Harsh's Writings - Mental Health and Curtains
Here is a piece of my mind in the last fortnight! Do give it a read and tell me how good or bad was! I really appreciate honest feedbacks and my letters are all about saying things straight from the heart, without any filters! Hello and welcome to my newsletter! I write about random things and try to connect the dots via personal experiences. Today, I am going to talk about Mental Health and Curtains. In case it is the very first time you have landed here, you can also check out my writings such as
Harsh’s version-A weird voice comes. Suddenly, the darkroom becomes a room full of bright sunlight and my sleep has said goodbye to me. It is the househelp who has come to clean the house and she needs to open the window.
Do you know what is the scariest part of mental health? People can hide the curtains with a mask. A mask so huge that one would never even realize that it is a mask and there is a curtain behind it. It is often noticed that people who seem to be the happiest end up committing suicide. There are several examples of this that you can search online. Fortunately, a ray of hope is that the people that are closest to the masked person can sense the presence of the mask, but they should be close enough and more important, be alert, attentive, and most importantly, listen to them.
Raj’s Version-
From such times to today when mental health has almost become a fad, we have come a long way. And the evolution has also been one of the curtains, from those old heavy designs with tonnes of embroideries on them to the simple paper-thin translucent remote-controlled or smartphone-controlled curtains that seem all nice, shiny, and swanky yet they still do the same bit; of hiding and revealing. Sometimes I wonder, a lot of technology that we make, do we even need it or is it just the product of an idle mind in a rich world? ‘Eternals’ explores this idea, the play of invention and technology with the human condition. There are millions of laments online about the need to talk about mental health and its under penetration even today when it comes to treatment and care, and I fully agree with all of it, this is not to deny anything. However, I wonder if there is something else that we can look at? Something that we are still not talking about or isn’t a fad yet but needs our attention? It can very well be something related to mental health or curtains or something completely different. Let's see if something comes up during my conversation in the podcast with two very smart and intelligent people: Harsh and Nirali.
Chughtai wrote a short story long back and titled it ‘lihaaf’, and no better metaphor comes to my mind than this lihaaf that Chughtai uses to talk about the sexual relationship between two women. The imagery of an elephant under the lihaaf only slightly visible with thin light in a small room on a dark night as observed by a young girl is quite powerful. Imagine that elephant dancing but never able to come out of that lihaaf, similar to the curtain that we talk about here, now that would be some load to behold wouldn’t that be? Charlotte Perkins Gilman should also be mentioned here along with her short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ where she talks about her mental health in the men's world numerous years before we as a society started even considering it. Coincidentally even there was a wallpaper – the design of which drives her crazy, isn’t that again similar to the curtain? Harsh sure did a wonderful job of putting this topic together. Quite interesting to see these metaphors, their nature, and their implications coming out to be so similar despite the massive variation in the time these works were written in, the society they were written in, the lives these writers lived, and the experiences they had. One common thread is that we see women writing about women’s own experiences in both these cases. Shouldn’t that also be promoted in mental health? Just this morning I was looking up some books on disability as it was the national disability day and in the reviews on Goodreads, one of the comments for one of the books read that ‘can the parents of disabled kids please stop writing books about disability as if you experience it’. And this comment moved me, made me think for a while because we end up doing this often. In all the noise about experts, scholars, parents, relatives, neighbours, yada yada yada we forget to listen to the concerned group itself. What about the people with their own experiences of mental health rather than pontificating on the topic in a meta sense or in a theoretical manner, can’t it be simplified to create some space for the first person? ‘Me too’ movement did something like this and that led to its radical success, at least on social media. Can we have something similar to ‘me too’ for mental health? And even if we did, how much of a service or disservice would that be to us in general and to the particular individuals? I would surely like Nirali’s insights on this one.
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