It is so easy for us as outsiders to brand someone with a mental illness as weak, mad, or many more things like that. But, have we ever thought a second before giving a label, how it must be feeling to undergo things like a mental health issue? Most of us cannot even think of it because we don’t know much in the first place!
Trying to see the world through the eyes of a person struggling with their mental health is not even a distant thought for a lot among us because we never pay enough attention to mental health to be able to think of its illness.
I’ve Never Been (Un)Happier by Shaheen Bhatt does just that to its readers – shows the world through the eyes of a person battling with depression.
This book is the account on the journey of the author from her childhood and how she developed and fought with a monster called depression from her early teens to almost her entire adult life.
Shaheen writes that she hails from a film family, was a happy and outgoing as a child and has had a comfortable upper-middle-class upbringing in her life. This just reiterates the fact that mental illness does not discriminate between rich or poor and can happen to anyone irrespective of all such factors.
She rationally explains parts of her life and it feels so natural like it’s our own! Her story is very relatable as she describes how she also had to battle body image issues as a kid like so many of them out there. For her, there was no one particular factor that triggered the issue.
She says…” I think the reason depression is so misunderstood is that there is no truly adequate way to relay what it feels like.” And continues to describe her ordeals so meticulously and exactly. It is mind-boggling!
The author has very accurately penned down even the finest details of the sadness and emptiness a person goes through in a problem like hers and how to a normal person it would never occur that those feelings could be indicating an ailing mind.
For any person who is or is not aware as much about mental health and depression, her narration can just bring a world of a difference in how we perceive them. Reading it would leave us wondering if we can ever imagine how dark life can get when battling with an issue like depression. It is a revelation.
To me, it felt like we all have experienced those feelings although at far lesser magnitudes at one point or the other in our lives and it feels so amazing to see that someone has articulated all those things for us that we did not know how to express!
Moving further, she writes about her emotional roller coaster ride and how she tried to cope with it at different stages in life. She illustrates a beautiful image of how society has tricked us into believing so many things without actually us paying much attention to them.
She goes on to talk about how she then asked for help and how it has helped her move on in life. From how language can sometimes just fail us in communicating our emotions to realizing the fact that pain is a better teacher than happiness there are so many important lessons that each one of us can learn from her story. It is inspiring to read when she writes that this painful experience has taught her so much. She fought like a true warrior each day to progress into the next.
I can just keep going on and on about how much we can learn from it and how many things we open our eyes to while reading the book and it would only be less.
I promise it will be such an enlightening experience to read through her journey and I feel anyone must read something like this to get a new insight into life.
Finally, I assure you that this book is a fulfilling read and you will surely take away more from it than you can think of…so pick this book up as early as you can to indulge in a much-needed thought-provoking traverse!
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