Perhaps my biggest achievement over the past few months is having not committed suicide, painted my nails purple or shaved my head again. Although I have been tempted to pour tomato ketchup on to my downstairs’ neighbour’s garden and shout “That’ll teach you to try and snatch my knife away!” very loudly, I’ve fortunately escaped most things that could either get me taken to jail or doing a lot of scrubbing for the next one thousand years.
But I stopped blogging.
Because you see, blogging would imply the semblance of usefulness. It would imply that somewhere in this deep, sticky quagmire of chocolate-soaked self pity, I actually thought I was good at something. That I actually felt I could contribute. It would endow me with that repulsive, dutty, shameful thing. Self Respect. Having that is like admitting to your family doctor that you smoke. Or telling your boyfriend that you have a yeast infection and no, that’s not something you can make bread with.
I’ve been through the worst. I’ve been so embedded in depression, the only way to get me out of it would be to place a piece of brown paper on me and iron on the reverse.
In the past four months I’ve learnt what it means to have your sense of dignity stripped away from you. To feel all-consuming, murderous rage but to have been so bound by fear that all you can recognise is a feeling of helplessness. How do you introduce yourself after you are fired from a job that was your sense of self? How do you communicate, without being one of those people who’s just dying to be asked about their bowel movement, that it wasn’t your fault, it was politics and you are good at your job YOU SWEAR! How do you look a smirk in the eye every single day, at every single party, in every first meeting?
I haven’t been the most pleasant person to know. I’ve bled my story over every single person I’ve met. Yes. Even the fish-wallah who comes on Sundays. I have REFUSED to share my Diet Coke. And I ate up all the Peanut Butter Cups my sister brought from America that you absolutely DON’T get in India.
And still Father A has loved me. Or at least resisted throttling me and throwing me into the sea. He has been able to wake up every morning and look at this decomposing trollop, this mess, this over-binged sloth, this self doubting harridan. This lumpen heap of tragedy and say, “Today, I will not be divorcing you.”
It must have been this all-encompassing ability to love, to see through the muck and still be around, and not his bank balance and cute arse like I all this time believed, that I must have said yes to marry. This solidness, this reassurance that everything would be OK, that made me choose him.
A few months ago, he and I turned three years old. And instead of an overdose of sleeping pills, he gave me my deliverance. A brand new HP Pavilion laptop. She’s slim and she’s black and she’s going to listen to everything I have to say. And for these very reasons, I will call her Oprah.
But I stopped blogging.
Because you see, blogging would imply the semblance of usefulness. It would imply that somewhere in this deep, sticky quagmire of chocolate-soaked self pity, I actually thought I was good at something. That I actually felt I could contribute. It would endow me with that repulsive, dutty, shameful thing. Self Respect. Having that is like admitting to your family doctor that you smoke. Or telling your boyfriend that you have a yeast infection and no, that’s not something you can make bread with.
I’ve been through the worst. I’ve been so embedded in depression, the only way to get me out of it would be to place a piece of brown paper on me and iron on the reverse.
In the past four months I’ve learnt what it means to have your sense of dignity stripped away from you. To feel all-consuming, murderous rage but to have been so bound by fear that all you can recognise is a feeling of helplessness. How do you introduce yourself after you are fired from a job that was your sense of self? How do you communicate, without being one of those people who’s just dying to be asked about their bowel movement, that it wasn’t your fault, it was politics and you are good at your job YOU SWEAR! How do you look a smirk in the eye every single day, at every single party, in every first meeting?
I haven’t been the most pleasant person to know. I’ve bled my story over every single person I’ve met. Yes. Even the fish-wallah who comes on Sundays. I have REFUSED to share my Diet Coke. And I ate up all the Peanut Butter Cups my sister brought from America that you absolutely DON’T get in India.
And still Father A has loved me. Or at least resisted throttling me and throwing me into the sea. He has been able to wake up every morning and look at this decomposing trollop, this mess, this over-binged sloth, this self doubting harridan. This lumpen heap of tragedy and say, “Today, I will not be divorcing you.”
It must have been this all-encompassing ability to love, to see through the muck and still be around, and not his bank balance and cute arse like I all this time believed, that I must have said yes to marry. This solidness, this reassurance that everything would be OK, that made me choose him.
A few months ago, he and I turned three years old. And instead of an overdose of sleeping pills, he gave me my deliverance. A brand new HP Pavilion laptop. She’s slim and she’s black and she’s going to listen to everything I have to say. And for these very reasons, I will call her Oprah.
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