Yes. I am surrounded by people I love and who love me. They are kind and sensitive. They are also coping like I am. They make normal conversations, crack jokes, go about their business, raise their children, work and play. Sometimes I can be like them. Other times I feel completely separate from them. I am in the room, sitting, smiling, nodding, interacting with everyone as I should. But I am not there.

I am somewhere else. It is a very silent place. It is dusky. My son and I live in it. He is invisible. I talk to him and tell him I am sorry and I love him. Everything is linked with him – these sunglasses, this rain, these people, this house……everything. I want to be in both places at the same time.

Much as I want to be in the here and now, I find myself gone.
I wonder if he can see me from wherever he is and know how I feel.

“Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.
Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more.”

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

“They are masters in disguise teaching us about impermanence”, says Dalai Lama about healthy young people who die.
I’ve been working on reviving my spirits for the last few months. I am not who I was on Day 0 or before. Never will be. As I sat for a long time last evening looking at a conical cluster of logs burning, after all the flames and smoke was gone, what remained was the warmth of the fire and the orange glow at the heart of it. I felt that warmth and glow reflected in my heart. The fire was my mirror, my friend.

Last summer I was driving on the motorway at about 75 miles per hour on a Saturday afternoon. I had had a very busy week and felt exhausted. The day started off rather cool but warmed up very well by noon. Before I knew it my eyelids went a bit droopy. I was only 10 minutes away from my friend’s house so I turned up the volume of the music and kept going. After a short while I got a gentle nudge on the right side of my head. I realized I had nodded off and my car had gently scraped the central divider. There were no other cars around. I crossed three lanes on to the hard shoulder, stepped out of the car and looked at the damage done. One tyre was punctured and there were a few scrapes on the side. That’s all. I had escaped without a scratch and no one else got hurt. Phew!

Was there a reason for my survival? Was someone looking out for me? Was it just a random act of kindness by Lady Luck? I didn’t think much about this incident. It was just one of the many things that happen and I take for granted. I am grateful, but I wonder why I was spared.

Here’s what I learnt about the correlation between mental illness(MI) and substance abuse(SA) today. It gave me a deeper understanding of certain types of behaviors and reminded me about overlapping territories that can be very confusing. Source: Night Falls Fast by Kay Redfield Jamison who is a psychiatrist and suffers from Bipolar disorder herself. In addition she is a survivor of a nearly lethal suicide attempt.

The painful and frightening nature of MIs such as depression, mania and schizophrenia can drive patients towards drugs and alcohol as they bring brief periods of relief from despair and hopelessness.

Sedatives and hypnotics might be used to get better sleep and relieve the restlessness that may be associated with these conditions. Cociane is used by many as an antidepressant or to induce mild manias. Opiates have been used as a numbing or lulling agent. Alcohol is used to escape depression (although it is pharmacologically a depressant) and induce senselessness.

Depressive illness can precede, accompany or follow the onset of SA. Like schizophrenia and Bipolar disorder, SA begins early in life and once it has set in, has a stubbornly progressive course. Despite huge personal, financial, social and professional cost, sometimes it is impossible to stop the compulsive use of these substances.

There is a reverberating relationship between the two – one aggravates the other leading to destructive consequences. As many as 2 in 3 patients with Bipolar disorder and 1 in 4 patients with depression also suffer with SA.

“Drugs and Mood disorders bring out the worse in one another: alone they are dreadful, together they kill.”

Compassion and understanding.

A very dear old friend from medical school wrote to me today and shared that at the Oscars awards ceremony last night, there were 2 mentions of suicide by winners Graham Moore and Dana Perry in their acceptance speech that were touching and inspiring. She has been listening to the Canadian radio channel ‘93.9 The River’ where they had special broadcasts on depression and mental illness. She said ‘It seems a wave of awareness has started…’ It is about time. Given the stigma and denial associated with this problem let us hope that this wave expands and flourishes and covers the whole planet many times over.

Over the last few months, “If there is absolutely anything I can do for you, please let me know.” is something that almost everyone who has written or spoken to me has said. That is such a generous thing to say. It inspires me to take this stance with everyone I come across. So many people have done so much to help me through this tough time that I could not ask for any more. However, I would request everyone to be aware of suicide and mental health issues, not have prejudices against them, look out for them, fund-raise for the charities associated with them, volunteer in whatever capacity one can. It’s all about compassion. I know I would have gone mad without it. Thank you. xxx

Slowly the rate of appearance of ‘should’ves’, ‘could’ves’ and ‘would’ves’ in my head is dimishing. It is a relief. Of course they will come back in varying degrees again to torture me and I will be looking out for them. They are most unhelpful. I hope I can make them feel really unwelcome when they do arrive. I don’t think they understand the pointlessness of their existence in this context. Of course there are lessons to be learnt by many of us from what happened but there are other less painful ways of doing it.

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib is one of the most prolific and delicate urdu poets. Translation of his verses does them no favours at all. On the contrary, takes away some of their beauty. Here is an attempt at sharing some of his couplets with you:

If there is nothing present except you,
what is all this noise then, oh God?

When nothing existed, only God existed,
if nothing had ever existed only God would have existed.
Existence did me in, if I had never existed what could have happened?

It’s been a while since Ghalib ceased to exist, but I still remember him.
At every occasion he would say, how things could have been

Its not as if the world has stopped without the ramshackle Ghalib,
Why then do you cry so copiously, why wail so loudly?

Thousands of desires, each one to die for
So many of my wishes came true, but it still feels very few did.