When fears are bottled up in a sea of worry

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When fears are bottled up in a sea of worry

Monday, 24 January 2022 | SURAVI SHARMA KUMAR

When fears are bottled up in a sea of worry

Systematic desensitisation is what we all have gone through in the last two years; the pandemic seems to have dulled our ‘fear response'

Once linear, life now seems circular. Schools opened. They closed again. In-person meetings had just been reinstated when, weeks back we were again told they would cease, with a return to Zoom gatherings.

Maybe Omicron will mutate; maybe not. Some other variants have come and gone without driving the pandemic to terrifying new heights. Maybe Omicron will follow suit. But for now, for us, every plan is a provisional plan.

It’s a sea of worry. If you take illness as a metaphor, we all hold dual citizenship of the land of the well and that of the unwell. Maybe worry is the bridge between the towns. And living in this bridge as we all are doing now is not easy though it may look ‘near normal’ from a distance.

As a child, I lived in an upper Assam town where, on hot humid summer nights, incessant rains hammered our house roof. There was thunder — explosions of fury. The rains and thunderbolts made me feel like a caterpillar who was about to have his head stuck by a cannon. And I clung to my mother or my nanny and slept until the rains stopped.

The arrival of the rainsat times sent the nanny - a girl in her teens called Niru — into her past and at times she spoke up about her painful memories sending terror down my spine. The air would slow down and grow heavy as if coiling in on itself, Niru would say, remembering her life a year back. Far away, near the river bank where she lived with her parents and siblings, the vast expansion of skyover the waterbody flickered. That day, for a minute or two, the lights paused, she said with terror in her eyes, like maybe the rains went away to skirt around the hills;and then got back only to detonate over the roof of her hut. And there she was facing a stream of ravaging flood waters. Her siblings and she cried together, and then all she remembered washer struggle to keep her head above the water level. Niru survived, so did her parents but her siblings who were younger than her, went missing.

Her story gave me goosebumps and the fear that I got from her still lives with me.I have been reminded of this time a lot lately. I am not making light of this pandemic, one that killed many and may kill many more before it is brought under control, or the economic panic that is now scorching through markets. I wonder how would this time turn into memories in the minds of the children today in the years to come.

If you are reading this and feeling fear, this is just to say that panic and fear are the great contagions of a contagion. After Niru’s stories, in athunderous rainy night when I along with my sibling couldnot take the dread, we would run to our bedroom and get under a thick quilt. And there we will tell stories or try to fall asleep in order to do what seemed the most logical thing: leaving. As I grew up,I would open a book and go someplace where nothing had quite so much power over me. This is a form of quitting the unpleasant, unwanted. My worst fear was that a lightning bolt would come scissoring down and evaporate my mother or a loved one while I was under the quilt.

I imagine many of us are doing something similar these days (or during the last couple of pandemic waves) in the quiet of our bedrooms.

Fear in general can deteriorate mental health but fears of childhoodnever go away. I believe the fear response in ushas gone through a sea change in this pandemic. It seems to have dulled our ‘fearresponse’ by now; at least in many of us. We all have possibly received the best fear extinguishing therapies that psychologists often use therapeutically in patients. Systematic desensitization is what we all have gone through in the last two years.

Pandemic-related adverse psychological conditions have led to another pandemic ofpsychological distress around the globe. For those under 18, one is four was affected.

We all exist in vulnerability. Shared vulnerability is essential to family life-and to citizenship, and in the larger context humanity. What each of us does affects us all. It is about accepting that you cannot opt out of an ecosystem and need to manage our inter-connectedness.

(The writer is an author and a Pathologist doctor. The views expressed are personal.)

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