Safe Space

During Lunar new year of 2021 I had gone out with my then friends to celebrate. In Singapore it’s an entire week of festivities, an entire week chalked up as an anomaly filled with people taking leave and holidays.

We were discussing restaurant options. I distinctly remember being with the gaslighter on a day out. I do not remember which mall we were in, I don’t know if it was the day when they told me, “it is a rare disorder and you have it”, laughing to themselves at the joke that only they understood.

During the discussion on WhatsApp I asked if I could request for a restaurant that did not carry Indian cuisine. It is hard for me to swallow anything that is sharp or spicy in flavours. Indian food in Singapore is imbalanced and sharp. As an Indian it was perhaps my greatest plight that I was unable to consume Indian food during the worst of Achalasia.

They had told me that it was okay and even put the suggestion out there themselves. I felt so validated, safe even.

Then the day came and we went to an Indian restaurant. I was uncomfortable to ask, raise the agreement that we had reached on the chat. I felt betrayed by the person I considered closest at that moment in time (they used to call me late at night to clarify course material, I do not pick up the phone for just anyone, especially because my nights had been claimed by oesophageal spasms). I eventually, albeit jokingly, raised the topic, they had replied with, “how can I explain to them an Indian girl cannot eat Indian food.”

The racism aside, I was stunned, and humiliated. The humiliation in this context is harder to explain. I thought I was safe with them, I thought I could be vulnerable and ask for a concession like going to a different restaurant. Them saying that reminded me that I wasn’t, safe or allowed to ask for concessions of any kind.

At that moment I laughed off the micro-aggression. I had been through worse. This would not break me.

I didn’t eat that night, had a few bites here and there from another person’s plate. Another friend had asked me about my condition, or maybe I began explaining, I don’t remember. The gaslighter had very obviously interrupted and changed the subject just when I went to answer a question.

That action, that specific action fractured something in me. I don’t think it was ever repaired, or it will ever repair.

During April of 2021 we had a 3000 word essay submission. I ask around about everyone’s well being throughout the course of submissions and assessments. We are all high-strung, its good to make sure that we have each other’s back.

I had asked the gaslighter, who by then I noticed was pulling away from me. It was obvious in the way they interacted with me, refused to hang out with me, brushed me off, ignored me in front of everyone, it was obvious. I was expecting the worst, I just didn’t expect the worst to be the way it was.

I had asked about their well being and their essay status multiple times during the week. One day I asked them three times during the same day.

A little context over here, brain fog is a beast, a bloody bitch. When I am going through brain fog I can forget the names of the people that are closest to me, details of my own artworks that are always at the tips of my fingers. I can forget everything, even my own name. The span of attention is barely a few seconds. You would be walking from one part of the room to another and you would just forget why or how and if you should be doing the physical activity at all.

I had asked and they, in a voice louder than normal, had proclaimed that I asked too many times already. That they were frustrated with me asking them, enquiring after their well being.

I understand their perspective, I would be frustrated too if I had to deal with a person in brain fog without the knowledge that they are prone to having brain fog. It’s just… I thought I would be safe with them, that the harsh edges of the world would be softer in my interactions with them because they were the first classmate that I told about my chronic illness. The first classmate that I had dinner with after one and half year of hiding. Granted they were also the one who said, “I feel bad every time you waste food”, multiple times. Who also said, “I bet she cannot finish it”.

I should have known better but I was already in the emotional scarcity mentality.

By this time Normal bodies had been forming in my mind. In its infancy it was just instagram stories that I posted on my private art account. Stories with short snippets of my experiences, things that I considered painful, hurtful. Things that made me feel less than as a person: the micro-aggressions, insensitivity, my pain, my fears, anger, frustration at myself and the world. I had turned to being brutally, painfully vulnerable about all of it.

It was the very beginning of Normal Bodies. At a time when I was still trying to figure out what could become of it.

It was the end of the semester when this instance happened, a conversation with someone that I deeply love to this day. They had told me that the people whom I had the above conversations with were upset that I was posting these stuff. They had told me that I should consider making another instagram account where these people did not interact with the content on that account to showcase this new, still in its infancy, artwork/art experiment that I was trying out.

At that moment I was astounded. A part of me wanted to throw a tantrum over me not having the freedom to experiment on my own instagram account. Needing to be considerate of the feelings of people whom I made sure to keep completely and thoroughly anonymous. The anonymity of these people was something that mattered deeply to me. I might have been hurt by them, however I was incapable and staunch in my resolve to not perpetuate an environment of hurt around us.

Another part of me was overcome with this fathomless rage. How dare they, how very dare they.

I was angry at them but never hated them, even after the event preceding ‘The Gaslighter’ and events that occurred during ‘The Lecturer’. They were still people I admired, appreciated, enjoyed. I just no more was capable of being anywhere close to them. A profound emotional pain had begun to envelop my mind if I was ever in their vicinity. Something crushing, humiliating. I hated myself for believing in them, not knowing better, for wanting friends, companions, some sort of emotional supports. I despised myself for needing a crutch in the form of humans.

By the time I had started posting these conversations we had been far too fractured. I didn’t care, or maybe I did. It’s a little hazy.

And maybe then I had even begun to abhor one person’s existence in very specific (the gaslighter, I was unsure then but I am not anymore, I was used, its hard to deny that anymore, how much ever my pride won’t let me). They were a narcissistic manipulator and it showed. There were instances when they had asked others to have conversations with me, conversations that sounded like “they only hope for you to better acclimatise into normal society”, “they told me that you were over reacting and it sounds like that from what I have heard from them about the situation”.

The instagram stories might have even been a way to lash out at them, all of them. To tell the world that I was hurt first and still hurting, how dare they make it about them. How dare they take away the one thing I had left with me, my work ethic that I was so very proud of, the only thing that was left of me that I was proud of.

My friend’s suggestion to make a new instagram id for my account of the events that took place, hurt me, deeply. I think I cried a lot about that for days. I was paralysed. I didn’t know how to communicate my pain and anger at the very suggestion. I didn’t know how I wanted to communicate the fact that it just about killed me to be placed second to these people all over again.

After the presentation of our Final Year Project, at the very end of the day, just before the briefing, I had sat down with this friend of mine and told them how I felt. About how I felt like my feelings and emotions were considered less important than theirs when they suggested I make a new instagram account. How it felt like my story didn’t matter. I felt like I didn’t matter, my pain or suffering didn’t matter at all.

I was terrified of having this conversation, horrified at the possible outcomes. By that time I had trained my brain to expect the worst, not hope for anything more than the worst.

When they had apologised and hugged me, I felt something return to me. A kind of release. A kind of… I don’t quite know. It was probably the most healing tenderness I felt spreading through my body during those times.

I had thought that my instagram account was my safe space. I had cultivated it in such a way, having boundaries that were strict. Granted during those times my ability to enforce those boundaries were wobbly at best. I was unsure of myself, terribly incapable of seeing myself as anything worthy. It felt like I deserved the bad things that were happening. I still do feel that way on some days.

It is always hard to accurately judge who might hurt you, tear into you, crush you when you are a non-able bodied person. The trust that you place into someone can be the thing that blooms into a ginormous tree that gives shade to many, or it could be the thing that sucks dry everything and everyone around them to nurture itself.

The remarks in the pictures above were by people I trusted. They were some of the very first whom I was vulnerable with about my chronic illness out of my own volition and not because the circumstance necessitated it.

In the beginning I laughed, I didn’t know how to communicate my discomfort or hurt. It seemed like the easiest option. A choice that would lead to my unhappiness, something that would make me more prone to putting scraps of kindness and affection on the pedestal they did not deserve to be put on.

When I was sharing my chronic illness, my emotions surrounding what I had experienced, someone had asked me, “aren’t you drawing a line by saying us and them, someone who has chronic illness and someone who does not? Isn’t this line of us and them discriminatory in its own manner? How do you expect people to understand when you draw that line?” I am para-phrasing of course.

The line of enquiry surprised and silenced me. Since then I have thought of and formulated a reply.

There is an ‘us’ and ‘them’, there is an othering that does happen when people who are non-able bodied speak about their issues, the discrimination they face, the insensitivity and the micro aggressions. The othering is structural. The othering is the crux of how human society is built. This society that we are a part of is not made for humans who suffer from aches and pains. This society and its toxic work culture is not made for people who are forced to be abundantly aware of their body’s short comings.

People who are non-able bodied were pushed into the background, their histories eroded. The representation surrounding people who are non-able bodied in media of any kind is abysmally lacking. And if there is any sort of representation, they fall into stereotypical categories, othering non-able bodied people all over again. The current media has a kind of distorted representation that is presented and forced as the objective truth, coercing and gaslighting non-able bodied people into questioning their own reality.

When I was diagnosed with Type- III Achalasia Cardia, I desperately searched for people with chronic illnesses in media, representation of any kind to believe that I could have that sort of ambition, that I could achieve that in my life. But I found very few, almost none.

The othering has been present in society for a very long time. However the person who gets to call out this othering, complain, speak about and throw tantrums about are non-able bodied people, not an able bodied person because they have basked in the privilege for far too long. They don’t even understand the privilege of being able to trust their body the way they do.

When non-able bodied people do find a space to speak, it is often never safe enough.