Personal Essay: Twenty-Five (Number of days it takes to form a habit. Number of years it took to accept living as a choice)

By Bharti Bansal

I am going to be 25 this year. 
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It sounds like a good number only when you remember that you are at an age when your mother got married. It seems a good deal to me when I realize that at my age, my mother had two kids already. But this isn’t the hard part. ​

At 24 now, I am not supposed to fumble while ordering a pizza. Those jitters were supposed to be the part of my teenage cringe stories. But I was always a shy kid. I remember memorizing everything I was supposed to say before going to the school stationery shop. It seemed like a daunting task, a challenge that I didn’t want to fail. But I thought this was a phase I had outgrown. Now as I stand in line waiting in the hospital to get my receipt, I look around for my mother. I thought this was the age when I could go to the gynaecologist alone or drive my way around, grocery shop, stand in lines outside the ATM, or worse have a job. But what defines me at the moment is this one concrete statement which isn’t even a statement but a number. 

The nurse asks me to stand on the weighing scale which I do and wish for a miracle. The needle keeps fluctuating between the numbers, as if unsure of how to measure the gravity of someone who wants to disappear into thin air every day. She looks at me with wide eyes, and proceeds to jot down the number on a prescription slip. By this point, I know this number will catch up with me, and sometimes surpass me in the process but I keep a calm face. I am called, and like any other “good child”, I keep my head down and enter the cabin where a woman with greys in her hair sits comfortably. I wonder how many times she has resented that room. I am at a stage where I think I belong more to people who have known sadness intimately rather than seemingly happy folks who would rather crack a joke than say how they are. 

It is a small dingy room with a window just big enough to let some light in.. As I enter, she immediately says, “just look at your weight”.  I pretend I didn’t hear her, I just want to convince myself that she isn’t talking to me. Mother jumps in and repeats my medical history which she must have repeated a hundred times by now. But she still doesn’t remember to mention the antidepressants I take. I think this is how she convinces herself that mental health isn’t real.As soon as I name Paxidep, which is one of the antidepressants I take, the doctor casually asks me, “Why do you take antidepressants?” Keeping my face as straight as possible, I say “because I have depression". Duh!

She looks at me- really looks at me - and I find myself becoming an object of inspection, bringing back many bad memories of long psychiatric visits, psych ward, and people with roaming eyes. I keep looking back at her as well.  And as we are staring, we’re challenging each other like two wild animals waiting for the other’s submission before pouncing. “Depression is not a disease" she says in a matter of fact voice. At this point, I feel obliged to clear that I am visiting a gynecologist rather than a psychiatrist.. But, I don’t say anything back. After years of fighting with psychiatrists over the fact that I am not lazy and weak, I don’t find any strength in me to answer. She then proceeds to say, “it is all a matter of will power". 

Ouch. There it is. Again.

When I was a teenager, I weighed merely thirty two kg. This invited lot of advices on what should I eat, how much should I eat. But the hard part was the mockery. Skinny shaming shattered my confidence altogether. At such a fragile age, nobody talked to me about the consequences of bottling everything inside and not finding the courage to actually speak up for myself. I always looked for someone to rescue me, protect me from the hurtful comments and taunts, take me under their shelter, save me from the world. But how long can one go without accepting the weight of their own insecurities? How long can one ignore the voices in their head, voices which first form when your aunt convinces you that you weren't as beautiful as your cousin during childhood?

Most of my self image has been constructed from the views of people close to me and I have spent my entire childhood and teenage believing the same. But slowly, I started gaining weight, mostly because it was the side-effect of antidepressants. I would look at the weighing machine and over the years the needle pointed from 32 to 45 to 54 to 65 to 68. My body became curvaceous and my face gained fat which would hide my protruding teeth. People would now look at me and compliment me whenever they met. Now, when a person has spent her entire childhood looking for validation of people, it becomes really difficult to not get flattered by the praises. I was feeling happy, at least about my body. I would go shopping and no longer asked for “S" size but “M" which then changed into “XL". For the first time in my life, I felt beautiful and confident enough to actually look at people while talking to them. This went on for a while but like every other high, it gradually had to go through low's. The weighing machines started fluctuating between 69 to 70. I thought what could go wrong, at least people found me beautiful. The fats around my hips and chest increased and my tummy protruded like an unwelcome sign. The same people now started telling me tips to lose weight. Drink lemonade before breakfast. Try eating cumin seeds everyday. Try yoga or have Saafi for clear skin and weight loss. 

I was suddenly too fat for their liking. Too big to wear crop tops or haulter necks. Too revealing to wear deep V necks. My back too broad for backless tops. My thighs too wide for wearing shorts. Run, they would say. And to be honest, I did. That’s what I have done all my life. Ran away from myself, trying to plan an escape from this body.

I have felt claustrophobic in my own body. And this hasn’t been an easy journey. At 25, I was supposed to have a dream that was ambitious enough to be called successful. Twenty five is the age of becoming and undoing. Everyday I see people my age doing the same. At 25, I had dreamt of becoming wild and “sane.” Be a fire vodka than a lukewarm lemonade ( I haven’t unlearnt how not to objectify myself). But what are you supposed to do at 25  really? I mean I am not Frida Kahlo to paint from my broken hands. I can not even start a revolution. I am a seemingly ordinary girl nobody cares to notice in a crowd. All I do is write pitches that editors gradually pass because I haven’t had adventures worthy of being printed in New York Times. I am ordinary and I say it like it is a mistreatment to self. 

What should you become at 25? Normal? Thin? Happy? 

25 is the age when I should treat myself to a glass of white wine, twirl around in my beige sequined satin slit dress, have my girlfriends hype me up but this is all just a capitalist dream. A dream for privileged people. 
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At 25, my mother says that she had already learnt about “womanhood.” And as she passes it to me, I try to bargain for atleast one short dress. Happiness, I suppose, is just a barter system. To be a girl from middle class means to conform. In a world where women have to constantly make a point through what they achieve, I want to sit in my small balcony in pink shorts and let the sun shine on my skin. At 25, when John Keats had already produced remarkable work, I want to just be. Even though, the world will look at me and think about a possible number for my body, I no more want to make it my identity.

The gynecologist has noted down my treatment by then. This old lady, who perhaps has viewed the world through a tinted lens of red, I think is shaped by the ideas constantly thriving on incompleteness. I think she tells every other girl “Have you looked at your weight" in a condescending voice. Yet I want to give her the benefit of doubt.

I take the prescription slip and walk out, first with slouched shoulders, then straightening my back and holding my head high to pretend that nothing inside the room has dissuaded me. I believe that is how a journey starts. By standing tall and proud  At 25, I think I will learn to do that more often.

Note:
​This is an edited version originally published in ​nativeskinonline.com