I answered some questions in a quiz?
You are so stupid but you think you are so smart.
I want to play cricket when my chest has started growing?
I don't know anything about how people think.
I want to travel in bus with my friends?
I just want to have fun with boys.
These are the actual reactions I got from my mother for being a child.
At every turn, at every decision, I was questioned, poked and made to doubt myself.
To my parents' credit, they never took a decision on my behalf. They emotionally blackmailed into me taking it myself.
As a result, I grew up doubting myself constantly.
It sounds sad and all, but it is a doubt that I still cannot shake off to this day.
I had an assignment submission for a job today, and I, a writer, had my email proofread by my partner. I have already lived past half a quarter of a century, by the way.
And this is me saying after healing from it, for the most part.
Though I don't spend most of my team cooking fantasies of revenge and cursing my parents anymore, there are periods when I am depressed and suicide seems the most logical option to someone like me.
I stopped hoping a long time ago, when my parents became the first people to dash my hopes and my dreams, which involved them upto that point.
Trauma doesn't stop with healing, it has become a part of me so deep I would rather die by it than forget it and move on.
I once had many dreams, I dreamt of working at CERN and winning the Nobel Prize, and now I struggle to find reasons to stay alive.
My partner gives me his smile to live for, but I was a daughter before I was his love, and at times I am still haunted by how casually I was birthed by them and now I don't matter to them anymore.
This has been especially true since I turned 18 and fell in depression. They used to treat me, at least on a surface level since I started topping academics at my school, with love, but now, I seemed to have become a burden on them.
I remember when I accompanied my mother to a market and saw a pile of open noodles and masala and wanted her to buy it for me.
I begged her for 10 minutes to spend merely ₹15 on me, and another 7 minutes for 2 packets of ₹5. I did get the masala in the end, but not because my mother yielded.
The undershirt wearing trader took pity on me before my mother did.
That was the day I realised I was worth less than ₹5 for her.
It maddened me to think why my parents loved me before and didn't now quite literally - I was their princess once and now I was nothing but a burden on their already heavy shoulders.
It took some time, but gradually it dawned on me that I am nothing but an investment for them. If I didn't actively produce any return, I am not worth anything to them.
And this is why when my partner first came into my life, I cried a lot over how he had to support me and how worthless I was to him.
Love isn't meant to only be there when you have something give back - this is true, but I didn't know it back then.
In my healthy relationship, these tears of worthlessness triggered a unhealthy cycle - he would support me and meet my demands to see me smile, I would cry because I could do absolutely nothing for him, and he got frustrated because nothing he did was enough.
Eventually, one night, when I threatened to kill myself and he told me that he was getting tired but would still support me as long as he could, I trusted him.
"He is doing everything he can for me, I should also try and do the same," I thought, and that was when I first took the steps that eventually helped me step out of that trauma.
But trauma doesn't end with healing, sadly.
I can understand now why my parents did what they did and why I was always destined to be the sacrificial lamb as long as I became their daughter, but there are still so many good things I neither know nor can provide.
For instance, I have recently started learning how to trust him fully. I have always trusted him to take the right decisions for me, but when it came to me working hard for my future, I always waver.
The only future I have ever seen upto this point is bleak and bleaker, and so working hard carrying this pain to survive another day makes no sense to me.
"It's hard and it will get harder, why don't I just die and make it easy for everyone?"
I know many of you will not agree with me here, and great but I don't care.
When I am down, when I have nothing of my own, when I am void, he is the only one who will share everything he has with all his selflessness, so he is the only one who gets to comment on me and my decisions.
Luckily for you, he agrees that I shouldn't die.
At this point, to me, it seems all the same. Death is as uncertain for me as life.
I may appear in a sadder world after my death, or I may be working towards a more painful future while I am alive. Fate is not knowledge we humans are privy to.
And so, I keep working, for him.
There was a time when I wanted to be happy because I liked to be happy - that time was in childhood before I was taught that I don't matter.
The past was a beast whose torture I suffered, the present is a shadow whose pain I still suffer, in the form of the lost potential of living a joyful life.
This trauma is what makes me write to you, and maybe you love reading what I write, but to me this is just a means to dissipiate my pain, which will collect once again and I will write again.
This knowledge I bestow unto you come from the wounds of my broken wings.
If I had never faced trauma in my life, I would have perhaps cleared IIT as expected by a friend, or maybe I could have had the courage to study in one of the best universities in the world I got the offer letters from. Maybe I could have been a cosmologist peering at the stars from a telescope at VLA, or a physicist smashing the tiniest of miniscule particles against each other to find the secrets of our universe.
Maybe I would have already won the Nobel prize that fascinates me so much, or maybe I would have been the next Einstein leading us to an era with dozens of new technological innovations that elevated our species.
I could have been anything, except a broke writer crying alone in a storage room worried about how she will afford her food tomorrow.
*Trauma = As I see it, trauma is the outcome of a circumstance or a set of circumstances in which you were constantly treated as something less than human. Trauma is why, even after those circumstances have passed, you may treat yourself as less than human.
Reflections