How many times will you be born in me? From fetus to corpse From corpse to fetus
How many times will l feel you kicking in my womb wanting to get out of me? How many times will l look at your face and recognize you in new being? How many times will I carry you in my arms and rock you as if you were my child? Not the other way round Not the other way round
Me who was born from you Out if you Because of you
Me who doesn’t know how to be without you whose origin is in the seed you’ve sown In your womb In your womb
“ with love, sir, i wish to serve myself some bread before I serve you a course, for I’ve starved my own hunger, and now I crave anything alive.”
“ apologies, for I have been, scared, but aggressively, aggressively scared sir ”
“ I’ve washed dirt, and scrubed your basins white, sir, but I must say, your wine stained shirt remains. It commands me to honor it’s poetic wrath with reality ”
And how she thanked the world, for it’s awaited doom, in casual conversations about flowers,
she’d smile at autumn, for death wasn’t new to her, but the after…
Total number of confirmed kills: 775. Photo taken in Germany, May 4, 1945.
And this hasn’t been made into a movie or mini series?
The cool thing is, there’s still one person missing: Lyudmila Pavlichenko.
She was one of the deadliest snipers of World War II, and is regarded as one of the deadliest snipers of all time. Over the course of one year (June 1941-June 1942) she racked up a count of 309 kills, 36 of which were enemy snipers. Her prescence in the picture alone would have brought the total number of kills from 755 to 1064.
This is an interview about depression. Why are we the ones writing it?
Caritas & Arpita: We both have depression and feel comfortable sharing our stories. That we feel comfortable does not mean we feel our experiences are typical, instructive, or solely representative. We are not attempting to speak for other South Asian people who have depression. We do feel that our personal histories are worth sharing, if only to contribute to an ongoing conversation, one that has existed before us. Others will hopefully give feedback, relate to, and/or challenge us; the idea is to have a robust discussion. Our experience is our resource right now.
Arpita:I’m also the Health Initiative Coordinator and my position, which existed at Sakhi a decade ago, is a direct response to a gap in services related to mental health. Sakhi staff found that when clients were unable to finish certain programs, such as ESL or computer literacy classes, 90% cited reasons related to mental health, including not being able to get out of bed or feeling too sad to come to the office.
Caritas: You and I have had many discussions about mental health as it relates to us and our work. We’ve built a foundation together for this conversation, where there is established trust and history. Ultimately, we are friends who have spent a lot of time interrogating our relationship to depression and anxiety. Now, we are essentially transcribing one of those conversations, sparked most recently by my stint in a psychiatric ward earlier this summer. We’re sharing it through Sakhi’s channels to bring visibility to an issue that affects our community.
Why is Sakhi having a conversation about mental health?
Caritas: Sakhi has been having this conversation for a while and finding ways to intentionally incorporate mental health and holistic care into our services. We’re responding to what we’re seeing, which is that women are having experiences that we recognize as being related to their mental health, and unless addressing it is made a priority, women’s empowerment suffers.
Arpita: It’s important and it’s ignored. When women come here and don’t feel comfortable talking about their mental health, it’s because they’ve been conditioned to hold it in. This isn’t singularly a consequence of being a survivor of violence; the women that come to Sakhi hold a number of identities that ask them to be strong.
Caritas:Even saying the word depression is fraught. There’s a lot of work to be done in terms of getting people to accept that depression exists beyond a moment of feeling extreme and justifiable sadness. It has both mental and physical manifestations, but when clients say they’re depressed, for them it lacks chronic meaning.
We both hid our depression from our parents. Why?
Caritas:Just because you have depression doesn’t mean you understand depression. You and I were both going through a period when we were trying to cope, manage, and understand this illness but we were also acutely aware that this was not something that was readily discussed or acknowledged in our culture or in our families.
Arpita: I felt a responsibility to hide it. My parents came here to make my life and my brother’s life great, and the thought that I was doing something to cause my own depression was really hard to shake. I didn’t want to give my parents the impression that they came here and struggled and did so much for me but I was ruining it by not living to the potential that they deserve. I honestly still feel that way sometimes.
Caritas: If I had broken my leg, my parents would be supportive because there’s evidence there. There’s a physical mark and no one at fault. But without that physical evidence, for myself and for my family, I held the blame. The whacked perspective of someone with depression made me feel ashamed and undeserving, so of course I hid it. And I hid it primarily with good reason. But, there were also instances where I hid it without good reason. My ability to assess whether someone could help and support me, to have faith that someone would step up, was distorted. I don’t think the answer to this question is just that we’re South Asian, a part of the answer is we hid depression from our parents…because we were depressed.
Arpita:Yes! I hid it for a number of reasons that I cannot explain to a person without depression. But for me, I knew my parents would support me 100%. Even in my worst depression-brain, I knew that if I told them, they would drop everything to be with me. Knowing that was somehow such a strong motivation to not tell them. The idea of burdening my parents with something that I didn’t even know how to explain or justify was so atrocious to me that I couldn’t even form the words to tell them. Everyone who knows me knows how much my parents love me, I talk about it constantly and they demonstrate it every single day. It doesn’t feel better now that I’ve told them, I still feel like such a heavy burden on their shoulders.
You also didn’t tell your parents that you were in a psychiatric ward earlier this summer.
Caritas: I didn’t tell many people. I only told those who knew enough of my mental health history and that I interacted with every day. Partially, just because of logistics – I couldn’t call many people. But mostly, I wasn’t in a place where I wanted to be managing other people’s feelings.
Arpita:That’s why you told me not to visit you!
Caritas: Yes, because it was a really intense place where I was also in a low point, as my friend and as a person who also struggles with depression and as one of the most empathetic people I know it just didn’t seem like a place that was healthy for you. It wouldn’t have been helpful to either of us.
I understood that the way to be there for you was to not physically be there for you. That became unbearable once I realized you were there by force.
Caritas: I didn’t realize that if I had checked myself in voluntarily that they could keep me there longer than I wanted. As long as I displayed a basic level of mental faculty, I thought I would be able to leave when I was ready. So for me, from the outset, I had in my mind that I would need 48-72 hours to fully cope with what I was feeling.
What were you feeling?
Caritas:Suicidal. Suicidal with a plan. I checked myself in not because of any understanding that suicide was an irrational thing to want, but because I felt dangerous to myself in a way that could permanently affect my health. I felt like I needed to be in a place where I was being monitored.
What was your reaction to being held there involuntarily?
Caritas:It was devastating. I think there was a feeling of “what have I done?”. Up until that point I had made all the decisions that had landed me there and then, unexpectedly, I was a human without agency for an undetermined amount of time. At that moment, that was the hardest thing – not knowing how long I would have to be there. Nobody gave me those answers. Once I realized I was going to be there for more than 72 hours I felt a sense of purpose, “Now I have to prove I’m healthy, I can play this game”. I decided that going to all offered therapy sessions, being “functional”, showing up for every meal (even if I wasn’t eating it) was how I could get out of there. If I hadn’t had an outside support system that rallied immediately, a job that was so receptive, and an ability to take care of myself then I would’ve been there for much longer. I realized that there is a lot of love out there for me, which was helpful in a way but I also felt guilty. If I could play the game and be functional in there, why couldn’t I do it outside of the hospital walls? Was it just a huge attention-seeking thing?
Did being South Asian impact your decision to go or your mindset while you were there?
Caritas:Yes. It affected that I went there in the first place because it was a way to protect and take care of myself without having my family see. I don’t think it affected my mindset while I was there except that I was so grateful I could speak English fluently. I had a hard enough time communicating to case workers what my needs were and felt grateful that I could advocate for myself. I checked myself in so that my family wouldn’t have to see the actual hard, visual ways in which depression affects me. But honestly, I also did it partially because I wanted them to know that this is a serious illness. This isn’t just me being sad, something to be fixed by taking a walk or bottling it away. A part of me hoped needing something as serious as hospitalization would make them understand the gravity of what I was experiencing.
Did you gain anything from being there?
Caritas: The psychiatric ward was an option to me because it was an option in popular culture; I didn’t know what other resources existed. Checking yourself into the ER for psychiatric reasons is a good, brave, responsible thing to do if you feel that you need it. But, it is also scary and dehumanizing, it isn’t restorative – it is a place to be safe for an amount of time. There is no magic that happened to me in the psych ward. I have always known that I have a support system I can call on, but it’s very hard to ask for help when you feel like you don’t deserve it and it’s demoralizing –
Arpita:– it’s hard to always be the one asking for support when ideally you would be asking for and giving support to those who love you in equal parts. This feeling is heightened when you feel like you don’t deserve help, and it’s impossible to see what people gain from always lifting me up and making me feel worthy.
Caritas & Arpita: In our conversations about depression and culture and community, we’ve realized that we’ve been taught that this is a thing you don’t talk about, this is something to be ashamed of, if people you love know, it will hurt and baffle them.
What are we talking about when we say “support”?
Caritas: Therapy! Going to therapy is my most effective form of care. It’s a way for me to talk through all the moving parts of trauma history and depression without feeling like I’m burdening someone.
Arpita: I hate going to therapy. It helps me and it’s good for me and I’ve been going on-and-off for four years with only good results, but I just can’t stand it. I get very uncomfortable talking about myself and I need and have had great therapists who are comfortable with silence, but I take some sort of perverse pride in relying on myself.
Caritas: Oh, that’s so South Asian.
Arpita:Yes! Yes, it is. I want to prove to my parents that I’m worth how hard they worked to raise me and help me be successful. I want to be stronger than I am, and going to therapy feels like weakness whereas “taking care of it on my own” feels like strength.
Caritas: I’ve had some really great therapists and I’ve had some horrendous therapists, but I’ve always felt like therapy is a long-term support that I will need. If I don’t go to therapy something builds up and explodes – no matter who I talk to , who I reach out to – taking time regularly to talk out loud does good things for my brain. There’s a part of me that feels like “Oh, what an American thing to do”, but over the years I’ve realized that there’s been an interesting correlation between not going to therapy and increase in my self harm. I think there’s something powerful that happens when you hear yourself talk through issues out loud to someone who is a professional listener. It certainly helped me. I’ve seen it help Sakhi clients too when they come in for counseling – they might not call it therapy but the process is the same. I think there’s an idea that taking space and time for yourself is an unjustifiably selfish thing to do. I don’t think it is if it’s what’s helping you heal.
Arpita:There’s no part of that that I disagree with. My dislike of therapy doesn’t negate how helpful it is for me, for people like me. I don’t do depression recovery perfectly. There are days where I don’t seek the help I know I need, and my recovery has been start-and-stop because my brain is constantly negotiating feeling better with the idea that I’m making this all up. I’ve also been blessed from the beginning with an unbelievably generous group of friends whose collective voice drowned out my internal feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness. That group includes friends, extremely important people in my life, who have been there to see and manage me at my worst and those who don’t know this part of me at all. It’s that kind of support that I crave, because it’s that kind of support that I’ve been given from the start. I moved to New York and away from almost all of those people, and therapy is a good placeholder for them…but it’s not always what I want to do.
Caritas:For me, support from loved ones has been equal parts necessary and alienating.
At Sakhi we talk a lot about self-care. What is that?
Caritas:Prioritizing our own health, which is something that we’re not necessarily taught to do. Self care is radical because we don’t come from a culture of self-help books – “self-” as a prefix is not a thing, we come from a culture where what we do is meant to serve or enhance a larger unit.
Arpita:I completely agree that it’s radical. For me, self-care is the simple process of taking time to yourself, for yourself. That seems so selfish. My model of strength is my family; my brother, especially, is the strongest person I know. They have shown that there is strength in taking care of other people. It’s hard for my me to see strength in taking care of myself – my depression-brain is saying, “Why bother?”
Caritas:As radical as the concept is sometimes, the process of self-care can be very mundane too. It takes a lot of planning and reinforcing routines. Setting alarms to make sure I eat, taking my medicine at the same time every day, cleaning my room even when I don’t feel like it because I know it’ll make me feel better later, going to therapy every week – depression is dramatic and puts you in touch with morbidity and mortality, but it is also super boring.
Arpita: They never show that part in TV shows and movies, but it honestly takes up the most time during my day and my overall recovery! I am a process-oriented person and I can be very analytical, so my day starts with me taking stock of my emotions, like a checklist. If there isn’t balance in that checklist, my mind moves on to setting in place all the things I can do to restore balance.
Does visibility matter?
Caritas:Yes! Depression is a very isolating and perspective-shifting thing that happens to your brain, so it’s important to de-stigmatize it, partially by sharing experiences, so that more people can identify what they are going through and seek help. I grew up thinking the pain I felt and the frequent crying were normal, I just thought that’s how people were supposed to feel. We need to normalize depression but also realize that you don’t have to live like that, there are ways to feel better, you deserve to feel better.
Arpita:The idea of visibility was the initial spark as I began building programs for the Women’s Health Initiative. Creating a Mental Health Assessment form and asking clients, very soon after they come through Sakhi’s doors, to take time and discuss their mental health was my way of making mental health more visible to clients, more central in their lives. Women often come to Sakhi with urgent needs, for housing, public assistance, jobs, their mental state and emotional health are set aside. This is why visibility matters organizationally – Sakhi provides holistic services, and addressing mental health is a crucial part of that.
Caritas: Having seen popular depictions of depression and anxiety, people working through their experience on the Internet in so many forms, through comics,blogs, videos, has helped me understand depression better. It’s easier to recognize those parts of myself when I see someone else representing it. I think it’s helped me process some really frustrating aspects of my mental health. It’s helped me be patient with myself in figuring out what recovery looks like, what progress looks like, and what I can expect from myself. It’s hard to have that perspective if you’re in a silo.
Arpita:Visibility of depression and anxiety has also helped me be more patient with others, with the people in my life who are witnessing my recovery and my setbacks. I had to learn to let my friends and my family understand depression and anxiety in their own way and in their own time. Initially, I was so impatient; I wanted people to learn and understand right away so that I didn’t have to explain my behavior all the time, so that I could have a panic attack and not explain what a panic attack is.
Caritas:For me, I hid so much from my family because I thought they couldn’t handle it. Because mental health issues aren’t talked about there was such a barrier to me realizing that my family, specifically my parents, could have empathy. It took a lot of mistakes on my part in communication before I realized that they are capable of, or at least want to, understand what’s going on with me. The progress isn’t linear; sometimes, they’ll still be frustrated and not understand or tell me something like, “Pray more.” But, there are also many instances where they’ve surprised me by having compassion in the way that they know how. Just general visibility is good, but culturally-specific visibility is also important. There are particular issues and interactions that arise when you’re South Asian that aren’t necessarily depicted in popular media. We’re navigating it in our own way, having difficult moments and conversations. There’s no perfect way to do it.
Arpita: Yes! There’s popular visibility, there’s cultural visibility, but there’s also the sentiment of “Yeah, me too.” That sentiment is part of why you and I are writing this together. Our experiences are very different but sometimes startlingly, reassuringly similar. Seeing that in you, understanding that part of you has been a critical aspect of my own recovery. I don’t have to explain certain nuances of depression, I feel a sense of kinship and affirmation that what I’m experiencing is real. That version of visibility is healing. It’s so special when someone says, “Yeah, me too.”
This is the beginning of what we hope will be an ongoing conversation. Feel free to share your thoughts, responses, and stories in the comments below.
If you or someone you know is seeking temporary, non hospital-based emotional health services, contact your borough’s Crisis Respite Center. If you or someone you know is distressed or in crisis, please call Lifenet. If you’re a teen looking for resources about mental health and wellness, visit the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Resources for Teenspage.
“Being born a woman is an awful tragedy…yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”
“The Female Man” - Joanna Russ // “The Robber’s Bride” - Margaret Atwood // “Gone Girl” - Gillian Flynn // “Ways of Seeing” - John Berger // “The Female Man” - Joanna Russ // Sylvia Plath
As a lesbian i will always relate more to trans women than cishet women. Made to feel disgusting and predatory in women’s spaces? Check. Berated and mocked for our relation to sexuality and womanhood? Check. Hated for our “deviancy from the norm”? Check. Every single essay about womanhood by a trans woman–and especially, especially by trans wlw–has spoken more to me than anything written by a cis straight woman ever could. T*rfs can take that to the bank.
also, may I add because it’s not just the negative stuff. there’s so much positive connection:
gender euphoria experiences with a self determined approach to womanhood, attraction and sexuality
celebration of bodies beyond the norm
creating our own culture of appreciating complex and intertwined expressions of gender and sexuality
destigmatization and newfound respect of and for our bodies
true sisterhood based on choice not force
the inherent revolutionary nature of our existence and our love and community
creating space for exploration of pleasure and identity
These posts were fundamental in my coming out as a woman and hopefully someone else will see them and see the overflowing love and acceptance that is waiting for them too.
literally song rep for women who are percvied as very nice and kind and then when people get to know you you do not live up to their expectations because you are a flawed human being like anyone else and people project their motherhood fantasies onto you but you are just a woman trying to survive.
”When you destroy midwives, you also destroy a body of knowledge that is shared by women, that can’t be put together by a bunch of surgeons or a bunch of male obstetricians, because physiologically, birth doesn’t happen the same way around surgeons, medically trained doctors, as it does around sympathetic women.”
the thing about “well-behaved women rarely make history" is that the author, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, didn’t write it about women who would be considered “badly-behaved;“ she wrote it in a book about a midwife, about women who had been largely ignored and erased from history because as a result of their “good behaviour.” So it’s not a “BAD GIRLS DO IT WELL" kind of quote; it’s a reminder to respect and pay attention to the women who go about quietly living their lives.
it’s a reminder to respect and pay attention to the women who go about quietly living their lives.
Studies suggest How may I help you officer? is the single most disarming thing to say and not What’s the problem? Studies suggest it’s best the help reply My pleasure and not No problem. Studies suggest it’s best not to mention problem in front of power even to say there is none. Gloria Steinem says women lose power as they age and yet the loudest voice in my head is my mother. Studies show the mother we have in mind isn’t the mother that exists. Mine says: What the fuck are you crying for? Studies show the baby monkey will pick the fake monkey with fake fur over the furless wire monkey with milk, without contest. Studies show to negate something is to think it anyway. I’m not sad. I’m not sad. Studies recommend regular expressions of gratitude and internal check-ins. Enough, the wire mother says. History is a kind of study. History says we forgave the executioner. Before we mopped the blood we asked: Lord Judge, have I executed well? Studies suggest yes. What the fuck are you crying for, officer? the wire mother teaches me to say, while studies suggest Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today?
If you ever need proof that men hate women, just watch how violently and how angrily and how indignant they act when a woman says “my personal experiences combined with the experiences of my female loved ones have made me afraid of you collectively”.
“Fuck you, that’s stupid, not every man is like that.” Maybe not, but you clearly are.
When men say this, it has nothing to do with making women feel safer or changing women’s minds about men. It has everything to do with silencing women through insults and fear. It is an entirely self serving act when a man tells a woman not to fear men. They don’t care about women’s safety or peace; they care how women’s suspicion going into any interaction with them is affecting a man’s ability to do what he wants with her later.
I have never seen a man say “not all men” and come from a place of “I want women to feel safe because I want them to be happy”. It always comes from a place of “I want women to feel safe because their fear is inconvenient to me; it prevents them from going on dates with me, it makes them question my intentions when we are alone, it makes them more apt to notice when they are being treated unfairly, it makes them less likely to leave themselves vulnerable to me emotionally and physically, and it makes me uncomfortable that I may have to tell other men to behave, so I’d rather continue to harass the women who are already afraid of me by silencing them.”
Transmasculinity: a term used to describe trans people who identify with masculinity to a greater extent than with femininity.
Womanhood: describing the quality of being a woman.
I could also call this flag as FtM/F2M/M2M/MtM girl, describing polygender and multigender (specially am/bigender) folks. This isn’t the same as being a masculine trans gal though. This has to do with women having gender masculinity (e.g. mingender) who are also transgender. - A.P.
