Death and darkness are normal for me. What can shake an average person comforts me, likely due to the varied experiences I have had ever since I was born. At 1 1/2years of age I was considered medically dead while kept alive by machines for a month. As a kid until today I continue being a mischief and misfit in everything I do and everywhere I go.
Survivor Series: Val Resh
Self-harming began early in my life before age 6. This isn’t considered normal yet it is a normal reaction to an irrational childhood of being locked in toilets for hours, being left under the care of maids, uncles and horror porn movies that kept me glued with curiosity and not fear. As an adolescent popularity in school kept me alive though yet lonely. Being called mad for cutting my own hair, lesbian for dressing like a boy, slut for talking to boys damaged my self-created worth pushing me towards comfort found through drinking and smoking. I was treated for my deviancy, and vandalism after I ran away from home, cycling 156kms to another state where I discovered a world where men liked boys and I looked like one. Freedom came with a price which forced me to return home 36 hours later yet I was not happy about it and wished I would never return. Everyone was angry with me for having run away, for making them worried, yet no one genuinely inquired about what happened when I was away, so I continued living my own lie having given up on adults. A psychiatrist diagnosed me as a transvestite and suggested sex change to my parents. This complicated things between us, having them decide on drastic measures by sending me to various fixing camps aka tough love camps. I realized my own horror movie had just begun as these camps are meant to break your spirit, tear you apart emotionally, mentally, physically, sexually and spiritually through tactical military style behavioral strategies. I returned home each time a different person hating myself and my parents further, although my obedient nature was now loved by all as I did as I was told, dressed as I was given, listened and followed every rule of how to conduct myself as a girl.
Survivor Series: Val Resh
I was moved to India in 96, under the pretext of a 2 month holiday which turned into 6 years. During these years, there was a lot of back and forth that interrupted my studies. Each time when I was beginning to settle with a new set of friends, gaining confidence in my studies I was forced to leave my studies owing to some mood swing a parent had. My insomnia that began at age 14 only increased. I thought and felt I was an imbecile as I could not keep up with the pressures of constant change and learning in a different language, culture and society. Back then Indians thought Bermuda shorts were underwear and so I was repeatedly teased by other adults, forcing me to dress in salwar kameez and turn into a good Indian girl. By 2001, I lived on the streets sleeping under benches or abandoned rooms in college while my diet consisted of alcohol, cigarettes and drugs when I could afford them or sell a part of myself for it. I would return home to shower or eat and leave under the excuse of staying at a friend’s. Arguments and fights led to my breakdown among many other things. By the end of 2002, I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, followed with schizoaffective in 2007, and personality disorder, sleep terrors, seizures and dissociations in 2012 after being operated for a brain tumour.
Survivor Series: Val Resh
I have killed myself many times throughout it all – each time asking myself ‘I got the concoctions right, why did I survive?’ A young friend – the only real one I had throughout my schizophrenia treatment told me ‘Didi, have you not got it? You want to live so much that you will not die. Your spirit won’t allow you too. You told me this yourself.’ Her words have never left me. I have come to acknowledge and accept that irrespective of how disturbing or damaging my hurdles in life were, of authority trying to break my spirit, my affair with death was not about killing myself but to kill that thought, or person I held responsible although I couldn’t make them accountable. Why was I hurting myself when there was enough done to me? As I teach my teenage students in school I have come to grow with them as a human, to know that being kind and compassionate to myself is what matters. I do not need to self-sabotage or victimize myself, there are others to do it for me so I might as well enjoy living life to the best of who I am and not how others have made up of me.
Survivor Series: Val Resh
My experiences, labels, abusers do not dictate my life, identity, intelligence or path. I always have lived my own path, it is for that reason they wanted to fix me each time. We easily give our power to others even in the minute we blame them for what they did to us. This sense of agency is not theirs but mine alone. What I do with it is my power and as long as I don’t play the victim card even with society and the stigma being evident through the varied diagnosis, no one has the power to use it against me. We are all capable of adapting, camouflaging and moving further, it is why we have survived what we have. The next step is to live and love ourselves. The rest just follows through effortlessly.
— Val Resh–
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