Mumbai: Have you ever been threatened by the fact that you might have forgotten to lock the main door once you leave home? That is anxiety! Have you been to the largest stationery store that you’ve ever visited and felt the need to pick up each and every thing, but your mom rejects your plea to buy so much at once so you have to limit what you cop? Besides each and every item you pass by, aisle by aisle, is nothing but another main door that you forgot to lock.
It is not a phase that one goes through, it is not a day that is off, it is not your mood that just swung like a baseball bat hitting a home run, it is a condition that would not cease to exist. Most people call it a “beautiful scar”, but there is nothing beautiful about it. The fact that people feel the need to “small talk” about it is enough to ruin the beauty at a go.
A person with such a chronic condition should be the last to be talked to about the same. When you tell them that they are just worrying and nothing more, trust me, they know better. Dear trend-setters, who are you to define the standards of normal? What is wrong and what is right, who decides? Dear people who enjoy the benefit of doubt, yours are the folks who bestow the benefits and my anxious lads wouldn’t make it above the doubt.
So when you come across a person who is going through anxiety or depression, do not address it at all. “Mentions are harder to take than the problem itself” they say, it’s true, I have known. Do not act like the crab who pulls the other down just as they are trying to get up. When you see someone cope up with their condition, do not belittle them with advices about something you have no clue about.
The apex of the pyramid of DON’Ts would be, do not make them a patronising promise like “it is all gonna be okay” because you do not know that. You do not know if they are going to make it through as most of them are waiting for that one point of saturation to give up on everything they are, have, know.
What you can in turn do is be considerate. Support them to keep going, because sooner or later there is going to be one day in their lives when they shall feel the light breeze up their cheeks or witness a cocoon turn into a butterfly or witness something as minute as randomly seeing the sun settling at the horizon and feel glad to have kept going to that point.
When you see such imperfectly perfect greatness, my dear “decisive” and “stable” pals, just admire them instead of trying to win them over.-By Malaya Bakshi
