After many trials and errors, I have come to a point in my current relationship (which, I hope with the same, persistent naivete, will last for the rest of my life),  where I am getting present to this conflict between my need and demand to be loved in a certain way and the way in which my partner loves me. There are some distinctions that my mind cannot hold when it is consumed by emotions and when it is busy projecting its past on to the new situation, the new partner. For instance, there is a subtle distance between feeling unloved and feeling loved in a way different from the one I want. All of that is too theoretical for me when I am caught up in my shadows. In those moments (honestly, they are days and weeks, not moments!), I cannot even read my partner’s love for me as love, because I lack the patience and clarity to read as love anything that is different from my notion of love. When I get present to this, I shudder at how unaccommodating and closed I can be. I am shocked by the violence I do to my lover’s love by not even according it the status of love.

How then can I truly understand the limiting nature of my idea of what love is? How do I live the next many days and weeks in a way that helps me recognize my limiting conception of love, bracket it aside, and receive what my partner is offering me? The primary act of love I can do now is to acknowledge his love for me as love. Since it is important to remember that love is also a verb, a set of acts, a mode of being in the world, and not just a cozy state of being where things happen to us, how do I be loving in a way that seeks to undo my hitherto violent rejection of love that has been coming to me from my partner?

I think it is very sad that we are never really taught these things. I understand that life is to be experienced, to be learned as we go on, but I do wish someone taught us, even as they were busy making us learn how to balance equations and to remember dates of wars and conquests,  to love ourselves, to examine our fears, apprehensions and projections. Oh I have nothing against balancing equations and knowing dates of wars, for I do find this world fascinating and want to learn as much as I can about it. I only wish our inner worlds weren’t neglected this much and left for us to figure them out on our own.

As we get close to yet another St. Valentine’s Day, I cannot help but muse on the theme of love. The language of love continues to be occupied by a consciousness that is all about young, heterosexual coupledom. Sadly, this currently available language falls woefully short of addressing even that one form of love. The glorious light this language of love casts on mushiness, the good feelings one is conditioned to feel and want, the unqualified longing for love one is supposed to feel, casts the darkest shadow on all that needs to be worked through for love, in love and through love: our fears of abandonment, our unexamined investment in patriarchy and other ways of wielding power, our readiness to sabotage something beautiful before it threatens to destroy us, our adamant refusal to believe that something good can ever happen to us, or, even if it did, that it should last, and many more things.

If I were to embark on a personal reclamation of St. Valentine’s day, I would, at least this year, make it my project to turn the light on my shadows where all the real business is, where all the things are that most urgently need the light of my love as well as my partner’s. You can ask me why bother about St Valentine’s Day at all, or some might even ask why bother about romantic love at all, that smug and narcissistic form of love that often relegates other relationships to a side, at least until the heart invested in it is hurt and comes rushing back to other relationships for comfort and healing. At one level, I will tell you that love seems to be badly needed in the world, that the recent discussions around sexual violence, the resurgence of violence on inter-caste unions, etc. point to our failure in thinking critically and usefully about love.

At another, more honest and personal, level I will tell you that as long as I seem to be bothered about love and romance, I think it would be a good idea to look for more healing, less turbulent and less toxic ways to love.

So, this year, for the first time, I have a proper Valentine. Myself. Love.

This essay is part of the Orinam V-Day 2013 series called The Original L Word

Among other things, I am a rape survivor.

I take my fingers off the keyboard for a little while and read that statement a few times. I add a prayer that being able to say it out loud will help me move on; that the ghosts that have been brought back to life with full force after the recent discussions about rape will begin to calm down and vanish into oblivion.

For several years now, I have debated in my head how to talk about it without falling into the many traps that have been laid out en route: how do I talk about it without generating a victim narrative? How do I talk about it without making rape pornography out of it? How do I talk about it as a man without making it sound like I am elbowing for space with women?

I was gang-raped twelve years ago. The men even video-taped it.  I was eighteen years old.  I hooked up with someone online and went to meet him at an agreed spot. From there on, things unfolded at a bizarre speed. I do not want to go into the details.  But I want to say some things:

Every time a friend mentions gay porn, I shudder in that panic that the video of my rape might be circulating online.

I don’t feel safe among unknown men. My stomach tightens. I try to make sure I don’t appear feminine in any way. Over the years, I have censored my body for survival.  I fear on a daily basis for the safety of my genderqueer friends.

When the memories of my rape history are triggered, I am scared of sleeping alone. Even in my own home. I try and go to a friend’s place. Or lie awake on my bed. And so that I do not worry my parents with my gaunt and hunted look, I try to be cheery, and it takes humungous effort to be so.

I fear that if I speak about this, people will forget the rape and will only blame me for hooking up with a stranger, for wanting sex, for wanting sex with another man. I fear that I will have to deal with the blame on top of dealing with the bodily memories of violence.

Whenever my lover uses a little extra physical force during sex, I shut down and shrink into my shell. He might mean it in passion, but my body reads it differently. I cannot participate.

Even when it happens to a man, rape IS gendered violence. It happened to me, because I was feminine, because the men thought I deserved it for not acting like a man. Sometimes rape is inflicted on men just to shame them; to, supposedly, insult their masculinity. In whatever way it happens, it loops back to the question of gender. This is ONE of the reasons my politics is grounded in feminism. This is one of the reasons I am a feminist. I was one even before I was raped by men. I didn’t need this violent lesson to turn feminist. But if I was to live with it, I decided to make this experience of violence, which I now felt in my bones, an embodied site of my feminism. I don’t need it to be feminist. But since I have it, since I am unable to erase it, I have tried to make use of it to understand gendered violence, to understand body and performance, to understand myself and this world just a little bit more.  But I didn’t ask for the violence. And there is nothing redemptive in my attempts to utilize the experience for something else. It is simply my courage and will to move on.

Orinam editors’ note: If reading this account brings you or someone you know/love memories of similar experiences, please check out some of the resources we are compiling for survivors.

Physical Activity: Were I to be truly honest, I should have titled this “Exercise.” But I don’t always manage to motivate myself to exercise, so I decided to be honestly vague! What I manage to do every day is to get some form of physical activity which makes me sweat. Now, in a place like Madras, it is incredibly easy to sweat. You just have to be. So don’t fool yourself. At least, do a nice, brisk walk. If you can find enough motivation every day to work out, there’s nothing like it!

My discovery here is that finding the motivation to step out for some physical exercise is the most difficult part. Once I manage to push myself to do it, or someone else succeeds in kicking me out of the house for a little walk/ hike/ run, things get easier after that. I have spoken to a few other people who suffer from clinical depression, and they all seem to have similar experiences.

Even a little bit of the morning sun might be helpful. I find that my days are significantly better when I get some sun in the morning. Recently, I spent some time in the mountains, and there were added incentives to a morning walk. Everything was just overwhelmingly beautiful. Catching the gentle, morning sun on my skin was something I started looking forward to. In Madras, I wake up when the power goes off in the morning and the ceiling fan stops swirling the same stale air about. Also, cities in the morning scare me with all their haste and rush, unless I manage to wake up really early and step out before the traffic starts.

Seek Therapeutic Help: Here’s the truism – the first challenge is to accept that you might have depression or related issues. Most of us do not think twice about going to a doctor to help ourselves out of a physical ailment. But when it comes to issues of the mind, we feel it is entirely up to us to deal with it. We are also conditioned that way. Not only are we often told that it is all a question of attitude and of altering the state of mind, it is also drummed into our heads that, come what may, we should just brace ourselves up and face everything with great fortitude. Well, very admirable. But let’s get some perspective here. We are talking about the will to get through each day here, the will to get off the bed and walk the few steps to bathroom to brush one’s teeth. We are talking about not knowing what one is fighting. So, if you choose to seek some help, it is entirely your business, and you should commend yourself for opting to take good care of yourself.

It helps to talk to a good mental health professional even to understand what ‘depression’ really means in mental health terms. We use the ‘depression’ in a variety of ways every day. We watch a bad game and remark, “Oh this is depressing.” Some people do not read the newspapers first thing in the morning, because they find them “depressing.” We also feel “depressed” after a bad exam. The clinical kind of depression we are talking about here is not the same as any of these. While these are all responses to certain concrete external circumstances, clinical depression arises largely because of decrease in the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain. There are social, familial, and “nurture” factor, but the biological factor seems to be irreducible.

Like many others, I have found a combination of medication and therapy helpful. As I say this, I am conscious that this involves money. But my suggestion to you is, please do not let this deter you right away from even exploring your options. Speak to someone in the community; find out what kind of support is available. You might be surprised.

When I went to a therapist for the first time, I expected to lie on a couch. Actually, I didn’t know the differences between a therapist, a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. I still don’t have a clear idea, but since I work with a therapist as well as a psychiatrist, I have sort of inferred on my own that while a psychiatrist is a medically qualified doctor who can treat clinical mental illnesses with medication and other approved modes of treatment, a therapist is trained to help people by allowing them to talk through issues and to facilitate the healing process by non-medical means. It could be art therapy, psychodrama, etc.

Remember, not all depression needs to be treated medically. Only severe forms of clinical depression are treated with medication.

Don’t self-medicate: Please don’t ever self-medicate. An anti-depressant or a mood stabilizer that works for someone may not work for you. You might need your specific combination, which only a psychiatrist might be able to assess and prescribe for. Also, once you have started taking medication and you are beginning to feel better, do not think it is alright to stop taking it. That is not going to help at all. Please don’t attach any stigma to taking medication for a mental ailment. Not everything is under our control, and there is absolutely no shame in accepting help.

Don’t over-commit at work: Oh, I had to learn this the hard way. If you have clinical depression-related issues, your productivity levels probably fluctuate more than they do for someone who doesn’t have the issue. So what happens often is that we don’t get much done when we are going through our phases. Once we are out of them and feeling better, we have work to catch up with. Most unfortunately, the world out there valorizes this notion of productivity, which reduces us all to mere machines turning out work at some expected rate. We don’t have to subscribe to that, but if we are in jobs that demand an optimum level of productivity all the time, there is not much one can do about it. However, we can at least not make things worse for ourselves.

For instance, when you recover from a phase of depression and try to catch up with work, do not be consumed by guilt for having a backlog of work. Of course, you will feel bad. Just don’t let it consume you. Then – this is most crucial – in an attempt to regain (perceived) loss of credibility, do not let that guilt make you promise to deliver more work soon. Never ever do that. Don’t even let manipulative glances from people make you do that. Focus on the task at hand. It doesn’t matter, at least provisionally, what people think of you.

Be very good to yourself: Treat yourself very kindly. You deserve a lot of love and affection, and it has to start with you. I know it is very clichéd to say these things, but after sniggering at such remarks, I have come to really believe in them myself. Reward yourself. If you have managed to exercise all seven days of a week, reward yourself to something nice. Get creative.

I will see you soon with another post!

Orinam editors’ note: For readers who would like to learn more about coping with depression, a guide on mental health for LGBT people developed by Ireland’s Health Service Executive mental health project is available here. Resources for those of us in the Indian context are being developed by Orinam and will soon be available here.

from Adrienne Rich’s Storm Warnings

Many years ago, I went to a psychiatrist to help myself get out of a terrible bout of depression. It had lasted several days, and by then I was really scared I’d do something to myself. The only thing that gave me some relief was to sit in the beach and read P.G.Wodehouse. But it really alarmed me that I could not laugh at all. Once, reading about some antics of Bertram Wooster’s, I found myself just smiling. I did not break out into my signature laughter, a cross between a horse’s neigh and the sound of an automobile engine trying to resurrect itself. No, all I could do was smile. I decided to force myself to laugh. My theatre director had taught me how to laugh on demand. I summoned all my reserve energies and I faked a laugh. I succeeded, but very soon I was sobbing.

Anyway. I wanted my dad to be with me when I spoke to the shrink. After about forty five minutes of his chatting me up, the doctor asked if my dad could wait outside. Then he asked me, “Do you have anything to share about your sexuality?” I said I was gay. For a moment, he sat back in his chair with an air of triumph. Ooooh, he has put his finger on the very source of my mental health issues, my sexual deviance! Then he leaned forward and said to me, “Does your dad know?” “Not yet,” I replied. He shot me a warning glance and said, “It will devastate him.”

Well, in the months that followed, nothing devastated me more than that comment and his piercing glance that pinned me to the pages of some medical book somewhere that said I was sick. But, for then, he sent me home with some anti-depressants. I never took them. When my dad gave them to me every night, I hid them in my bag and threw them out on my way to college.

I know some of you have suffered a lot more in the hands of shrinks. I am not interested in calibrating and ranking degrees of suffering. I just want to share what it has been to live and cope with some form of mental illness.

I think I have paid a heavy emotional and social price since childhood because of my sharp mood swings and the associated unpredictability. Like it is not bad enough to be tossed about like a tennis ball between emotional states, you also have to clean up the mess when you get out of the game. You will have to make up for the classes you missed, exams you failed to appear for, assignments you never got to finish, etc.

I really enjoyed going to school despite the taunts and jibes about my glorious sissiness, because my teachers were wonderful. My way of coping with the cruelty of fellow children was to ingratiate myself to the teachers, become their pet and position myself as someone the boys could not pick on with impunity. Some of you are familiar with this strategy, aren’t you? Don’t you think it is all exhausting work? But I made things hard even for these loving teachers when I simply did not go to school on many days. Whenever I woke up feeling like I was alone and hunted in the world, I refused to go to school. Or I invented some ailment to convince my parents not to send me to school. And it usually happened that I missed school for three or four days in a row. This was a pattern. Even the teachers who adored me found it hard to justify to others my absences. It came be seen that I was either taking undue advantage of the goodwill I had earned from the school, or I was a total hypochondriac.

Believe me or not, this continued into my university days. To add to my depression woes, I also had chronic migraines which tormented me like evil ghosts sucking the life out of me. And every time I returned to school/ college/ university, everyone thought I was just a weak-willed hypochondriac and not to be taken seriously. I don’t think I want to blame them. We had no framework then to think about mental health; we still don’t. If you felt low, you just picked yourself up, motivated yourself somehow and marched on like an intrepid warrior. The scores of self-help books on my shelf, which were all bought during that time of my life, bear testimony to this view.

I will tell you where I have lost most. People. My terrible mood swings and my sudden withdrawals perplexed the best of my friends. They did not know how to be with me. They did not know what the boundaries were. And I was not helping. I couldn’t. But it was not fair to them. Those who had a sense that I was suffering hung around patiently. Others simply thought I was blowing hot and cold. The way I saw it, well, why should they complicate their lives by having to deal with my ups and downs? ‘Drama queen’ was a label. ‘Intense’ was the adjective used often. All of it scared boyfriends away – prospective ones as well as actual ones.

One of the important decisions I had to make was to separate my sexuality from my mental health issues. I chose not to attribute any causal link between them. But to this day I am scared that people will make some such simplistic connection and pathologize my queerness. Why else do you think I am writing this under a pseudonym? I imagine terrible situations. I have been carefully peeping out of this closet for a while now, but I am not ready to fling it open yet. Also, for me, the whole closet analogy is getting very jaded. But that’s for another day.

I had to get creative with my life. I knew I could not do a nine-to-five job, because my sleep and diet patterns have always been askew. Unless I am on medication, I cannot sleep most nights. I read all night, and I am total bitch to everyone the next day.

I had to fashion myself into a freelancer.  I saw that the art I practiced was a good antidote to my bipolarity, so I started finding the right opportunities to do just that. One thing I still have not mastered is how to let at least very close friends know when I am withdrawing. Often, I don’t see them coming. I am walking, turning around a corner, and there they are. I am doing fine, and then suddenly something cuts me down.

Also, very few people take your problem seriously unless it is of some extreme kind. People say things like, “Oh, depression is very common. I read this statistic somewhere….” True. But, as the African American writer and teacher bell hooks has put it in the context of dysfunctional families, just because we are all dysfunctional in some way or another, it does not mean dysfunctionality has to be a norm. But then it seems to be a larger cultural problem: we don’t acknowledge violence as violence unless it is absolutely gory and terrible; we don’t count emotional violence as violence at all; and you don’t have a mental illness unless it is the kind that calls for institutionalization or some other kind of drastic intervention. Ironically, those who accuse you of creating drama often don’t take you seriously unless there is some drama!

As I write this, I am grappling with the question of which tense to use! Now that I have been helping myself with therapy, medication, meditation and reading, should I speak of my problems in the past tense?  On the other hand, I wonder if it is really such a wonderful thing to be such a function of medication. But you know what? I am going to be at it as long as I need. I work with trusted people.

One day at a time. That’s what I tell myself.

See you soon

Orinam Editor’s note: Vinodhan writes more about how he copes with depression in Spells and Charms.