I Began Working When I Was Five

Too dramatic? Maybe. Then again, at this point, are you surprised? Truth is I’m not being dramatic at all - I’m not exaggerating, and this is not hyperbole. I definitely do not mean child labour or anything illegal. I moved from India where I was born when I was five years old because my father got hired by a huge multinational corporation and so, being a minor, naturally I moved with him. As did my mother, and my sister. I’m not going to name this company, you can rummage through this website and probably figure it out by now, but basically it was a really tough job, which continued for more than two decades. The part I want to focus on is how it wasn’t just a tough job for my father, which it certainly was and is, but also how it was a tough job for the rest of us. My mother did brilliantly, and worked over time for two kids, carrying out emotional labour that is harder than any job description mentioned for any multinational corporation. I have spent the better part of my adult life until now trying to find a way to honor her for what she did. I’m still trying. I’ll never be able to. My mother has been simultaneously the most selfless and selfish person I know. And she was always there. My sister was also there, but we’re two very different people, so without going through the dark and dirty details and inevitable war zones that siblings create as they grow up - I’ve decided it’s best that I do not speak for her. So let’s talk about me. (I promise it’s not my favorite subject, although it certainly feels like it on here doesn’t it? We all have to find some way to express ourselves, so bear with me).

Let’s go back to the beginning. When I said I was hired at five years old I didn’t mean for the company my father worked for directly. However, what people never realize is that when your father works for a huge multinational corporation, it means so does his family. And what people always forget is he was an adult with a clear purpose, with emotional development and real life experience, and I was only five years old, but here’s where it gets truly interesting: that didn’t mean I had any less responsibility than he did. Hard to believe since I was five. But a five year old in a new country. Thrown into the first of many schools I’d be attending throughout the course of my educational years. And I distinctly remember saying: “How will I make any friends when I get there? I can’t even speak English.” Which wasn’t entirely true, since I could speak well enough to ask the question, but I was already smart enough to understand that that wasn’t enough to survive. When I started learning English at my first international school they discovered I had mild dyslexia - again, the first of many diagnoses that would follow throughout my life, although I was naturally unaware at the time. I would write the letter S backwards, and the letter C, and I would write B’s as D’s and D’s as B’s. My mother got concerned and the teacher told her just let her keep making the mistakes, and I’ll keep marking them, and she will learn. And she was right, I did learn. I learned fast. I kept learning fast because no one told me, but at five years old I already knew that this was my job and if I wanted to survive I was going to have to exceed expectations every step of the way.

So over the course of the following years, as I transitioned from kindergarten, to elementary, to then middle school, and high school, which was for me boarding school, (I'll mention this a lot - repetitive, sorry) to finally a series of universities alongside strong helpings of mental illness, all I did was learn. I died a few times, was resurrected a few times, and hey look at me I’m still here and I’m still learning. Since I’ve mentioned the mental health part already (that didn’t take very long did it?) let’s go in reverse or mixed up chronology. Every time my father made us move to a new country, new house, new people and join a new school in a new city - I lost something and gained something huge. Rupture without repair as my therapist called it. I was not allowed to complain. My ability to adapt by the age of 18 was unbelievable, and it set me apart from the rest, in ways which were rather painful and advantageous. People admire chameleons. I loved my ability to change but also I got old. I grew up so fast and any experiences I sought out to just kind of act my age led me to age only faster until behaving like a child felt like the only respite. I kept traveling. I never knew anything other than moving, so boarding school and University - being on my own in new places - was not actually that difficult at all. Yet, you know those theories that sort of say you get older, and older, until you suddenly get younger again? That kind of happened to me really fast. You can read all about that, facts about my life etc, on different parts of this journal and elsewhere, so to avoid being unnecessarily repetitive, let me cut to the part about how this was like working for the multinational corporation, which moved me in the first place. I keep beating around that bush. As is my nature. But hey, this is a journal after all. So let’s go.

First of all, I had no choice in the matter. Second of all, I had no choice in how I would react to it but I was expected to adapt, which I did. And lastly, I had the highest expectations placed on me and by the time I reached Middle School all I did was work. Morning til night. To get the grades I needed. It’s not a story that’s unheard of yet it is one that is often overlooked because with everything good that comes to you in life the assumption always is that those advantages will somehow protect you, and I am not saying they don’t. I didn’t really have to ever want for anything. I grew up with the knowledge that my education and mind was valuable. I had no celebrity magazines or even a TV at the age most people do. I read and took exams. I studied. That’s all I did. And that is, as I later realized, quite remarkable. And yet, no two people are the same. The constant moving and the constant traveling and the academic pressure, and the inevitable trauma of life, all combined, made me a complicated individual who had taken on a lot more than she could handle with incredible capacity and calibre but not enough understanding, empathy, or compassion. I couldn’t grasp what was happening and I had no time to process. Like I said, no two people are the same. No one is going to have the same experiences, and no one is going to have the same reaction to their experiences as everyone else. I still don't understand why some people hold on to that expectation. There is decency, and then there is humanity. One is about our social conduct, the other is about our inescapable fragility. Not everyone gets diagnosed with a mental illness. The other three members of my family dealt with all of this very differently. They had their own battles no doubt. But somehow we began fighting them alone and not as a family. So at the end of it all, I was thoroughly exhausted and alone.

What made it, or has made it, worse is that I knew and know that I wasn’t and am not meant to be exhausted and alone. That wasn’t exactly what was supposed to happen. Everyone else, my mother, father, and sister, adapted not without the inevitable strain, but adapted nonetheless. We all went through our unique forms of Hell, I’m sure of it, but I’m the only one who turned out to be the acutely sensitive, impractical, eccentric, manically depressed, and finally bipolar person who died and came back to life too many times to count. It sounds so dramatic, always, but I made sure no one saw the worst of it because it is extremely difficult to witness. Watching a bipolar person at their lowest is like watching someone dying. In short, it’s awful. And I have heard everything from I am playing the victim-card, to I’m making excuses, to I need to get a grip, and finally, that I am too strange for not having any friends or intimate relationships. Trauma combined with mental illness will do that to you. Millions of people in the world live with mental illness. It’s a fact. It’s not glorification. It’s the truth. And somehow being employed from the age of five, I suspect, had something to do with it. Suddenly I became this adult, who at the most crucial moments of my life supposedly, had taken - or have taken - a massive step back from everything. And every time it happened, I died a little more on the inside. I feel like I have been dying and my only lifeline - aside from my parents’ and doctors’ support - has been trying to write about this to make it make some kind of sense. Because it has to mean something. No one can go all through their life and not attempt to try and make it mean something.

I cannot and did not and will not accept being the girl who went from being a straight A student to suddenly being someone who could not get out of bed in the morning. Now I know what it feels like when people suddenly lose their ability to walk - it’s not the same - but it kind of is. The organ I relied on most, my brain, began failing me. It still does. And there is nothing I can do about it aside from medication and therapy. If on any particular day, and there have been many, many days like this, if my brain shuts down there is absolutely nothing I can do to change that. I need a charger but it doesn’t charge fast enough. I’m helpless. Me. The over-achiever. The idealist, the romantic. The one with so much potential. The one who was destined to succeed. She can’t get out of bed. She can’t read a book without great effort. She can’t seem to hold down a job. She, the star employee, can’t be around people because she’s afraid they will notice all of the above. This is the girl who despite being severely physically ill, with jaundice, finished all her pressing school deadlines and went in to submit papers and had a teacher tell her that she’s being ridiculous for coming in to school looking half-dead and that it wasn’t needed. But to me it was. What if I fell behind? I was the star employee. Everyone expected the best. I was not going to fail. Ever. It was never going to be an option. It still isn’t an option, although that drive - that relentless energy - that bravery and self-confidence; I am ashamed to say it shattered. People have tried to shame me for much more than that but at the end of the day that is what causes me the greatest pain. Knowing that once upon a time I was a super-successful and determined employee, at such a young age, and still I could not keep it together. My life was and is so beautiful, but I can’t be there for it. I can’t be present. I reach for pills and I call my doctors. Or they call me. That was never part of the plan. I was meant to fight and make it through.

And don’t tell me I don’t try. Either you don’t know what it’s like, which you don’t, or you simply cannot fathom the idea that from the outside what looks like a dream set-up could from the inside be, at times, the exact opposite. I pretended to be normal - I still pretend - but I can’t. I’ve been and still am in treatment. I’m being vocal about it over and over and over and over and over again because I owe it to that young child and young teenager and young adult who now can’t seem to properly enter adulthood - I owe her the humanity that was taken away when she could no longer perform. I was never supposed to be here. That was never the job. I didn’t even get fired or quit. I sort of just stopped working. My internal mechanisms shut down. I stopped talking to people. I stopped trying to be a part of anything because who knows what I might do. For the last several years, as I’m writing probably for the trillionth time, my sole focus has been survival. Not work, not ambition, not desire, not joy or fulfillment - just plain denial, running, then coming back and fighting, and doing whatever I can - beg, borrow, steal - to just stay alive. Because I could not have gone through all this to then suddenly disappear into some tragic ending. Because even when I think I’ve stopped working, the truth is, I am working all the time. Just because there is no visible product doesn’t mean I haven’t been on overdrive, doing whatever I can really, to just remain relevant enough to myself that I remain here. For as long as there is life there is hope, right? We have to believe it. I started working when I was five years old. That has to mean something. Even though it made me collapse.

So I do apologize if I seem like the kind of person who doesn’t care, who stopped trying, who can’t keep it together, who only fights but doesn’t create anymore, doesn’t strive for that anymore. That’s not me. And none of those things are true. I’ve just been an employee for a very long time. My mind and body finally just said: I’ve had enough. You can keep going but I won’t be there. Keep writing. Keep running. But you are going to have to stop and you are going to have to listen to me. I was telling myself to listen to myself.

And at last, finally, I have had the great privilege and wisdom to just listen.

Like a machine that demanded once again to be human, to remove the masks, to tolerate the brutality, and yet to continue dreaming, but most importantly: to continue breathing.

I’m alive once more.

And I haven’t retired yet.