By: Iman Waqas
TW: MENTAL HEALTH/SUICIDE MENTION
The vacancy in your eyes, with the hollowness of your face, caused a chill to run through my heart. Never had I seen someone so refulgent, vanquished by the shadows so easily. Your intimacy with death was like an embrace of a lover, serene, and invigorating for you. Till I realized how far you had gone; it was already too late.
You were diagnosed with depression at 25 years old. Everybody speculated that it’s just a phase, she’ll get over it. Nobody was willing to treat it as a sickness. It was either avoid it or ignore it altogether, even if the other person was disappearing slowly day by day, only to leave behind a mere apparition of their real self. The signs were present for a while. The significant weight and appetite loss, your bleak outlook of life, random outbursts of self-loathing, and an apathetic attitude towards everything. Our grandmother whom you had been closest to had died recently, so your melancholic behavior was written off as an excuse to mourn the departed soul. Forgetting that this despondency and desolation hadn’t just started. Being my sister, I tried to reach out to you, but you had fortified yourself behind unbreachable walls. Do you remember me sitting outside your door, refusing to move for hours, screaming until my voice went hoarse for you to let me in, only for my pleas to land on deaf ears? What happened so horrendous that you settled for living a monstrous nightmare? Was it the continuous pressure of society over matrimony, facing rejection over the most trivial of things, the stressful job with minimalist pay you had to hold onto, to ward off the loan sharks, who continuously haunted our house after dad’s business went bankrupt or something else that missed my eyes. Anything to make me understand, why I found you in the guest room on that fateful night, bleeding out slowly, your eyes turning glassier by the minute.
Coincidentally I had left my bag there. I had never expected to see you lying there like a ragged doll, the cuts on your arms the only witness of your traumatizing past. Stories cloaked for so long that not a whisper of them was heard, so people deluded themselves into accepting their fictitious nature. We rushed you to the hospital, they immediately shifted you into the emergency room. After two long hellish hours, the doctors announced that you were getting better, but would be kept under observation for 24 hours. Seeing you plugged with so many tubes, looking like an angel so ethereal in your unworldly beauty, my heart wept silent tears. Despair and misery in their extremes still hadn’t managed to quench your luster. The most heartbreaking fact was that you weren’t always like this. You were happy before. It took years of neglect, ignorance, and unchecked disease for you to finally spiral off the end. The worst part was that it took for you to almost die for people to realize it was an actual problem that needed to be treated medically, despite my constant begging to get you psychological help before. This is perhaps the most toxic trait of our society; nobody really cares until you are gone or take an extreme step. Perhaps, regret is stronger than gratitude. When will we understand that having mental health issues doesn’t automatically make you insane? It doesn’t turn you into a lesser person for having them. It’s not something ugly or horrid that must be hidden or ignored. How many more suicidal victims does the world need for them to accept it, like any other illness that needs to be treated?
(Photo from here.)
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