Denial was thick syrup sweet. I let it pool in my heart till it overflowed and coated the outsides of my insides, sticky. I wanted the liquid sugar to suffocate me.
I didn’t have a mental illness. I had experienced enlightenment, an intellectual breakthrough.
I kept telling the story of what had happened to me over and over. To my parents. To Ellen, my therapist. To Kannan. To Kimberly, one of my closest friends. It comforted me to lay out all the pieces and fit them together in a seamless whole.
Reactions ranged. My mother did not comment on my experiences. She was more worried if I was well enough to stay in Los Angeles and continue on with my graduate program. Wouldn’t it be better if I came home? My father listened avidly to my story. When I finished, he cut no corners. Based on what he knew, he was certain that what I had experienced was not enlightenment. He could not, however, dismiss all spiritual explanations. There was a possibility, he said, that I had experienced an awakening of my kundalini. In any case, spiritual experience or no, he recommended I meet with a psychiatrist. I was relieved that my father believed in my story, disappointed that he didn’t agree with my categorization. Then again, my father didn’t know everything. He hadn’t gone through what I had gone through. Maybe a part of my experience was an awakening of my kundalini, maybe a part of it was some sort of enlightenment. As for a psychiatrist, absolutely not. Prescription pads were bugaboo.
With Ellen, I omitted the golden light experience, the messages in the signs, and what I heard in limbo. To no avail. When I finished telling my story, Ellen diagnosed me with Bipolar Type I Disorder. Just like the psychiatrist at Exodus. I burst into tears. My therapist did not believe me. Ellen, consummate professional, quietly apologized for making me feel that way, then brought out the DSM-V. She opened the tome to the diagnostic criteria of bipolar disorder and asked me to read it. I stared at the small text. No, no, no. I couldn’t have bipolar disorder. I was special. I was chosen. I wasn’t mentally ill. Without reading a single word, I looked up from the book and told her that none of the descriptions fit my experience. For two more weeks, she tried to broach the subject. When I continued to dismiss her, she dropped it entirely.
Kannan hacked a laugh when I told him where I’d disappeared to for two weeks. He told me he’d been in a straitjacket a time or two before. I loved him madly for this. In every way, we were exactly the same. Without asking him outright, I tried to figure out if he had felt psychically linked to me on the day I threatened suicide. But he was a dodgy man, terse. I never got a straight answer to my roundabout questions. I believed in our telepathic connection anyways. Ours was a karmic bond.
I was excited to share my experiences with Kimberly, one of my dearest friends. I wanted to work on my thesis with her. She knew me so well. She understood me so deeply. I was sure that, together, we could create something truly groundbreaking. But it was all wrong from the beginning. Though she did her best to be a supportive friend, I could feel her shock, her horror from the minute I began my tale. Not only did she not believe what I told her, I could tell that she feared for the softness of my brain. After that trip, she faded away. Even then, I couldn’t blame her.
In the background of all this, my work at UCLA continued with a frenetic hum. I took a full load of classes. I served as the President of the Sociology Graduate Student Association. I was involved in organizing efforts with the union and the housing association. That quarter, I was supposed to be working on my master’s thesis, but I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the interview audio from my summer in Thiruvananthapuram. I couldn’t bear to hear the voice of a young woman untouched by the burdens of enlightenment. The unfinished work grew heavy round my neck. By the time I returned home to Virginia for winter break, I was exhausted.
One bright light remained. I was finally going to meet Kannan.
But if I was honest with myself, even that light was not so bright.
In the months following my discharge at Exodus, my relationship with Kannan became thorny and tumultuous. Kannan was often hard to reach. Our two-hour long conversations dropped to an hour, then fifteen minutes, then five. He began abruptly hanging up on me. He grew harsh and unkind. He called me a cunt once. I’d never allowed anyone to treat me that way before. But he was tortured. He struggled with addiction and mental illness, the heavy burden of being the firstborn of South Indian immigrant parents. I knew his battles. I forgave him for it all. I loved him.
We made plans to meet a week after I got home. He offered up his car first, then a cheap hotel room, not a coffeeshop, not a restaurant. But the details didn’t matter to me. I was so sure if only we met in person, it would all work out. Faced with the granularity of my body, my skin, he wouldn’t be able to deny the wonder of our connection. How magical it would be.
But as we got closer and closer to the date, I only felt dread. He wasn’t going to show. I knew it in my gut. Still, the romantic in me hoped. Silly girl. The day before we were supposed to meet, he texted me. Sorry, I’m too depressed to meet you. Ice shot through my veins. After everything that had happened to me, after everything I had borne, was I to be denied Kannan too? It made no sense. If he had been a part of what had happened to me in September, how could he not want to see me in December?
With this latest rebuff, I couldn’t bear to continue whatever it was that grew between us. I ended it. I said goodbye.
And with that, the whole of my being gasped, a glacier calving pain.
The depression that followed was death. For weeks, I lost the ability to read or write. I couldn’t watch tv or movies. I couldn’t listen to music. My concentration was entirely shot. Everything reminded me of Kannan. Tears slipped down my face, ceaseless. I had trouble falling asleep at night. I would wake around three or four in the morning, mind racing.
Though I tried to move on, Kannan’s presence lay over me. At the supermarket, on the street, I found I could no longer look into men’s faces. In their frames, in their movements, I saw pale shadows of Kannan. No matter where I went or what I did, I couldn’t escape him. I had been destroyed by a man I never met, a man I would never know.
It wasn’t just the loss of him, the person, that I grieved. It was the sense of great connection. The two of us had been cosmically linked. He had been a part of my spiritual experience, my great moment of realization. I had felt him with me in the thick of it all. For fate to devolve and dissolve us so quickly was impossible, absurd.
In the dull ache that remained, I kept returning to the strange events that had unfolded in September. What had happened to me then? Why was this happening to me now? Was this all part of some greater plan? Round and round, I went looking for answers in my head, but I found nothing there that could help. The universe had stopped sending me signs. The energy had shifted. I could feel it in my bones. I was now all alone in the world.
Curled up in bed, tight as a knot, I whispered to myself: just hold on, baby girl, you just gotta hold on.
When I returned to Los Angeles, I was determined to put it all behind me – Kannan, what had happened to me in September, my dreams of genius. I had a master’s thesis to write, classes to take, and organizing work to do. Step by little step, I started to move on. I was going to be Anjana Gigi Radhakrishnan, an ordinary woman with an ordinary life.
But I was foolish. I thought I could pack up the turmoil and stow it away, neat. I thought my steady diet of denial came free. I thought if only I tried my very best, I could keep my reckoning upstream.
If only it were so simple.
You see, in less than three months’ time, I would lose my mind.
Originally posted on a now defunct personal blogging website.
