Poetry of the blues

Silence is not always golden, and especially when it is time to address one of the most pressing issues of our times — depression and the stigmas associated with it. Breaking the silence around it, Delhi University student Nandita Kochar, 21, decided to pen a poem If Depression Were A Boy I Dated. The poem that’s going viral personifies depression as an abusive boyfriend and aims at making the issue more visible and more real. In her poem, she says:

Dear Depression, Some days I wish you were a delicious gentleman I had met at the bar on a Sunday night; maybe then the high-pitched voices of my girlfriends would have surrounded your name the next morning, and not the silence that makes one’s stomach cringe…

Explaining the whole idea behind this powerful poem, the Miranda House girl says, “While for some it is hormonal, it was suicidal for me. I would go on to the Internet, as there weren’t many people to whom I could talk about it. The people who haven’t been through depression will often compare it to sadness or a phase where your appetite goes down, you recede into your shell and you’ll be fine soon. Depression actually is when it takes a plunge on your confidence, and there are thoughts where you feel like you don’t want to exist anymore and there is a loss of appetite. People from all over the world have been writing to me on how they have been through the same phase and the same symptoms.”

She adds, “My encounter with depression started this March. In the initial few days, it was in suicidal stage. I couldn’t talk to anyone about the same; the only person I could talk to was my therapist, and that was just one session a week and that too for just an hour! I would go to the Internet and seek answers. The feeling that you want to have is that you are not the only one who is going through this phase or there is nothing monster-like about depression, and it is absolutely human to have such feelings. There was no space to talk about it or to express my feelings. I came across some anonymous pages on social media that instead of pulling me out of the situation suggested suicide as an option. So I didn’t know where to go and whom to talk to about it. This is what prompted me to talk about it on a platform that is open and understands an issue. Summarising that whole mental process and making it relatable to people in such a short poem was challenging.”

Sharing why she decided to personify it as an abusive boyfriend, Nandita says, “Earlier I was planning to write a letter to my therapist about depression and my encounter with it. But depression as an idea appears quite vague and abstract to someone who hasn’t been through it; it is an idea, a thought in your head, so it is difficult to make someone understand it. So I thought of personifying it by comparing it to an abusive boyfriend, and make it more real and easy to visualise.”

Of late, several Bollywood celebs including the likes of Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt, Shama Sikander, have openly shared their experiences of battling depression. Nandita feels when a person with a massive fan following chooses to talk about it, it helps in breaking taboos and spreads awareness. She says, “There have been several celebs who battled mental disorders and came out like a rockstar. Many of us suffer from Impostor syndrome, where we live under the persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud; we constantly feel that people around us are all happy and have no suffering in their lives.We are aware of our behaviour constantly, but what we see of others on social media is what we perceive to be true, like the lives of celebs and the glamour that surrounds them. That’s the reason paparazzi content sells so well, as a common man can actually relate to him/her when there is news of celebs dating someone or undergoing a break-up phase. For instance, when Deepika Padukone, whom we think of as such a perfect body,  came out in public, she felt so much more real. These stories show that depression can affect anyone. ”