Mapping Insanity / Family
In the neighborhood of Madhavaram, in the city of Chennai, in the quite large state of Tamil Nadu situated in the bottom corner of India, an old man sleeps on a simple cot. He is slowly losing his sense of who I am, who he is, and his psychological presence in this world. This man is my grandfather, my mom’s father, who we call Thatha. For the past year and a half, he has been engulfed by a rapid progression of dementia after the onset of learning he had stage 4 cancer. His chemotherapy treatment simultaneously saved his body and lost his mind. His consciousness slipped by us unseen, unheard, and while we looked far and wide for it, we knew it will not return.
As I reconcile the loss of his mind, I’m thrown into a needed reflection of what it means to preserve who he really was and how it transcended his body and passed down intergenerationally through my mother, through me and my brother. However, with a handful of old WhatsApp messages, fading memories from my youth and unreliable narratives from my mother and family, I realized perhaps this archival project was improbable. More so, I realized an even deeper failing—that all this time we failed to understand Thatha as more than just grandfather; we ignored what it means to understand our own selves as products of each other.
Pivoting generations and continents, I think of myself: of who I am and how I have become. For the past year, I have been in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) which has forced me to reevaluate how I perceive myself and my history. However, the process to get myself into CBT was a brutally isolating journey, one that was bereft of the needed warmth and compassion from family. The first time I cut myself, I was in the junior year of high school. I had been berated by my parents for not being studious enough, smart enough, grateful enough—something I should have been numbed to, but I am not one to disassociate myself from my emotions. I had been so scared by the impulse I immediately told my parents. My mom’s first reaction was to ensure that she was absolved of blame and insisted that my dad was the “cause” of this outburst. She made me confess which tool I had used, scissors, and had since then make jokes like, “Oh, I can’t give scissors to you anymore!” I stopped cutting, out of embarrassment, but the need still existed dormantly.
In college, these underlying feelings of self-hatred became more visible. I felt my life dictated by archaic South Asian expectations, and I had ceased to find meaning and value in my own life, especially when compared to those around me. I had reached a state from which I could not rebound. I stayed in my room for days, oscillating between crying and silence for hours on end. I would be easily triggered by friends, acquaintances, classmates, and would cut myself in private as if to punish myself for my inadequacy. I never sought help, because I didn’t know I could. I didn’t want to humiliate my parents once again or worse, humiliate myself.
Through confiding in my partner and close friends, I learned to put my scissors down and tame the impulse to hurt myself when I felt a surge of worthlessness. But it still did not change the mental health struggles I was suffering from in my mind. When I graduated college early and moved to New York City, I was buoyed up, invigorated by the simple act of change. But the novelty quickly wore off, and I continued suffocating under the same issues. I naively thought leaving college would indefinitely “fix” me, but I did not realize the dangerously compounding effect of unresolved, untreated mental health struggles. After six months, I felt I could not keep going day to day. My self-hatred manifested in almost unique and specific ways that I never could foresee, and still do not feel comfortable sharing publicly. It was then that I started the ongoing process of healing and attending CBT sessions.
Through my sessions, I have been examining not just how my own life unfolded, but how my history has functioned in conjunction with my family. For so long, we have considered ourselves disparate entities, floating in and out of each other’s lives, neglecting to think deeply about how our intergenerational web has influenced one another. However, I alone am beginning to put together fractured images of my family in an attempt to heal my fractured self. In thinking about the roots of my self-hatred and mental health disorders (anxiety and obsessive-thinking), I realized I must understand, first, how my mom influenced these feelings and exhibited such behaviors herself.
In the little I know about my mom’s mental suffering, I do know she was victim to a brutal childhood in which she faced colorism and fatphobia at a young age. In this vulnerable state, I know she grew up with unbridled anger, distrust and contempt toward anyone or anything that could even potentially make her feel as worthless as her bullies made her feel. But this last part, she never admitted to. She admitted to being relentlessly bullied and from that becoming “stronger” and “not giving a fuck what people say.” But past these supposedly courageous characteristics, I am forced to see a deeper pain and struggle, and piece together her insecurities in order to explain the ways she emotionally retaliated against her family. I had to look beyond her glossed-over recounts of the past to understand how or why she would scream at her own children when she thought we doubted her, didn’t agree with her, or when she misconstrued something we said as an offense to her.
The narrative I have written since I was five years old was that I was a terrible person, and that must be the reason why my mom had to yell at me every day, especially when there was no other apparent reason why. I did not think to understand that perhaps the real reason is that she is human and has her own unresolved trauma that she does not know how to process. That her anxiety manifests as anger, and what feels and looks like obsessive thinking is her ruminating on her own insecurities of being less-than. However, because she does not admit to her deeper consciousness or concede that her behavior is indicative of something more severe than just “time-to-time temperaments,” I do not know how to fully understand her struggles with mental health. And unfortunately, due to a lack of dialogue in her own family, I don’t think she fully understands herself.
I cannot help but think about the man who sleeps on a simple cot and whose consciousness I am slowly starting to map. The only narratives I have of his lifetime feel, at best, unreliable. I know of his anger, but was it abusive, uncontrollable? I know he was obsessive in his behaviors, but to what extent? My mother jokes about how he physically numbered his underwear in order to evenly divide out how and when he wears them; moreover, he could not wear his underwear if they were not numbered. If I could, I would ask, “Was this related to his passion for numbers, or was this a compulsion he could not avoid?” I wonder in this story where she branded him as quirky, did he really have obsessive thinking and/or OCD? In his last years before his cancer diagnosis and dementia, was it simply unfortunate that he was alone with no friends or family, or was it a very serious depressive condition in which we should have brought him to the States?
Beyond my mother’s recollections, I must reconcile that there is a whole history before her that I can never retrieve from Thatha himself. How did his childhood—being alone and self-sustaining at the age of 16—isolate him further in his social anxiety? Was his anger and verbal abusiveness towards his wife and daughters a result of his own past? How was my mother influenced by this behavior, and how did she inadvertently take on part of this identity?
As I circle back and forth between his fading mind and reconstructing it from my own, I imagine how things could have been different. In what could have been a shared experience, a mutual understanding of one another, there is a generational silence. A void that festers misunderstanding, miscommunication and my own furthering isolation from family and my community. We lack a fundamental necessity to admit our psychological struggles; we barely understand each other and worse, degrade experiences we vocalize through harmful stigmas and perceptions of mental health. For my mom to confront my cutting as a throw-away joke, or for her to disengage my anxiety as “thinking too much for no reason,” were all symptoms of a systematic rejection of mental health that she most likely also faced from her own father.
In this chasm, I dream of a reality in which we redefine what “mental health” really means. That “happiness” can be achieved through the help of one another, rather than an unattainable ideal as my mom once said to me. Through open, genuine conversations about the ways we have and continue to suffer, we can begin to see how that has affected us individually and together. We can break down the stigma associated with a word like “disorder” and instead embrace the histories we have been dealt as momentum to heal going forward. We can hold ourselves accountable for how we have treated each other and acknowledge that, despite our best intentions, we have often hurt each other in different (and unfortunately many) ways. We can support each other through the most severe and difficult feelings of self-contempt and keep each other safe.
And through all of this open-dialogue, I imagine that there is one day in which we no longer feel alone, unwillingly staggering through a dark cave. That sooner than later, a familiar hand will extend, and together we will guide one another away from this world of unknown into a safe, new reality.
About Anonymous
I have chosen to submit this piece anonymously in order to maintain a safe and private way to share my story without having to identify my family. I also wanted to have a space to speak honestly, without muddling my language, sentiment or words. I want to be genuine with the pain I felt and continue to feel, without feeling guilty for being public about it. While the history I detail in the piece feels harsh, it is what happened and something I feel worth expressing. However, over the past few years, I have been more vocal about my mental health with my parents, and they've reexamined their past perspectives and learned to show their real love and compassion. There is hope, and I'm thankful for my family, my friends, and Asian American Feminist Collective who provide spaces to share my voice.