My name is Zenia and I am a Mental Health Practitioner currently based out of Delhi. And here’s my story of survival.
Survivor Series: Zenia
My father had a transferable job and I grew up in different places across India. The kind of grounding that staying in one place provides was missing. I would experience nervousness, hesitation and confusion in the first few months of moving to a new place and it would be time to move to a new place just when I felt settled and comfortable. The fact that I was shy and lacked confidence, made matters worse. Overtly negative, dreadful, imagined thoughts, about losing loved ones, failing tests, getting lost, hurt or killed clouded my head. As much as I wanted these thoughts to end, they wouldn’t and I would be lost in them. Adults around me described the younger me as someone lost in her own world. It’s difficult to say what led to what; the constant moving places led to anxiety or was it the existing anxiety that made moving places difficult. With time, I did make peace with the process of moving from one place to another and accepted it as a part of my life.
It’s difficult to think of a period of life when I wasn’t anxious but my anxiety took a turn for the worse when I was 15 years old. The anxiety was starting to take over my body now. I started experiencing dizziness; a lack of balance and steadiness. People around me were clueless about what was happening to me and this led to my first bout of hypochondria, “I have some serious disease and I will die.” This is what played in my head constantly. It was around this time that my father got posted to Brazil and I too shifted there. Brazil was a world so different from anything that I had ever seen before. The culture, the language, the school system, the food, the weather, everything seemed alien. My school was a high end American school catering to American and Brazilian kids from the upper class. This was a quantum leap for somebody who studied all her life in the state-run Kendriya Vidyalaya in India. The smaller community of international students was where I felt at home, at times. The small yet significant experiences of exclusion and prejudice as a brown girl coupled with my lack of self esteem and tendency to worry excessively made my situation worse and I had a breakdown.
Survivor Series: Zenia
Things could have really gone out of hand for me if it was not my parents. They were not dismissive of what I felt and helped me in seeking external support. I was introduced to therapy and it was there that I first learnt the term Anxiety Disorder. This approach of my parents was crucial and I want to stress on this. Many times, we are dismissive and equate other people’s experiences and journeys with our own. They thankfully didn’t. They didn’t depend on their past experiences. They read up on Anxiety Disorder, tried to inform themselves and provided the kind of support that is required. The lack of awareness was something that increased my anxiety. But with an increasing awareness and informed avenues to talk about anxiety, I was able to control the seemingly never-ending negative ruminations. I recognized my positive qualities and values and realized that those were my strengths. Things are not perfect even today and, probably, they never will be. But I am in this pursuit of understanding what goes within, what little changes can be done, how much we do not know and there is so much to learn. I try to embrace myself as a whole; the flawed person that I am. Somedays I succeed, somedays I do not. On the days that I do not, I take solace in the fact that it’s okay to not feel okay. I reach out for help. I read. I exercise. I breathe. I listen to other survivors for hope and inspiration. There’s some really good and helpful stuff out there. Anxiety gave me some horrific times but it also made me empathetic, sensitive, strong and compassionate and subsequently, gave me a career in mental health.”
— Zenia Yadav
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