An ode to therapy - pt. 1

The story of how I saw the parts of me I’d alienated from myself by imbibing a bunch of stories

Five years ago, if you'd told me that someone who was blatantly sexist was only having a human experience, I would’ve been livid. I might even have gratuitously heaped similarly uncharitable labels on you. And if you’d so much as suggested that I’d be the one writing an essay defending the proposition only some years later, I would have just laughed.

Younger Malavika, as Mitchell Allen put it so kindly, just didn’t have the tools to look at life in this way. 

But after a slow-motion breakdown and six years in therapy, my toolkit has undergone some dramatic upgrades. 

The slow-motion breakdown

I woke up one day many years ago to realise I had hit a wall. 

It began as a total ennui. An inability to give a shit about anything. Like the fact that there was work to do or places to be or a life to live. 

I didn’t want to wake up, I didn’t care to go out and see the birds or the sky or the sun and the beautiful monsoon rains. I resisted the idea of cooking or walking Raksha, my dog, or movement of any kind. I didn’t have the energy for anything more than resistance. No strong feelings, no hard opinions, an abject emptiness where there should have been self-belief, or at the very least, self-interested survival.

Life happened to me. I remember nothing, felt nothing, saw nothing, and experienced nothing. I was numb, living outside of my body and entirely in my head. 

Which is to say… I was barely living. 

Until something tiny happened — like an approaching work deadline.

Then, the thing would spin me out of control into a breathless haze of panic, sometimes with my eyes watering, other times with my mouth releasing the bitter taste of a fever. Add in an authority figure, and I’d be in almost continuous panic. If the authority figure was male, my panic would reduce me into a shell of myself, dysfunctional and barely there.  Which was suboptimal in my world where most of the work-force and most authority figures are indeed male. 

I don’t fully understand the resolute and unwavering numbness that gripped me, or the disproportion of my reactions to the tiniest triggers. My material circumstances were the dreams of thousands of others in my country. Private schooling, public university, a home to come back to, and enough family support and social capital to ensure that I only ever worried about my aspirations, never about my survival. Yet, psychologically, I was a mess. I feared conflict, I craved connection, I slept poorly and I was pouring whatever energy I had into excelling at the empty game of adulting. 

Why? Who can say? Perhaps I was just sensitive. Nature? Nurture? Your guess is as good as mine. 

(Today, this memory feels surreal. Because boy, do I love living.)

The glue that held together parts of me - the stories

When I hit the wall, I was a shell of a human-being, made up of a bunch of stories. 

These stories were like glue. They held together different parts of a younger Malavika — the parts which found meaning in their different narratives. 

One part of me was a scared, anxious, deeply hurting child. She was constituted by her status as a child while feeling compelled into being more than a child. She didn’t know play, make-believe, pranks, imaginary friends or her own rowdy and rebellious side. Let’s just say 11 year old Malavika thought Alice in Wonderland was the dummiest of dummy books she could have wasted her time on.

The story that kept her alive was that she had more serious business to be getting to, like world (and domestic) peace. This meant unprocessed feelings of shame when she couldn’t take care of a situation, which remained buried in the rubble of her childhood consciousness for decades and decades without her realising.

Why? Maybe it was that I had front row seats to the ups and downs of my parents’ very up and down marriage, the changing nature of the Indian market, and the financial instability that often complicated their marriage.

Another part of me was a teenage woman. The path for her was laid out before I became me, by other men and women in an unholy criss-crossing of caste and the patriarchy.

The story that kept her going was that the world was unfair and that men had it easier. 19 year old Malavika had gone the full arc from hating men, to hating the patriarchy, to hating herself. She found solace in scripts laid down by seemingly “stronger” women, without realising that they shattered their way through glass-ceilings by wielding the weapons of their caste-capital. This meant being highly functional and always excelling. Not pausing to wonder if she could get anywhere without confronting the part of her that was hurt as a child.

Why? Teenage Malavika would blame the adults! There is no story of a heterosexual family in India that doesn’t reckon with the caste and gendered scripts for the actors. The woman must keep the respect, integrity and status of the family, while also raising the children, running the home, and being a professional, an all-round extraordinaire, really. While the man may be stressed, sad or angry, screaming, raging or simply broken — unable to handle the pressures of a life within the scripts and the roles that strangle him. Different families cope differently. Mine coped through conflict. 

These stories were my lens of the world. My field of vision narrowed, and I saw only the things that confirmed the stories I believed. Then my field of story-telling narrowed, and I built more stories based on the things I let myself see. A strange loop to beat all strange loops.

the mind and its tricks: a strange loop to beat all strange loops

These stories were also my lens to get to know myself. They ensured I only see the parts of me that I knew through these stories.

Becoming my parts 

When I hit the wall, teenage Malavika had taken centre-stage. Since I thought that the Malavika acting out in a silent and meek rebellion against the patriarchy was me, I embodied her until she became all of me. 

When I broke up with my first boyfriend Kris because he had begun to be involved with another woman, I held on to the story that men cheat. Some years later, I let myself believe that my then boyfriend Parth was cheating on me. Truth is, it only was a rumour; everyone was talking about it, but he always insisted she was just a dear friend. Yet, I believed my story from my days with Kris, and I tried to move on. Some months later, Parth was in a relationship with his rumoured girlfriend; some years later, he married her. Later, in another relationship with Hassan, the same cycle of events played out. 

The stories I was married to about men in relationships turned into self-fulfilling prophecies in my relationships with men. These in turn became the narrative fuel of the part I was playing: an angry woman who demonised men. 

Was there any part of me that wasn’t an angry woman?

I had no way to know. Fueled on a diet of stories that confirmed my older stories, I had all but alienated the rest of me – the parts of me that didn’t find expression in the unhappy and anxious woman. Only I didn’t know that I had, because I didn’t see that there could be any part of me that wasn’t fully explained by the totalising thesis of being a victim of hateful men. 

I was, at the time, constituted by the scared child forced into womanhood. And my personality was an anxious, people-pleasing, self-sabotaging and yet somehow over-achieving woman: a disarray of debilitating mechanisms I was reaching for, to cope with a childhood I hadn’t processed.

And so when I met Raj ten years ago, and again five years later, I did some highly scientific calculations in my story telling machine and concluded: Raj was sexist — no different for me than a life sized beast and monster.

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This is Part 1 of a two-part personal essay on my bodymind wellness journey with the able guidance of my therapist. Part 2 is here. Mental health is a topic close to my heart. I choose to talk about it a whole lot because it still carries stigma in many circles.

Feedback is the greatest love language. This essay's got a ton of love, support, structural and stylistic editing from

Nic Hurrell

, for which I will be ever grateful.