Depression Chronicles

I’ve given myself an ultimatum, that if I don’t write a minimum of one post a fortnight then I’m no good. Procrastination and self- doubt have got the better of me. You’re not a writer! screams my mind from within my head and most of the time, I immediately follow its advice and don’t even try! Why do we have to have a mind, which wants to sabotage every single good thought or thing we want to do, simply boggles me! We need an app which de-bugs our mind!!

I don’t have any excuse not to write, I have Swamiji, who is an epitome of everything, I mean everything, love, kindness, hard work, sincerity, Oh let me just say He’s God in a human form. I have his protection and love and I have no one to blame except myself if I don’t use the platform He’s created for us to write. So, the ultimatum!

Writing about my long-standing relationship with major clinical depression and the roller coaster it’s taken me on is the first thing that comes to my mind. It’s taken me to so called tantrics and babas and the works.
Then ultimately it brought me to Swamiji, but that’s a story for another time.
I’ve been on strong anti-depressants for pretty much the whole of the last decade and I continue to use them even till today.
My tryst with major clinical depression started with the birth of my daughter in 2011.(post natal) But dealing with mental issues goes way back to my childhood. I’ve always had unnatural fears and paranoias from when I can remember. I got married late in life and my husband who is a gem of a person was quite flummoxed when he realised how scared I am and how many times I fall physically sick with all kinds of ailments. He’s a tribal from the Himalayas and although, he’s more educated than me and has a firmer head on his shoulders than me, he’s brought up believing in black magic and evil spirits etc. He firmly believed that all of what was happening to me was because of an evil spirit. And then began a series of visits to various fraudulent babas. The only reason I played along was that my husband and his family are such amazing and endearing people. They live in the central Himalayas and my mom in law was genuinely concerned about me and my well-being. To top it all I live in Mumbai and my husband had to do a lot of asking around to find the ‘right’ person to help me because he didn’t know too many people here. Finally we got an appointment with a self proclaimed siddha hahaha who is a bhakt of a well known enlightened master. How people manage to raise themselves on pedestals and have people actually following them is indeed a mystery to me. But at this point I must admit that I got a bit carried away with my husbands conviction and started half believing that I might be possessed by an evil spirit to have this kind of fears and constant illnesses. So this Babas ashramresidence is in the outskirts of Mumbai and he had a proper business running there with business cards and the works. He wore saffron robes and plenty of jewellery and he took one look at me and proclaimed that I was possessed by an evil female spirit. (why do all evil spirits have to be female, I have no idea!) And of course he said he has a perfect solution for all my problems! (is there any such thing!!) He conveniently made us buy some jewellery from him, which I was supposed to wear at all times and if I didn’t follow what he told me I would die a horrible horrible death he said. I had to do some elaborate rituals for 7 to 8 weeks and report back to him at the end of every week. Each time we visited him we of course had to pay him for some thing or the other.
At the end of this strange procedure I was supposed to sleep on a black bedsheet for 3 days in a row and then burn the bedsheet and that would signify the burning of the evil spirit.
I was beginning to get tired of all the nonsense and yet I went through with everything thereby ending our first encounter with a ‘baba with occult powers’ as he is popularly known as We were left a little poorer and very tired but nothing else had changed.
I don’t need to mention that my fear didn’t get any lesser and my paranoia continued to grow at a steady pace. (more in the next post)