Fifteen is just too young

A recollection of the day when a friend asked me to go and talk to a family dealing with the suicide of their daughter. To preserve their image in the society they were framing her as a victim of mental illness.

I’m not scared

I’m not scared to admit that I’ve been suicidal for days. However, I’m also aware that it is because of my natural response to trauma all my life. In times of extreme stress, my brain somehow thinks of suicide as a coping strategy which I know is not right. But that’s what it is.

And I’m fighting this feeling. Once you’re lonely, after tasting the medicine of companionship and love. It is really hard to get accustomed to the stillness around you. I’m going through one of such days. I don’t know how to talk to my brothers but I want to talk to them, I just don’t know what to say? I can’t process what’s going in my head, and this inability to put my thoughts into words has created this constipated emotional whirlpool that’s creating a gut-wrenching anxiety, twisting my insides as I type this.

Writing has always worked for me in the past but it’s not working right now. Perhaps I’ve been away for a long time for the right words to flow in. But I know for sure that the only way to break through this chasm of numbness and feel is to actually go through the trauma and acknowledge the loss.

I need to embrace the pain instead of running away from my tears. I just don’t know how. I need my tears to flow yet there is no thaw in my heart.

Talk about your struggles; it will inspire others.

I never talk about my past or the struggles I face on a day-to-day basis. And a lot of people think that behind my quiet, placid demeanor, I have an attitude or a sense of pride that I don’t like to mingle with other people or reach out.

Of course, for a person who’s faced horrendous atrocities at the hands of the people who were bound to protect him is going to be afraid from the strangers around him. My anti-social nature stems from a long-period of abuse at the hands of a lot of people: friends, family members, relatives, care-givers, romantic interests.

So it doesn’t come as a surprise when I try to keep that dark side of mine locked up because I have learnt that people don’t like to see things in gray. For them, it’s either black or white. Unfortunately, nothing in the world works like that, but hardly anyone has the time to figure out that we’ve just been programmed by society into massively accepting what’s OKAY and shunning without questioning ourselves things that are in rarity.

I never reflected on the my TEDx speech that I went for last year. Nor have I seen it yet. Even though it’s officially on the TEDx YouTube channel. Admitting that it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life is an understatement.

For me, going up on the stage was a very smaller part of the ordeal. The first thing was to stare at myself in the mirror, look myself in the eye. Recall everything horrible that has happened in the past, and forgive myself.

Forgiveness was essential if I were to do this in the first place. When we can’t understand the cause of our pain, we tend to blame ourselves, because it is easy and because our self-worth from repetitive incidents of pain, neglect and humiliation has become so weak that we don’t really see us as likable people anymore. Or people who’re genuinely capable of being loved in return without having to change who they are.

I had to go through all the memories that I would rather not have and see all the cracks that have chipped away me from time to time. When something terrible happens, it changes you. You can no longer be the person you were, but you can stop from becoming a monster by allowing the grief to let you know that what happened to you was wrong and accepting your part of the package.

Sometimes, you don’t have anything to do with what is happening all around you, but the people in your life are unable to see that and so they blame you. And in turn you end up blaming yourself to a point that the entire breathing space around you shrinks to a point where you feel suffocated and the only way out is death.

The first day, I went for rehearsals, I thought I was prepared. I blanked out. I could literally feel my tongue stuck at the back of my throat and the words in my head, lost in utter chaos. I couldn’t feel anything and my feet were numb.

I went for three rehearsals, changing the speech every time till I figured out I couldn’t run away from it. I had to accept the truth and I had to admit that I was hurt and broken to a point that I chose to kill myself time and again.

But saying that, in front of a hundred people, when the whole world is watching you, in front of the family members and your parents and your siblings and your students and then your friends. It just takes on a form of this huge boulder that sort of crushes you with a massive amount of guilt and shame.

Suddenly, people stop seeing you as you and some kind of diseased, broken, good for nothing rag doll that they couldn’t have gotten rid of any faster than they’d wanted. But I had to realize that there was nothing to be ashamed of. Instead, the people who were supposed to protect me and love me and take care of me should be ashamed of not being there for me. And for making things so hard on myself that I could only see death as a way out of pain.

Today, I’m sharing with you my story and even though I have not seen this video. I do hope I will find the courage one day to look at it without having to experience a surge of pain, loneliness and having to experience bitterness, disappointment and hurt from the people who I expected to love me.

Today, let me tell you this. Killing yourself won’t do anything. The amount of potential that you have will simply be lost and no one will give a rat’s ass about it except for the people who actually love you. They will suffer and will never be able to forgive themselves for not being enough. It has to start with you. You are enough. You are capable of being loved and you don’t have to fight for the attention of someone who doesn’t want you in their life.

I haven’t figured out my path in life yet, but here’s what I can tell you. If someone loves you, they will respect you, they will forever want to know if you’re okay and during disagreements and fights will always sit you down and try to clear things out. They will never let go even if you have lost faith. And they will never let anger and stress change the way they see you. If they say they love you and they will never hurt you and then a few months later they want to punch you in the face and don’t see anything wrong with their actions, it’s time you pack up and leave.

Learn to leave the table when love’s no longer being served. Because the truth is: love heals, and love is all you need!

TEDxNUST Karachi: The Beginning [1/3]

365 days ago, around 8:30 P.M. I took the stage for TEDxNUST to talk about the 6 times I tried to end my life and failed. And how the seventh time when I succeeded and still survived, led me to build FUSED – a system that identifies suicide markers from emotions embedded in a person’s speech.

When I was first introduced to TED Talks, I was seventeen years old, more skeletal than I look today, a fresher enrolled in an engineering program. Sulking everyday while walking to class I couldn’t stop thinking what the hell was I doing with my life? I was recovering from self-harming tendencies then.

Over the course of years I had started to wonder about the purpose of my life. I was a total misfit when it came to social acceptability. I spent most of the time reading. I had no real friends, and my wants and wishes never existed; personal likes or dislikes never mattered – a common byproduct of families having strict, narcissistic parents. Physically, I am below average. For a man of my age, I’m genetically incapable of growing muscle mass (I’ve tried, believe me) which often turns me into a dartboard of humanitarian pity and remarks that if found their way into the UN Summit can actually end world hunger and endless wars.

When asked about my aim in life, I was always blank and it took me a long time to figure out that I had an endless drive to help people. I now realize that my faulty ambition stemmed from years of neglect and lack of love that I had to deal with while growing up.

It was during the years at university that my mentor, a brilliant professor who taught me mathematics, introduced me to the tenacity one needs to accomplish something extraordinary. She introduced me to TED talks which I procrastinated watching because seventeen is just too much without the addition of family drama and mental illness. Mine had two more niches attached: existential crises and the search for self that gradually resulted in academic suicide.

In 2010, I watched the first TED Talk of my life. At that time, my religious and sexual identity was already under heavy scrutiny by my peers, my knowledge and understanding of the Quran, and the sociopolitical changes that had bound Islam and Terrorism in close familial ties after the 9/11 incident.

For a boy who spent an entire childhood reading comics from Marvel and DC, collecting action figures, sketching super-hero costumes and praying to be granted superhero abilities (more specifically Spider Sense), I was just baffled and awestruck when I saw this guy who had animated characters based on the 99 attributes of Allah.

And I wondered how great that would have felt, being able to connect with so many people and telling them what you’ve wanted to do for the rest of the world. My ultimate goal with a faulty premise roared itself from a slumber once again. Perhaps I could live to serve the people and bring happiness to their lives. Deep in my heart, I wished for the fulfillment of that dream. But also another one that I failed to realize or I must say, too embarrassed to speak out loud: become a TEDx speaker.