No one will know about my family’s struggle with mental illness because no one will talk about it. Generations have lost this knowledge and now I have only my mother’s half-hearted attempts at storytelling to help me understand my own mind. A slim recount of my grandmother’s breakdown and other such stories. God forbid I repeat them here. It’s not the fault of my family, so I don’t say this with anger. Secrets are expectations passed down over silent years.
My first experience with anxiety was throwing up before preschool and in my kindergarten class. I’ve thrown up at every school I’ve been to in my life so far, including university. Each time it happened I told myself I must have an illness, a physical one, because anything else meant I could not be saved. My mother took me to a psychologist when I was around eight years old because my stomach aches were constant. I was passive then, as I can sometimes be now, silent and spacey before I learned the term “dissociation.” The doctor was the kind who kept Rorschach blots on her desks. She asked my mother if I had a fear of my parents dying, to which my mother shook a confused head. Then she explained I had anxiety and I would probably grow out of it, like most kids do.
In my Muslim family, prayer seemed like the only solution. For years, I struggled with selective mutism and a racing heartbeat that I prayed would slow down before I went to sleep. “Oh Allah, please let me sleep well tonight. Please make my heart beat slower.” My selective mutism deemed me shamefaced to my grandparents, aunts…
