Returning home to Kerala just in time to be locked indoors with the rest of the country, I've spent my days scrolling through headlines ranging from the horrifying to the tragic. Somehow, none felt more personally jolting than the death of 'Sushant Singh Rajput'. The national uproar that followed, loud and righteous as it was, meant the realities of mental health got lost in a cross-fire of misinformation.

Depression and I are old friends. She's been my most loyal companion for nearly three decades. I've forgotten a time before she and I shared a home, a heart, and a brain. But we don't have the healthiest of relationships, she and I. How could we after the multiple occasions on which she's tried to kill me, and I was seconds away from letting her? I doubt she's thrilled that I attempt to medicate her out of existence every day. Or beg, plead, kick, SCREAM for her to leave me alone. To leave me in peace. At least for a day. A week, if she's feeling generous. Sometimes she obliges. But we both know it can't last. She has nowhere to go. She lives within me. In my head. In my heart. In my home. She's lived there so long I don't know what a me without her would look like. Act like. Sound like.

There's a Lost Draft Version of me out there somewhere in an alternate reality. A version of me that never met Depression. A version of me that never materialised because I did. I'd like to meet that girl. To see whether she's all the things I wish I were, but am not capable of being. To see whether she's someone who carried the weight of her early potential and wore it well. To see whether she managed to do something with her life that makes her family proud. To see whether she managed to do anything with her life at all. Did she fall in love? Get married? Have children? A prolific career? She's fantasy. I dream about her. Sometimes I pretend I AM her. She's the personality I clumsily attempt to project to the world.

The girl who isn't climbing a sheer cliff face, always moments from falling, while everyone around her walks effortlessly on flat ground. The girl who doesn't live in her bedroom in an endless feedback loop of sleep and wakefulness. The girl who doesn't expend her reserves of emotional energy brushing her teeth or having a bath. The girl who doesn't forget to eat. The girl who doesn't have to hide panic attacks and crying fits in public. The girl who DAZZLES people. I've never been a dazzler. I imagine it's nice. That's all I can do. Imagine. Imagine the Me That Almost Was.

That's what depression does to you. It eats away at anything and everything about you that makes you you, until there's more of IT left than whoever you used to be. It strips you of what makes you a person, until you' re barely a person at all.

There's nothing linear about an existence with this illness for company. It's not a noble struggle before the Happily Ever After. It's messy, complicated, and PHYSICALLY painful. You can reach the summit one day only to find yourself at the bottom of the logic to it. To live with it is to watch yourself descend into chaos and dysfunction with nothing more than a dazed, apathetic resignation.

For a long time I internalised the extent of my descent in some bizarre attempt to protect my parents from the knowledge of how close they came to losing me. Hadn't my aimless existence hurt them enough without further assistance? After all, I didn't want to die, I retionalised. I just wished I didn't exist. Suicide ideation or the act itself is rarely about weakness of mind or escapism. It's about collapsing under the exhaustion of simply existing. When existence becomes agony and torment, the only logical solution you can muster is not to exist.

We don't talk about mental health nearly enough in the South Asian community. It's developed from a taboo, to a joke, to catnip for tabloids. That needs to change. If you're reading this, I hope you can find some solace in knowing I'm not a warrior or a superhero. I'm almost ridiculously human. It's taken anti-depressants for me to achieve some semblance of emotional stability. For others, it might be therapy. Never let your brain convenience you that your experience doesn't "matter" enough to seek help. You matter BECAUSE you exist. I continue to survive. To LIVE. I promise you that you can, too.