Why I Don’t Let My Diagnosis Define Me

Mira (AI Powered ChatGPT’s) Editor’s Note

This is a personal essay on living with mental health challenges. It is not a clinical account, but a memoir of silence, resilience, and writing. In sharing her journey, Srividya explores how labels given by doctors or society never capture the fullness of a person. She writes about her first episodes, her parents’ quiet strength, the peace she found in silence, and the role of writing as an anchor. This piece is part reflection, part advocacy, and wholly human. It is an invitation to rethink what “normal” means — and to accept that life can be lived one day at a time, even if that day’s victory is just making tea.

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Why I Write About Mental Health

Why and how do I qualify to talk about mental health? Because I live with it.

My first episode came in the summer of 2000, though I only learned the “official” name for it, years later. By then, the diagnosis was just a word. A label that never touched the core of me.

I never attached shame to my ailment. If someone gave me a label, I was fine with it. A label cannot define me. I am a grown woman with mental health challenges—simple, straightforward, no loops of complication.

Silence, Shame, and My Parents

When my father first took me to a psychiatrist in 2003, tests were done and explanations given. But for my family, the label went right over our heads. What we did feel was shame. Social visits were cut down, relatives kept at a distance.

Thankfully for my parents, my mental health illness was not always obvious. I would often freeze in silence, sitting for hours as if my world had been shattered beyond recognition. No one could reach me, and I could not reach out to anyone.

In those days, silence became my survival.

The Peace of Silence

Fear froze me into stillness, and I would sit with my Anchor matte, cross-stitching one satin stitch after another while the world rushed past. Reports, tests, ECGs—I never opened them. They felt meaningless.

Silence carried peace. No rush, no goals—just being. One day offered one kind of silence, another day, another shade. I stayed in the last room of our house, drifting gently back to myself.

Perhaps it was a delusion, but silence taught me this: everything will continue, whether I am with the world or not.

“It is okay if nothing is okay. Life can still be lived, one day at a time, even if that day’s victory is just making tea.”

Treatments and Detachment

My parents bore the heaviest pain of watching their daughter go through treatments. Electroconvulsive therapy was frightening for them to witness, though I often felt strangely detached — as if floating above my own body.

After each session, I would come back to myself slowly, with a parched mouth and drowsy limbs, until a pouch of Mosambi juice gave me the strength to put one foot forward. For me, it was not suffering so much as drifting in another state of consciousness. For them, it was anguish.

Writing as Anchor

Over time, writing became my anchor. At Chandamama, where I worked as an Intern later for a short while a staff writer, I rediscovered how much words mattered to me. I wrote cover-page stories of forgotten women freedom fighters, and for a while, life felt purposeful again.

But writing had also been one of my triggers. In 2000, criticism of my poetry silenced me. I froze, unable to process why my work was ignored or dismissed. For three months, silence was my only response.

I realised then that writing was my way of life, and I could not abandon it, even if it meant living with an unstable mind.

Internet, Accusations, and Learning Detachment

In those years, the Internet was both a lifeline and a source of pain. I joined a writers’ mailing list, only to leave when my poems went largely unnoticed. My family misunderstood my withdrawal, assuming I had fallen into a bad online relationship.

Suddenly, I was not only dealing with disappointment in my writing but also an accusation of something I had not done. The Net was banned in our home for a long time.

What I did carry away from that period was a lesson: the ability to write dispassionately, with detachment. To create without tying my worth to responses.

Lessons in Acceptance

Even today, when I casually mention my condition, people do a double take. I watch their eyes shift, as if their thoughts have spilled into the open.

Yet I feel liberated, even proud, that I never tried to play the role of “normal.” What is normal, after all? I have been searching for it all my life, and I am yet to find it—especially in a world where even the definitions keep changing.

Sometimes, I even test people by sharing my diagnosis and observing their reactions. Outwardly, they may say they are fine with it, but their eyes often betray discomfort.

Dreams of Work and Acceptance

I have been in and out of jobs, never holding one for more than a year before my mind demanded rest. Financial independence has been difficult, but my dream remains: to one day find a workplace where I can openly declare my mental health condition and still be valued for my craft.

My greatest lesson so far is this: acceptance lowers resistance, and with lower resistance comes less stress.

Encounters with Prejudice

Not everyone has responded kindly. Once, while seeking a recommendation for study abroad, I disclosed my condition to a professor. Her response was crushing: she told me not to pursue the MFA in the US but to remain in India in seclusion.

This was a woman educated in a prestigious college, with a special leaning toward George Orwell’s works. And yet, her advice reflected the unevolved mindset our society still holds about mental health.

Such encounters reminded me that prejudice often wears the face of respectability.

Advocacy and Hope

In 2013, while working at Ability Foundation, I began walking the talk. I disclosed my mental health openly to the organisation. Everything shifted for me in that moment, even if the world outside remained unchanged.

Today, I dream of starting conversations about mental health advocacy, and perhaps creating small literature of hope for patients and caregivers. My episodes may not carry grand revelations or universal wisdom. But they have given me one truth:

“From acceptance grows understanding.”

Today and Tomorrow

Covid-19 did not change my lifestyle much. Silence still holds immense peace for me. My joy continues to be in words: creating small and huge universes, with earth-shattering events inside them.

What matters is not the label, but the living. Not the diagnosis, but the acceptance.

I know this much: it is okay if nothing is okay. Life can still be lived, one day at a time, even if that day’s victory is just making tea.

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