Sometimes, it is a lumbering beast: Living with social anxiety

Here's what it feels like to live with my particular brand of social anxiety.

Sometimes my anxiety is a lumbering beast that wants me to stay in bed so that I don't have to trudge through another day of pallid existence. Sometimes it is an unsolicited hummingbird in my heart that has made a deal with my breath to only travel on Track 1, where no deep breathing or meditation can fix it. Sometimes it is a swirling of the world as I lie alone in bed at night, ribbons in my stomach swimming in great currents against the tide of sleep.

This is what it boils down to: the fear that I am unloved and completely alone in the world. That I was born this way and will die this way - unknown, undiscovered, uncared for. An urge to split a channel down from my sternum to my stomach with a blade till I see blood and discover that oh, my existence never really mattered anyway. A life of hearts drawn on the windshield, and for what, for something peripheral that never made a dent in anyone else's life anywhere.

In my mind, I will always need to make other people comfortable and feel hurt when that is not reciprocated. Why would it be reciprocated? Few people are at the same time as warm and gracious and loving and kind, and also as intelligent, funny and charming as the family I grew up in. I have drifted out of worlds with people like this - or I did not value them enough in the past to know how rare a thing it was. Either way, here I am, forever feeling like I am stuck on an island with no one else on it. Floating Alaska, party of one.

Being left out, being talked about when I am not there, being taken advantage of and then discarded. Not having control over how I present my image and carry it forth. Living only in the minds of people and their unique parochial understandings of me through the singular angles I give them to understand me. I give everyone shards and edges, only I know the entire bubble of the picture - the confidence and charm on the outside, the tact to piece together two fives and make them a twenty in almost any language. Only I know the bubbling lava I learn to live with each day on the inside too, the constant coming up short, the deadweight of the black decaying fungus log of past lives, little flowers sprouting through rotting wood.

Is it worth carrying that log around?

So this is my anxiety. This is the cold oatmeal I stand in, sticky toes, heart pacing, afraid to step into iterations of the same old situations. Colonialism everywhere, jaded and rusted. Shit in a toilet bowl. Being left alone, being left behind, being laughed at from where they think I can't see it. Being anything short of loved to the max, unconditionally. Sitting in calcium water instead of being polished to steel tip. And me avoiding it all for just a while longer.

Avoidance is supposed to be harmful, but the fact that I have control over one tiny damn thing in my life is a balm for the eternal scraping of my soul.

Ecstasy is a taught word

Ecstasy is a taught word. We are born with an inner sense of joy and curiosity that makes all emotions acceptable. Social conditioning leads us to believe that the spectrum of emotions has to be wild to be interesting, that we have to feel extreme joy and extreme sadness. Conditioning leads us to think that the only one that is acceptable of those two is the extreme joy, ecstasy. And that we can only feel that when we forget everything else.

We have been conditioned for so long how to forget to notice what is around us, to be curious, that we lose touch with our inner child. We lose touch with the innate ok-ness of being. We forget that nothing is permanent and all thoughts and emotions are just thoughts and emotions. And in creating that distance and alienation, we start to feel overwhelming amounts of grief, anxiety, loneliness. 

Drugs like Ecstasy, Zoloft, even alcohol remove that filter of self-correction we have been socialized to keep on and often allow us to just feel more deeply the wonder in whatever is around. By flooding our bodies with happy hormones, they keep us in a suspended state of extreme happiness, which is not the same as joy but feels like it. But they also disallow us from feeling much else, and in doing that, tie us to the belief that happiness can only be felt in the absence of other emotions.

The Buddhist way says to choose the middle path, to find your own equilibrium and remember that life is full of moments of joy and sadness, and that these are just moments and it’s ok to feel them, sometimes all at once. True joy comes in knowing that. True joy feels like a warm sun in your chest, carrying you through life and all its rivers with the knowledge that you can always come back to yourself. 

You were born with true joy.

Walking in the echoes of my grandfather’s footsteps

"Sorry Nanya, they couldn't revive him. We lost him, beta."

At 6.51 am, Tuesday February 23, 2021, my mother broke the news that my grandfather (my father’s father) had died to me over a Whatsapp message. In a different city, my father would arrive home to my sister to tell her in person. They were going to light a lamp and sit with it. I made my way to the roof to watch the sun just come up over the horizon – the slow lighting of a candle I was somehow just in time for. By the time the dog and I got back down, my sister had me on the phone – our voices breaking a little, our grief shared and multiplied, echoes of feelings inside us, bouncing off echoes of feelings of those in the close family outside us.

The first person to hold me in the world had just died. Died.

Nearly exactly a year ago, just before the pandemic manifested itself as a permanent fixture in our lives, I had traveled to India prematurely to see my other grandfather who had been hospitalised earlier in the year. Between one flight landing late and another leaving right after, I didn't get to see him, but I spent a third of a day in Delhi visiting with my other two grandparents (my father's mother and his father – Papa, as he was known to his children but also his grandchildren). We had the lunch they have had an iteration of for the last many years of their lives, I attempted our usual tradition of touching his feet and him refusing this quaint ritual, and we shared a cup of tea in the warmth of the last cold Delhi spring day before we knew the extent of the wave that was about to hit us. That would be the last time I would see him.

We had been losing him slowly in the last few years – first his sense of purpose as a working bureaucrat when he retired after a full career working to improve the jagged country we live in, then his hearing, and with that, a little bit, his motivation for social connection. Soon enough, my grandmother was the only one who could get through to him. "Dhiru!", she would call him by her lovename for him, somehow getting his attention even though she was just loud enough for the rest of us to hear, "They're asking how you're doing". His last few years were spent in a haze of love and memories, on the surface 'hi's and 'hello's, but in higher spirits, crystal clear accounts of days from the past that had changed his life, and in so many ways, ours: his wedding, the surprise of being enlisted in it and the procession that followed, finally meeting his wife a year later; his days on the tourism board strategising how to bring out the best in a town, a hotel, a beer factory; how he built his first house brick by brick; how he met each of his grandchildren. Each one a special story he would unwrap like candy at dinners with the family. 

 

Even though he couldn't hear us as well for so many years, even though he seemed lost in a land of memories, he was always crisp in expressing himself – his love and the path of his life full and present. Here was the boy who had gone to school with no shoes and one slate, whose father, a poor farmer, gave up his own food and who knows what else so that his son could study towards a better life than the one he had been born into. He worked so hard and did so well, he flew through scholarships, landing in prestigious Allahabad University and then, wonder of wonders, the Indian Civil Service, rising before dawn each day to ensure that every day, someone was being given a fairer life, a just decision, a glimpse of humanity. So polished, so gentle, so hardworking, they gave him the name with which he would be called his entire life, "Sudhir", with gentleness. Our family's last name. 

He set up India's largest (and, I think, first) crafts fair, one that invites various artists and artisans from all over the country each year to a beautiful lake near Delhi to showcase the glorious diversity of the country and continue to nurture traditions that would otherwise die out. He brought home lush silks from foreign travels that my grandmother still shows off. He approved and inspected restaurants in prestigious hotels all over the country – as children, a recurring theme was going for dinner to iconic restaurants in Delhi that my father was invited to as a perk of his work, only to find out that my grandfather had approved them when they were set up years ago. And that I myself returned to on balmy summer afternoons for a coffee and a pastry as a college student in the same city. We are all walking in shadows of footsteps he made.

 

He suffered little as he went, by some standards (though what are ‘standards’ when talking about pain?). My father and mother were both positive on the phone about that. That even with eight months of discomfort, of not being able to breathe well, sleep restfully, of blood clots and heart attacks, he wasn't in much pain. Even as he passed, he had the best medical care, he had people around him that he loved, his family at home and on video calls connecting with him when they couldn’t be. And he was there, he was fully there, asking and responding and recounting and blessing us, nearly more clearly than he had been in years. We are so grateful for that. (A couple days ago, he had fallen asleep with his eyes open. When my mother went to check on him, heart literally skipping a beat in case the inevitable had happened, he raised an arm he hadn't been able to lift in months stick straight and said, "I'm right here!" He was, and he is.)

My grandparents’ one wish for all their grandchildren was that we study hard and get steady jobs at good organisations. My decision to work on poverty alleviation and representing marginalised groups came from this understanding of my family's complicated journey into being where they were, and that not everyone was so lucky, so hardworking, so unconditionally loved in a tough, tough world. Being a Sudhir is an everyday reminder that what we have is so precious, so rare, earned through sweat and sleepless nights, achieved with the pure fact of selfless love, family support, non-judgement. Our family is a place where we discuss everything exceedingly democratically – even the youngest member has a valid say in issues from what we are going to snack on that evening down to the colour of the car we are going to buy. In the middle of the casteist, patriarchal, religious fanatic country I come from, I grew up in one of the only bubbles of absolute freedom and equality. What a remarkable privilege.

In our last conversations, my grandfather asked me repeatedly if I had already moved to Geneva to work with the international organisation I work for, perhaps losing track of the muting of major life decisions during the pandemic. It seemed to satiate him that the answer was: yes, even if remotely, I was working in a serious job doing good things for the world, spending my life in service to extend that privileges we had (the privileges he had forged for us) to others without our platform in the world. And could anything else be a more beautiful note of confidence to carry him with us forever than that?