THE ROOM
19 year old Nishant is worried as he enters the room with his mom, its 6 pm in the evening he has bunked a couple of classes to get to the venue, the sun is almost down but he still has his shades on. He picks up a quiet corner further away from everyone and hopes the earth would swallow him.
58 year old chatty Betty is on the other side. She is very blissful. She picks up conversations with almost everyone in the room. She is very friendly.
35 year old Khushbu is also present. She is busy observing everyone, her so called fellow roommates, the receptionist, the general vibrations and the aura. She is very proud to get to the “room”.
So where actually are they? Where one is worried of being spotted another proud and yet another totally blissful!! Let me give you a brief snippet of their lives.
Nishant has had phenomenal performance in his academics. He has always topped the class. He has got into the best engineering college in the country. He has plans to set up his own start up dot com. He is introvert by nature but in this digital world who cares?! He is very close to his family and loves them dearly.
Off late he worries a lot of the well being of his family members so much so that he checks on them almost every one hour. He believes every single minute that they are going to die. He feels there will be an earthquake or a road accident any minute and his family members will be affected. It took Nishant’s mom a lot of persuation to ask Nishant come along. He is worried on whether he should share this encounter in the room with his girlfriend at all.
Betty is a wonderful lady with a heart of gold. She has a degree in chartered accountancy. She is the apple eyed girl of her father. She was responsible for setting up her paternal family’s business. Albeit she found her prince charming sooner than expected and settled down for domesticity at the tender age of 21.All the same she is very knowledgeable and can have rich stimulating conversations from fashion to politics.
Her problem is she is confused of her identity and family lineage. She believes she comes from royal family and nobody in her world is real. She believes that her mother is a queen who did not want to take care of her as she did not love her and in turn left her with her current foster parents. This of course is her imagination. She is more than happy to come to the room as she believes she is going to meet a queen.
Khushbu is a young dynamic advertising professional. She has everything going right for her. She is blessed to have a supporting family,awesome children and a husband to die for. She is an omnivert if I may coin a behavioral term for her!! Well that means she is approachable and friendly yet does not blend in easily. She does not care what anybody thinks of her and speaks her mind. She is extremely self assured and leaves no stone unturned to fulfil her goals. She has a wide range of capabilities right from dancing, swimming to driving to name a few.
All this suddenly disappears when she left by herself. She is always second guessing herself and is very anxious of being lonely. This has led to endless sleepless nights, frustration ultimately leading to bouts of violence. She feels so wretched at times that she contemplates suicide every second day. One minute she is happy next minute she is sad. She is totally clueless on what she will feel next. This roller coaster of emotions brings her to “the room”. She is glad she made it after a lot of contemplation.
My guess is you have a guess by now (Pun intended) ! Welcome to the therapist’s clinic!! Do Nishant, Betty and Khushbu have a life situation that warrants a visit to the therapist? Are they having any crisis? Is there a financial loss? Is there a loss of a loved one? Is there a severe health failure? Is there anything out of order at all dear readers in their lives?
Now all of situations may well qualify for a psychological health crisis. An issue which exists but is not easily validated. Socially there is a refusal to classify it as a disease. Unlike Blood Pressure, Diabetes, Heart Disease, Immunity Disorder, Cancer and so on and so forth there are no symptoms that the body will give out. Quiet contrarily here is absolutely no physical manifestation at all in all of the above cases.
Technically they are not “crazy”, “mad” or “abnormal”. They are highly capable individuals. Well what separates them a little bit from most is that their thoughts run a tad more than us. Are not all of us a little weird? Do not all of us have some type of anxiety, imagination or lack of confidence. That’s all that’s about it. Would you give them company in the room without being apprehensive about judgment?
It’s a actually a non starter. We all have a taboo about therapist, shrink or in need of a better word clinical psychologist. We are all worried about social acceptance having visited the therapist once. In fact it may even feature in our “dark secrets” that is allowed only the deepest recesses of our minds and hearts. We refuse to share, talk, discuss leave alone consultation.
In fact it is so great an outlaw that we are not able to see our own tell tale signs of psychological inadequacies. We continue to lead a life filled with anxiety, depression, insomnia, addiction, stress needless to say and many more forms of emotional upheavals.
Somehow when we think a psychotherapist we only think of a person who is deranged who is haggard who is not successful who is probably chained who is hostile who is demented the list is endless. They are the ones who get help because their inadequacies are on display.
The ones who really suffer are the ones who cannot see that we don’t have to be psychotic to visit the therapist. We just need to want a better life. We are totally unaware of a much better joyous life that we may have if we care to pay attention to the needs of our mind. For this we need to lift the rose tinted glasses on our perception of “normalcy”. The irony of life is we are abnormally worked up about normalcy!!
We need to revamp our approach to therapy. We need to believe that it’s ok to visit a therapist. Why should we deprive ourselves of a good life? The more we address it, talk about it and discuss it the more we improve our lives.
Last but not the least! No! We don’t have to worry about changing the lives of the ones who are in the room. They are already the winners. We actually are talking about the lives of the ones who don’t visit and appear alright. That very well may be us!!
We all have that one emotion that we cannot handle. We all have that one compulsive disorder that we cannot change. We all have that one fear we cannot get over. It is all about our mind and our soul.
If you dear readers don’t feel up to it don’t wait! Wake up, get going and visit the room. Get a life!
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