I finally read ‘I’ve Never Been (Un)Happier’ and I have Never Been Happier!
(Sorry for the tongue twister-like title)
Shaheen Bhatt’s I’ve Never Been (Un)Happier is honest, straightforward and an eye opener. It’s a start if you want to make yourself comfortable about talking about mental health because that’s what she perfectly encourages you to do. The book balances between her personal experience with depression and what little the world knows about the monster depression really is. I find her brave- not for sharing her story but sharing her story knowing who she is. In India, we believe that celebrities are not entitled to a private life and we love gossiping about their lives like we love gossiping about the lives of our neighbors and relatives. Not an inch of difference. The taboo around mental health just makes it worse. We aren’t supposed to talk about it like we aren’t supposed to take Voldemort’s name. Oops, just did it.
In the foreword, Mahesh Bhatt writes that knowing Shaheen understands what he shares with her meant that she’s suffering too and what a heartbreak that was for him. What a tragedy it is to be not understood and yet a greater one to be understood, isn’t it? This is also why when we tell people who are upset that others have it worse, it doesn’t really make them feel better. It’s one of the most puzzling ways of talking about gratitude.
Mental health is widely misunderstood, not only because we lack conversations around it but also because the research in the field is actually fairly limited due to the vast field of study: every heart, every brain, every feeling so different from each other. There are no fixed/standard protocols that can be followed as compared to physical ailments which relatively have solutions available and where there’s mostly a way to establish an effect-cause relationship. However, mental health can screw up your physical health equally which is something we don’t talk about much either. So though we have started a conversation, there’s so much, as Shaheen puts it, ‘oversharing’ still left. Sometimes, it’s absurd that even after so many centuries of our existence, how little importance we give to taking care of ourselves in ways which are not materialistic, not tangent.
But what I really wonder is how much we are learning from our experiences and how much are we willing to change. In the last few years that we all have started sharing what has bothered us while growing up, what has affected our mental health adversely, it’s mostly the standards and norms set by the society that are to be blamed. We all hate the constant judging of our choices, of our bodies, of our intellect, of our existence. And since we all happen to be the victims of society, I wonder if we are also going to turn into a society that we hate so deeply or if we are going to change, if we are going to try and make sure that the coming generations do not feel the same about the society they’d be a part of. Do we break the cycle? Will we break the cycle? I hope we do.
Nevertheless, here are my takeaways from the book! :)
