When I got diagnosed, I was trying, and I'm still trying, to put words to what I'm feeling.
I have depression, I have anxiety, and I have panic disorder.
Having to, you know, go and tell someone that I have depression, trying to explain it to
someone is so hard.
Where I come from, in Bombay, mental health is not really recognized.
It's recognized by like point something percentage of the population.
It's just not a thing, so anxiety is just not a thing.
Why are you anxious?
There's nothing to be anxious about?
This is a safe place, you're fine.
Stop it, you're being stupid. Snap out of it.
And coming from a country where you feel like that, you therefore have a lot of trouble
communicating emotions regarding mental health to people.
I am studying psychology, so I can throw out symptoms of anxiety, I can throw out symptoms
of depression and mood disorder.
But the DSM-5 cannot fully give words to what I'm feeling.
But art is different.
Art transcends all those boundaries that other things put up.
And I've been trying to write about this, and I could not.
And because I could not write about it, I started trying to find people who did write
about this stuff, which is when I stumbled on this poem.
And it helped.
Said the Poet to the Analyst by Anne Sexton.
My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;
as if words were counted like dead bees in
the attic,
unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.
I must always forget how one word is able to pick
out another, to manner another, until I have got
something I might have said… but I did not.
Your business is watching my words. But I
admit nothing. I work with my best, for instance,
when I can write my praise for a nickel machine,
that one night in Nevada: telling how the magic jackpot
came clacking three bells out, over the lucky screen.
But if you should say this is something it
is not,
then I grow weak, remembering how my hands felt funny
and ridiculous and crowded with all the believing money.
Though the poem is a conversation between a psychologist and a patient, when I read
it, I did not see it as the poet addressing a mental health professional.
It was more like struggling to get across to someone they care about.
Even now, talking to my parents about it, being able to tell my mom that I had a really
bad day, it's so hard coming from where I have.
And this poem does exactly that. It turns and it gives you the words.
I was able to start talking to my mom about it.
And she struggled with it because you don't ever want to hear that there's something wrong
with your child, and especially when it's something that you cannot touch and fix.
And she struggled with that, and I struggled with it as well, getting diagnosed.
But, just being able to tell her about it, being able to talk about that, it's really
nice.