Honor Aside

Chapter 5

My first week of university was disappointing. I was very anxious about making friends and keeping up with the workload. At the end of the week, I sat on the bus toward home, gasping for air and unable to relax at all. That familiar feeling had returned, and I'd only been at school a few days. I knew things needed to change before I couldn't function. Secretly, I saw a doctor near my house. She asked me about my mental health and I cried, partly because I was miserable and also because I was terrified that I needed that kind of help. Our family rarely went to the doctor. If you got sick, it was your fault. People could be kind, but they would also let you know that you were a burden. I would try to hide headaches and colds for as long as I could. Sometimes, I just needed time to myself but my mom would think I had a headache and blame me for whatever reason she could think of.

The doctor recommended an antidepressant. I started taking St. John's Wort. The word "depression" rattled around in my head. I wanted to not need medication. I wanted to be okay without anything else. Some people around me have negatively referred to medication as a "crutch," which doesn't make sense because a crutch is something you use to keep the pressure off your leg while it heals. It doesn't sound like avoidance to me that someone would want something to, yes, make things easier because they don't want to flounder in the dark for years in the hope of distilling their experiences into a reason to live life fully. And some situations are so bad that a person does need to artificially improve their mood for a while so they can start to improve their life. To me, it seems like most people are bootstraps people, even if they say they get it. Only someone who's been through it will actually empathize without often judging you and making you feel like you are wasting your life.

I had a friend who said she'd been depressed for a couple of years in the past. She wanted to help, but it was as if she was convinced that I was somehow immature for being indecisive and unsure about things, regardless of my upbringing that gave me a very different perspective. Asking me, "What are you going to do about it," when I just want support and not an interrogation from someone who doesn't understand, is very unhelpful. For all that she said she knew what depression was like, I later realized that she had just had a very normal process of growing up. Sometimes, in rare circumstances, I feel that I can make that sort of judgment, in my own head. Some people use those kinds of terms incorrectly.

I struggled with anxiety and depression throughout university. The first year was the worst part of that. My weight ballooned from all the stress-eating. I made almost no friends, except for one who became increasingly difficult to be around. Fucking loser. I let that friendship go because I felt like I was walking on eggshells all the time. I tried different antidepressants at different dosages, most of which did not help me as much as I would have liked. Some of them made me very numb. I have always felt guilty about taking an antidepressant. I hid everything from my family, because even when I tried to share, they might initially try to sympathize, but that would give way to advising prayer, gratitude, and better daily habits. And everything else was still going on at home too.

Sometime in my second year of university, I saw a counselor from school. I bawled in her office each of the few times that I met with her. Sharing what bothered me was so painful, especially when she asked if I had thoughts of harming myself. I left every session red-faced and puffy-eyed. Eventually, I started group therapy for students with depression. I talked about my family and the secrets we'd been taught to keep hidden forever. I learned to open up and I heard other people's life stories. I was and remain grateful for having access to free counseling from school. After that group therapy cycle had ended, I joined another for students with anxiety. I wanted to be healthier, so I started eating better and exercising at home. I ran, trained with weights, and tried to be as healthy as I could.

At a certain point, I no longer wanted to take medication. I had always been cautious about it. I told my doctor that I felt the drug had done what it was intended to do, and I no longer wanted to rely on it. I was actually still depressed, but it seemed like I had enough control of my life that I could stop. I also thought that I should be able to handle my loser life after all those months of hard work. Won't just stop being useless. Although I wasn't as suicidal at the time, school was still stressful. I pushed myself to do as well as I could. I pushed myself to wake up early, commute, pay attention in all of my classes, study in the library during my breaks, participate in extracurriculars, eat well, exercise when I got home, and get enough sleep. The system broke down eventually. I was still a depressed, nervous wreck on the inside. The early mornings made me miserable and I still lacked social support. The burnout always caught up to me. My parents criticized me for being too skinny, according to them, and warned me to avoid lifting heavy so that I'd still have marriage prospects after I graduated.

The knowledge of what my life was supposed to be was always there. They never let me forget it. They wanted to ensure that I didn't dishonor or shame them after I married by acting rudely or inconsiderately, so I heard a lot of "Your in-laws will kick you out of their house and send you on your way back to us if you don't..." My mom would say such things while laughing in a sickeningly self-deprecating sort of way, as if we were all bound to fail anyway. I hated it, and I'm still struggling to change my thinking so that it's separate from what she taught me. Because yes, a woman's in-laws can make her life miserable. Parents can marry you off to someone awful and your complaints are never taken seriously, at least not in my family. Even if your situation is objectively terrible, people don't really believe that you might have to endure something that bad. They think women are and should be immune to most forms of pain. You grin and bear it, and hopefully that misery turns into a tumour that kills you before you're 60. And then they whine that you went too soon. I sound cynical, but that's one of the conclusions I came to after critically thinking about the effects of arranged marriage within my family.

Marriage is usually coerced, and also forced in many cases. The bride's parents don't seem to see their child as a person deserving of happiness and a complete life. They see it as a way to get rid of a burden, both literally and figuratively, since an unmarried daughter who is getting older is also seen by others as a dead weight. If asked the reasons for rushing their daughter through marriage, parents usually respond, "You don't understand, but you will. People will ask and wonder why she's not married, and they'll gossip that it's because there is something wrong with her, or with us."

I struggled with the catch-22: either you worked to get an acceptable job and represent yourself as a hardworking, pious woman and got married, or you dishonored your family and they'd try to find someone who would be willing to take you on regardless. Either be good (according to their definition, which severely limited your autonomy) and stay that way for the rest of your life, or disappoint them and have them emphasize that your misery was well-deserved. In both cases, your family would criticize and berate you for the smallest perceived mistake, and remind you that whatever you did have in your life depended upon your ability to act correctly. I believed for many years that I was inherently bad. I always anticipated punishment or well-intended criticism. It was hard to predict when someone would react negatively to something you'd done or shared, and it depended mostly on my parents' mood at the time. Many times, I thought I'd gotten away with something that was objectively quite non-noteworthy, only for people to bring it up much later and point out what I'd done that was so bad. It could be something like driving with my mom and she would later remember that I had swung slightly into the oncoming lane while making a turn as a car approached some 50 meters away. She'd tell me in hushed tones how I could've caused an accident, and I'd have to agree. The conversation would turn into something about prayer. It was maddening, because even trying to explain that such things were okay and hadn't caused any horrible effects was unproductive. We all failed to communicate effectively, even though I tried many times to change that. It wasn't my fault. Except that it was.