ones unhappy? Why me? All the WHY questions plagued my mind.
I was haunted by the thoughts of self-mutilation and even suicide. I didn’t know how, but I was sure of committing it before dawn. Yet something stopped me from taking this extreme step – maybe it was the belief that I would bring disgrace to my family, or maybe I was too pigeon-hearted to take such drastic action, or maybe I was just too afraid of the consequences if I survived the attempt.
I don’t know what kept me from making that move. Maybe some invisible angel was looking at me from a distance and protecting me without my knowledge! Chuckles… not from me though… maybe it’s those guardians trespassing again. On second thoughts, I felt, it would have made things easy, at least temporarily – as if I would have been alive to feel the ease. Chuckles, again… It would at least have given my dear one’s a chance to repent on their irrational allegations. Guffaw, this time.
You see, I used to overthink a lot! And I knew I did. It amused me how mindful I was even while I overthought. Grinning… it’s me, this time!
Well, it’s easy to make fun of myself now that I am out of the crisis. But believe me, I was a part of innumerable cycles of emotional turmoil and hurricanes of grief. I have been in loops of heartbreaks, melancholy, depression, and martyrdom, before I could regain myself and fix my fragmented parts into a whole, at least partially.
In search of answers, I roamed from door to door – my doors opened to a new book each time. One book particularly caught my attention. It was Karen Casey’s “Let Go Now: Embrace Detachment as a Path to Freedom“. I tried reading it, but couldn’t. Nothing struck a chord inside me. No advice works when you are going through hell. Maybe self-help books are for the sober and not for people already in the rut. Yet I clung to it, slept with it under the pillow with frantic hopes that something would work and get me out of my depressive cycles.
My quest, I cannot say came to an end, but was quenched to a large extent by a unique and intriguing book, Paramahansa Yogananda’s “Autobiography of the Yogi“. Though it’s an autobiography, every page of the book served as a bioscope for me to glance into my ‘soul’ – a term I had first read in the Bhagavad Gita, which made me realize there’s more for me to identify with myself, than my body or thoughts.
However, it would be wrong to say that my learnings have come only from books. Instead, it is the…
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