By Writt Chakroborty

We often come across some people who are lost in their own world. They seem to be absent-minded whenever you talk to them.-” you pay no heed to what I say!”The person is often seen to have been rebuked by his/her peers. If we peep through the streak of thoughts that is going on inside him/her, we will understand his/her state of mind. The person in question may have been suffering from anxiety. The most bizarre thing about these persons is it can be imaginary anxiety, that is to say, the situation around which his/her anxiety stems from might be imaginary, as it never happened or is never likely to happen. In this case, the person needs to vent his thoughts to someone but they choose to remain silent because others usually laugh off the issue and label the victim with terms like ‘ eccentric’, ‘abnormal’ and other derogatory terms. While anxiety is a curable disease but the disease of intimidating others and deriving pleasure out of it has no cure because the abuser’s personality has been shaped by such malice. However, the victim of anxiety, in fear of getting socially ostracized, often remains silent about his/her mental ailment which even intensifies the problem.

Am I sounding like a psychologist?- No! I am a student of literature. Literature often deals with the human mind and in order to understand the human mind, one has to connect his/her emotions to the character in a text. Above all, I myself am an emotional person and suffered from anxiety and panic attacks for no reason! As a person, you must have a goal in your life. We all have goals in our lives. We have a purpose we live for. But as soon as anxiety devastates our inner peace, that most-cherished goal seems to be far from our reach! For no obvious reason, we foresee the end of our life and sometimes we start looking down upon ourselves and get panic-stricken for the future of our family members as to what they would do if we are in a grave problem? Sometimes we watch a movie, where, suppose, the protagonist has died at the end of the film. We start relating ourselves to that character. We start seeing the condition of our own family in the consecutive events so prudently scripted by the film director. We start living in a parallel world. The victim cries silently lest he should open himself up to the judgment of the world because it is easy to attach a tag of judgment on someone rather than analyzing what that person is going through. 

However, when anxiety becomes chronic, the victim is often advised to take medicine which is no cure from anxiety, rather makes one’s nerves numb. So, it is better for everyone to speak out. There is a beautiful life beyond judgment, we just have to go beyond that and make the victim believe that a beautiful life is awaiting us. We need to talk to our parents, who will stick to our side regardless of any situation. In the age of smartphones, we update the status on Fathers’ Day or Mothers’ Day with big captions on social media, conveying our love and respect to our parents. But in reality, our parents, who are probably sitting just next to us in person, are dying to hear from us that we love them so much! But we are busy updating a status.

This is not the end of the world. We always have at least one person in our lives who truly cares for us. So, other than opening ourselves to the ridicules of this judgemental world, we should always take recourse to that person who might be a help. Especially in case of imaginary anxiety, we often see some insensible people cracking jokes on the victim, as if (s)he has crossed the ultimate boundary of saneness set by this judgemental world, unable to distinguish abuse from banter. We all are such personalities who aspire to become someone better. We try hard to get a better version of ourselves. We should never let anxiety get the better of our fighting spirit and deter us from being what we live for! It’s not YOU! You’re not alone! It’s all-inclusive WE and deep down we all are warriors and in the words of Confucius,
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”