Ceilings are cliffs

“It’s going to be okay Navya, it was never your fault.The world is not going to change for you. You cannot expect them to have the same heart as yours. Breathe, just breathe!”

I was sixteen when I felt it for the first time.

Death.

I remember lying numb on my bed, my eyes fixed to the white ceiling above as I whimpered these sentences hoping that someone would hear me.

I have no clue what literal death is like by any stretch, but at that time, I felt exactly what my sixteen-year-old self thought death would feel like. Dark and hauntingly peaceful. I could feel my mind slowly disconnecting from the world with its revolution gradually coming to a pause.

I spent the following night colouring the white ceiling with shades of grey as I cried pretending that its able to hear me. My ceiling was the primary witness of the most damaged version of myself I have ever known.That was the first time when I had experienced betrayal. However, the hurt didn’t solely root from betrayal. It came up from not being heard, from a sheer abundance of helplessness. The realisation that nobody in the world would want to hear about the moments when I feel the most dead unless it’s a part of a success story.

On that day, I learnt how immensely the world is capable of damaging a woman.

On that day, for the first time my anxiety emerged from my existence.

I was afraid of life.

Dear reader, you must be wondering what happened that day. What kind of betrayal did I go through that left me feeling so dehumanised?

But why does it matter? Why do you want to know? I expressed how sharp the knife in my back was as poetically as possible. Why is that not enough for you to empathise with me?

It is a human tendency to want to know the reasons why someone is hurting so that we can measure the intensity of their pain based on how much we can relate to them.

“Oh! you have been through all that? I am so sorry!”

“Oh! that is all you have been through? You are overreacting.”

After that day, I spent many days contemplating about all those times when I was mocked for being too gullible and I hated myself for it. I know I wasn’t gullible, I just didn’t know how to betray people. At that time, the very idea of letting people down became the new definition of intelligence for me.

A month passed, with me trying to look like that normal teenage girl going to school and acing her examinations. It took everything in me not to look like an adolescent with a stream of emotions inside continuously trying to break its way out. I couldn’t show people because even though I was too innocent to understand how the world works, I somehow knew that all they are going to do is make a list of things that are wrong with me. After all, that is what the world does to young girls. They are expected to be mature enough to read a person’s bad intentions from their face but taught to keep quiet during intellectual discussions because apparently, they don’t know enough. They are burdened with boundless expectations from such a young age but are not supposed to expect anything back.

Since then, it seemed like I had grown a radar underneath my skin that screamed ferociously every time I saw a boy get away from the same actions girls are held accountable for. I realised how I have to crush myself under the pressure of being excellent for people to listen to me because if a young girl is not brilliant, they presume that she is born to be owned by a man.

So, I worked excessively hard for my grades along with building my writing and speaking skills. Not only did I want to be brilliant but also I wanted to earn that rebellion to speak for myself and all those young girls who have been forced to wear a similar facade. I aimed to speak it out loud without having others brush my feminine voice away.

Now that I look back to those years, I recognise that I had hit the middle of a phase. A phase where my brokenness helped me thrive and the world started unravelling layer by layer. A phase characterised by the journey to the edge of life. The point from where we can jump from the cliff, wave goodbye to our life forever and peacefully dive into the warm waters of death.

However, the moment we decide to jump from the edge, life pulls us back during which we feel death and life simultaneously coupled with an excruciating amount of pain that comes when we become aware of the darkness we had been taught to overlook. I call this phase by the name “Brown.”

As vulnerable living beings, sometimes we all are scared of living because no creature in the universe is as capable of betrayal as life. Life continuously pushes us to the verge of death only to pull us back and in the process, another layer of the world is stripped off. While we metaphorically equate our inner struggles with death, we continue to mistake the rock bottoms for our graves.

Death, on the other hand, doesn’t play games. It keeps it so real that it is incapable of not being peacefully attractive. The ceiling above my bed was the cliff for me.

I am genuinely aware that my story is not a success story, not even close. But I have stood on the same edge, I have had the same urge to jump and I have dealt with the frustration of being pulled back. We all have. I have learnt the brutal truth that no matter how peaceful death seems, life will always know us better than death ever can.

In the end, when we are lying on our deathbeds, maybe then we finally get to see the last layer burning off to reveal a world exactly as we wanted it to be: real, raw and beautiful. Who knows it might even resemble our childhood fantasies?

I would love to believe that maybe then, life will finally let me jump off the cliff….