This is a really personal piece. Trigger warning ⚠️
“Maybe I won, maybe I lost, but every battle makes a warrior stronger”.
Writing this not only shows I am not a loser, but it also gives a clear depiction that I am a proud winner.
When sitting at a table, where growth is a controversial subject. The fourth and back are often about our successes or victories or a major crux in our lives. Growth has a lot to do with us other than that. It has everything to do with decisions you make at 6 pm on a Friday. Whether you will go out with friends or stay in and watch a movie. What then do you do when you are left with no decision-making opportunities? Just you, waking up to a repeated pattern of day-to-day life.
Everyone at a point or the other had really big plans for the decade. It was 2020! A year we all anticipated with our coats on. Before long, what felt like a -not-so-serious- 2019 health news became a pandemic right under humanity’s watch.
There everyone was, confused, out of control, and uncertain of the next step. We hit a borderline when this fast-moving life-threatening disease got to our homeland. Things were out of control.
It was all vague news for me until everything took a fast turn in my institution of learning where I am a third-year medical student, juggling between theoretical and practical learning. It started with restrictions on movement and a lot of precautions if you had to move so importantly.
How wild of my school to think they would be able to manage the students with the breakout.
It felt like they had everything under control, not until the power beyond control, NUC, two days later halted every plan my school had by asking every university to close down and students were ousted.
There I was, with my entire bags packed and I was in the car on my way home to what I call “the brink of death”.
No, I never had the virus in my system. The helplessness and loneliness that came with this terrible circumstance was an unquenchable wildfire. It led to series of inner battles. A battle with myself that pushed me to the edge of the cliff of life.
Internal battles are fuel for self-mastery.
Being locked in your home away from all social activities really would open your eyes to such battles.
What felt like a farce became a reality.
What the human mind fears the most is death and when you are left with just one option to stay alive, away from your fear, you would most definitely jump on it. Practically everyone felt this way about the lockdown. It was our only means of survival. We accepted the offer. Well, maybe not everyone accepted it at first, but adaptability is one important biological feature of the human being. We adapted and we were all locked in our various homes away from the usual man's day-to-day life.
The social interactions, physical contacts, partying, clubbing, visiting friends when one deems fit and the celebrations that come with our every wins came to a standstill abruptly. It all crumbled down in front of our faces when all you can do is wake up to see the same faces you saw the previous day. How tiring!
I strongly believe that everyone has a story to tell about this pandemic. Either a fun story or a story like mine; a story of being stuck with my mind engulfed in loneliness, anxiety, and depression.
Complying with the quarantine guidelines was tantamount for anyone with an underlying condition. Speaking of that, my lung capacity was not at its maximum so whether I liked it or not, I had to be one hundred percent complaisant with the rules. My anxiety and depression level skyrocketed because of the inability to have human interactions and essentially the loss of social life.
I was quite introverted before the lockdown, what would serve as a minuscule difference between the lockdown and my daily life was the enforcement. Ever heard of, I hate doing things when I am being forced to? Yes, that was it. I hated the lockdown because it was forced.
The first few weeks had me going out of my mind, trying to find something to focus on and distract me from destructive thoughts my brain imparted. At the very beginning, it was not about being solitary, it was about longing for the human contact we had daily but did not quite take notice of. It was petrifying to deal with things that were completely out of control.
Our level of education, ferventness in religiousness, or basic morals could not save us and we were left there with nothing but memories of the outdoors.
Prior to this lockdown, I never had such a long moment with my family, I was the distant kid that went from boarding school to boarding school. I was an away from home family member. Now, being confined to a house where the occupants were at arm's length to you and an exhaustion of what to do leaves you with nothing but a realization of the distance. It was truly a hassle to stay behind closed doors all day, especially with no motivation to do anything at all.
I realized that my experience during the lockdown might not be just my own story. It might as well be someone else’s story somewhere. It might even be a lot like yours because the COVID-19 pandemic had its impact on everyone. There are some parts of this story that might make sense, some parts might make no sense, some parts that have always made sense and some parts might never make sense.
From an unbiased and unfazed perspective, you would understand how it feels like having someone you have an emotional attachment with outside of your family.
The distance that was exaggerated by the quarantine questioned this emotional attachment. With a mind wallowing in depression and anxiety, there was no coming back. Before long, ties were cut and what felt like a tiny ray of hope (the relief of having someone to talk to over the phone) was cut short. I was left with a huge vacuum of emptiness.
The popular saying “you don’t realize how alone you are until it is dark” was wrong for me, because even in the bright afternoon when the sun shone across the draperies in my room, I felt the loneliness. This was the beginning of what turned around my lockdown experience.
“Depression is living in a body that fights to survive with a mind that tries to die”.
Every day got worse and worse and I could barely drag myself along with the forthcoming days. I would stay in my room all day and night crying myself to sleep. Absurd thoughts were creeping in and filling my mind. There was nothing else to do. I had all the time I needed to break down and become a shadow of myself. I lost the motivation to do anything else because it felt like I was wasting my energy on pointless day-to-day activities.
An idle mind really is the devil’s workshop.
I got tired of being sad every day and wanted to be happy. My mind constantly made me feel there was no reason to be happy. It felt like a repetitive pattern. A battle that I was losing. Like a vulture feeding on carcasses, my mind preyed on my vulnerabilities. Soon enough, suicide became my everyday thought and I started to question my purpose in life.
The media has always served its purpose at every point we needed it. With every positivity, comes its downside. This is not exclusive to social media. A couple of people during the lockdown made money from the media. Others created fun memories with it, but the story was different for me.
Social media created nothing but pessimism, divisiveness, and hurt. It started giving me the illusion that I was the only one with such rumpled mental health. Scrolling through the manipulative algorithm that keeps reviewing to my face only the good side of people’s lives, in utter opposition to my sad life made matter worse. The over- analyzation of what people posted had a terrible effect on my mental wellbeing. The pressure and comparison that social media set in a mind that is yet to be fully developed and articulated is horrifying and disbelieving.
I was a victim of the pressure from social media. The necessary evil had me up in the middle of the night jealous and dissatisfied with my own life. I wished I was more perfect or more coordinated.
My family did not pay much attention to me but of course, soon noticed the drop in my activity level and they started making comments like “why do you stay in your room all day?” or “why do you sleep so much?”. My breakfast, lunch, and dinner would be on the table, uncovered and untouched. I lost my appetite for food. Well, technically, it was not just food. I lost my interest in everything else. I wanted a get away from my mind so bad. I was tired, run-down, sad, and alone.
In the middle of my deteriorating mental health, I got the news from my doctor that I had renal stones. News that made things worse. When I got the symptoms in the fourth month of the lockdown, I ignorantly thought I was being hypochondriac. Anxiety can make you think of nonexistent health conditions. I was proved wrong when my CT scan reports came back and I had stones in my renal system. Backaches, painful urination, and vomiting. These symptoms sound easy until it is accompanied by miserable thoughts.
It was not my first time being diagnosed with renal stones but it was an arduous time for this. I was administered drugs and the doctor advised I drink more water and take my drugs at the stipulated time. What a bluff. I have always done that but what about the excruciating pain that comes with passing these stones?
Why can I not turn off all the depressing, anxiety-inducing, negative horrific, and mean thoughts that my brain comes up with?
Why can I not be a normal 18-year-old-girl? If such a thing even existed.
Yes, everyone technically was staying at home, maybe I am being a little whiny, but being alone is draining. Being alone in pain is even more draining. Being alone with an empty soul, a weakened heart and declining health are over the top draining. I lost control. The baton of the race fell off my hand and I succumbed to the never-ending urges of my suicidal mind.
Self-harm set in. You never know about other people’s pain until you have felt it.
I have no recollection in detail of how it started but I know the feeling of the razor blade cutting through my skin brought the sense of relief I did not think of. Crying and making the first cut, the second cut, till you are cutting deeper and deeper and feeling relieved instead of pain. I had my entire left arm lined with wounds from my cut. I did not stop until I was tired and I dozed off. I slept with blood oozing from the cut I inflicted on myself.
My dad met me in this disfigured state the following morning. Words cannot do justice to the despair and disbelief on his face when he walked into a room of his wounded daughter. But he understood me surprisingly. His words on why I should be happy remain stuck in my head.
If only depression works that way. If it was just about telling people to just be happy and not be sad and they would. It went from bad to worse in less than a week and I became even more suicidal. I had felt the unreal sense of relief that self-harm brings.
The pain from the stones became unbearable. All I could feel was physical and emotional pain. I felt like disappearing, I was exhausted from doing the barest minimum which is just existing. I could not tell anyone, not even my parents; how do I tell the people that gave me life that I hated what they gave me?
It was easy for everyone else to say if you feel down, you should open up and talk to someone, but opening up is a herculean task.
I wanted to end the pain in any way I could and I tried. I overdosed on pain reliever pills. The feeling of about fifteen pills going down your throat is bad but the worse came five minutes later.
It felt like a rush of moments, from my mum opening my room door and meeting me almost lifeless to rushing me to the hospital, and there I was in the A & E being resuscitated. I honestly thought it was the end I wanted.
Even if I could not move, the look on my mum’s face had me begging to live. The beeps from the EKG monitors and my mum’s screams were the last thing I heard before finally blacking out.
Re: I have this written down already and I'm still skeptical about sharing the rest of it because it contains a lot of triggers. So yeah, I might post a part 2 next week and I might not. As I deem fit.
Thanks for reading today's piece. Make sure to like and drop a comment. Thank you❤️
Hmm,What a piece..I'm glad you were able to get through this dark times,,,,I hope we all embrace/love ourselves for who we really are,,Give room for growth for our individual selves without comparism with where others are or their achievement whatsoever instead of beating ourselves up,we should see it motivations/inspirations to get better for ourselves only...It's easier said than done,lol,but it can be done if we set our minds to it
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