Is it Clickbait if I say I am Depressed? (Part 1: World Wide Web)

There are only two ways of beginning this: I never thought it would be as bad as January 2017/it is as bad as January 2017. In the September of my 2^nd year of college, I felt as though I was losing grip of reality. I was swimming. I was writing essays for class. I was volunteering at the hospital. I was nursing a gigantic crush on the guy I would go on to date. I was the thinnest I was in college. I was scoring the highest I ever did on assignments. I was curating a poetry project. For myself, I said. I was productive. I wanted to die.

That semester was The Semester When We Read The Crack Up. When F Scott Fitzgerald was 39, he was no longer happy. It didn’t come suddenly, this unhappiness; but slowly built, spinning itself round him, spool after spool, silken and thick. People around him knew—he wrote this unhappiness so frequently, it was impossible to not know. 

I was 19. I imagined him holding his pen up, uncertain how to phrase this next part
authoritatively, as an author must: 

“the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise”. 

I thought of him, Arachne-like, holding his pen like a knitting needle, trying to put a positive spin on this story of brokenness; determined to make it otherwise. I imagined him covered with the silk of his sadness, picking at this silk for weaving his stories. I imagined how he got entwined in the spool, how his armchair, his feet, his torso, were all covered in web after web of silk. How he saw the web; and was "determined to make it otherwise", see his trap as a chrysalis.

*

Spiders wrap their prey in silk. They are expert spinners, covering their prey, line by line, with their own sticky creation. Before long, the resisting prey surrenders, surrounded by the spool of silk. The silk paralyzes the prey; slowly, literally consuming it. By the time the spider finally feasts, its prey is indistinguishable from the sad silk it is wrapped in, trapped in.

I always knew I was sad. This primary knowledge is integral to how I wove myself. I sought out the most tragic of stories and read until the tragedy in the story was indistinguishable from the tragedy in my heart. I wrote Mother’s Day cards fueled by self-sacrifice, demanding "nothing except more love". I wrote diary entries informing myself I was a terrible daughter, a terrible friend. The first word I remember learning is ‘Sorry’: a ‘Magic Word’. Where the word implied healing, I would weaponize it, use it to become sacrificial. In my sacrifice, I would become the scapegoat for the pain of others. I would be glorious. Instead of wafting into the spider’s web, I decided to invite the spider into my home to build its web. Instead of being hung and killed by the spider, I would choose to die the death of a martyr; my final moment, being crucified at the centre of a shining web.

You could say I harboured a romantic notion of self-sacrifice. I could say that is what we value in women. 

*

In September 2016, I lay in my hostel bed, slowly thinking that if I did it, who would find me first, how they would tell my parents, and how this would irrevocably change my family and my friends. At that time, my mother was running around Calcutta, building a home. Papa gave her the money, she ran around the city, talking to carpenter, electrician, painter, mechanic, glassblower, about how she hoped to build a home, possibly a final home. She spent all day working, laughing to me over the phone that she had dreams about the house, about how it all coming together. She sounded exhilarated and exhausted. When the house was finally made, it was something to behold. I stood there, in February, when the house was complete, feeling the earth shake.

Nobody else did, but I could feel the earth spinning, as though it had been bearing the brunt of something heavier than itself. I paused, gripping the marble tabletop, and felt my legs shake. Almost in response, the tile had grown a slim crack, evident only if you were looking for it. Around me, everyone applauded, praising this house with its golden lights and filigree woodwork. I saw it crack.

When I returned, I turned to Vrinda and Sanna asked them to tell me why not. I had made a list of reasons in September, and the only item left in why not was that my Mum was making the greatest project of her life—I couldn’t do it to her, not then. The reason was over. The house was complete. They said something, and it was good enough. It was reason enough, to not—or it would be, in a while. On the best days, I can remember what they said. Right now, I cannot.

*

I have always found the word clickbait strange. Click, implies action; bait, implies trap. Surely one cannot action themselves into a trap—if you walk into a trap, surely you wanted to, and if you wanted to—it cannot be a trap. Why would someone will themselves into a trap?

More than anything, at the heart of that is thr question of what it means to be human. Where do you really begin and end? In horror films, you watch the protagonist walk into the haunted house, unassuming. You call her stupid. You know what will happen; you hate her for not knowing her own fate. You still scream. In watching her, do you become her? 

*

I stepped out in the sun after four days today. I walked down the road, starving, and went to Pret a Manger. I saw a man and a woman sit on a bicycle parking bar and talk. I saw a family of Hindi-speaking tourists say it will be cheaper to take the metro. I watched a man pass by where another had asked for my number last week. None of them felt real. Sign 1.

I took the brioche I wanted and took a second one. I considered a bottle of juice and I picked it out. I thought of how matted my hair was, how unwashed I was, how evident it was that I hadn’t been able to sleep in two days. The shop assistant called me love, like he knew. Sign 2.

I walked into Sainsbury, casually picked up two packets of chips, instant ramen—food that I wouldn’t have to leave my room to make. I smiled at myself. This was so clearly. Sign 3.

Papa called. I felt relief I had missed it because I wouldn’t have to pretend to be fine. Sign 4.

I guilt myself for the relief and call back. Mummy asked how work is going. I shout at her in fury and burst into tears I didn’t see coming. Sign 5.

I write on my weekly planner list, in big blue felt pen letters: DO NOT SELF HARM. DO NOT SELF HARM. DO NOT SELF HARM. DO NOT SELF HARM. DO NOT SELF HARM. DO NOT SELF HARM. DO NOT SELF HARM. Sign 6, Sign 7, Sign 8, Sign 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.

I fantasize about how one little movement, a tiny one, not too dangerous, could have been mistaken for an accidental scratch, really, how a slight swish, could make it all a little more tolerable.

Sign 14.

*