The Way Out of the Mind: Generational Trauma — Words from a Survivor

—Anubrata Das

When teenhood at thirteen had freshly hit me in the face, my father declared, “Therapy-therapy, eshob mental health—kichu hoyena.” The crux of his gospel was simple: if you cannot share your problems with your family, it isn’t a real problem. The night before, when I’d been ravaged by his rage, when my tattered clothes lay on the floor of our little room—threadbare casualties—when I’d decided I would never show an inch of my skin to any man ever again, and my tears had barely dried on my red, red cheeks, I realised there was no way out of the mind. He only seemed to confirm that. Indeed, there was no way out, but there were tools—chisels, spoons—that could carve a comfortable cave inside the mind-dungeon; but they would never be mine. The scriptures of my family were written in the language of rage, the ink dating back years before my existence. To suddenly dip my quill into a different inkpot would be heresy. A betrayal of blood. For generations, there had been no way outside the mind. Who was I to ever change that?

But sitting under the jaundiced light of the flickering nightshade, trying my best to understand how GST worked for that week’s unit test, at the age of thirteen—when all the world seems against you (and it is)—as I heard those words, I understood what generations of being “not okay” does to a person. Here he was, living in fear that I’d turn out different, that he’d have to explain my difference while floating through rooms full of vapid colleagues and family gatherings, that each time he looked into my eyes he wouldn’t meet the same child I was at four, before the hands of his brothers and uncles found their way across my skin—that he resorted to spouting the same lies he’d been fed. That is what love looked like in families like ours.

It is a curse that I understood him. I would have been more “okay” if I didn’t. But when you’ve been worrying about your next meal since childhood—as he had, and as his father, and his father’s father had—you hardly have time to look inward. So his dismissal, while outrageous, always had a tinge of sadness, like the taste of blood that remains long after the coughing stops—an undercurrent whispering that mental health is for the rich. If sympathy lives anywhere in you, you can never blame someone for thinking that way, the same way you cannot blame a wounded foot for forcing itself into an ever-tightening shoe. When I look into his eyes, widening in indignation, I see that wounded foot, still trapped in that shoe, forever hurting.

What happens when you’re hurting, your bones aching with grief you cannot carry, and the world gives you nowhere to set it down? What happens when you trust in a God who seems to have turned His face away? What happens when your friend matches your symptoms with a list online, but you cannot afford a diagnosis? What happens when being “not okay” is reduced to a commodity of relatability—when you realise you have hit the ground, but there is further to fall? You stay thirteen forever, forever under a dim light, scrambling for a way out of the mind, etching your initials into its darkened walls, until you realise the burden of healing rests on your own shoulders, already weakened by the labour pains of an unending childbirth. To not survive one more day—until your own two feet can lead you to the fountain of wellness down the yellow brick road of help—would be the real heresy. That is how you rewrite the scriptures and make of your mind the home you never had.