A Healthy Mind for a Healthy Body - II

Shambhobi Ghosh, Indic Language Translator, AI4Bharat, IIT Madras.

Part - II

In 2017, I went to a new place. It was a small, closed-knit town, with a fledgling university and an even smaller community. Apparently, life looked laid back and calmer here. But the pressure of higher studies and adjusting to a diverse student community silently took a toll on me. I started getting frequent panic attacks. It would arrive suddenly, out of nowhere. A random word in the classroom could trigger a violent fit of panic. I realised that my anxiety had reached clinical levels but did nothing to address it. Deep down, I hoped that my problem would fade once I returned home.

Things weren’t looking better when, after two years, I finally went home. I remained irritable, short-fused, and aggressive with my parents. I felt small, mean, and petty, but instead of asking myself why, I assumed that was how other people viewed me. My solution was to get a job in a different city and leave home as soon as possible.

In the initial days, moving to a new city felt great. My new workplace had some amazing people, and I had the opportunity to reconnect with a few old friends. After the excitement of beginning fresh had subsided, I began to feel the anxiety again. No matter how much I tried, I failed to really connect with people. Every afternoon, when I left my office building and stepped out into the street, the sky above me looked like a grey bowl that pressed down on me, making me breathless, heavy and terrible. Things worsened when I broke down in tears at my office desk, for no apparent reason.

I spent two months in that office. By the end of those two months, I was starving myself, eating an apple and some bread each day. Every tiny setback felt like a mountain I couldn’t climb. Daily life activities and hygiene became an insurmountable difficulty. I spent most of my day lying in bed or crying in the washroom. Soon, it became clear that if I continued to live like this, I’d be dead by next year—by starvation, if not anything else. I had to get to the root of the problem; it lay not in the external world but within myself. So, I handed in my resignation letter before I was out of probation, and left for home, carrying with me what felt like tremendous defeat. Little did I know, it was the best decision I had made in my life.

Read Part -1

https://www.yogaplease.org/post/a-healthy-mind-for-a-healthy-body

To be continued...