I've Never Been (un)Happier by Shaheen Bhatt

Author:Shaheen Bhatt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353052140
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2018-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

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It’s the dead of night and I’ve been tossing and turning, drifting in and out of broken sleep.

In the few, barely conscious, wakeful seconds I take to turn over, a little voice in my head pipes up out of nowhere. ‘You’re going to die one day,’ it says, as if it’s been patiently cradling this little nugget of truth all night and waiting for the perfect opportunity to hurl it at me. In an instant my stomach drops and my eyes fly wide open in the dark. I’m taken by fear.

I’m wide awake now, my heart still pounding. I grit my teeth in frustration. There seems to be no end to the number of ways in which my mind chooses to disrupt my life. You’d think it would do its best to help. But no, it’s just one thing after another with the reckless thing.

In time my fear of death, combined with pre-existing health conditions, have given rise to a very inconvenient bout of health anxiety. When the anxiety is at its peak I can’t go anywhere that’s more than fifteen minutes away from a hospital, convinced as I am that I’m going to have a sudden medical emergency and drop dead. There is, of course, no reasoning with my stubborn mind and it refuses to listen to reason and accept that vaguely healthy twenty-somethings don’t just cease to exist for no reason. This fear is so great that I even carry around inhalers for asthma I don’t actually have. The idiocy of this isn’t lost on me. Some days I feel like I ought to be shrunk down and studied in a test tube.

I curl up and close my eyes, trying to push the thought of death out of my mind. It won’t budge. Soon my thoughts have spiralled. I’m thinking about all those I’ve lost to death and all those I’m still to lose. It’s like a film of horrific hypotheticals playing on loop in my mind.

Thoughts like this would usually send me into a fit of tears, but it’s been two weeks of this misery and I think my tear ducts have had quite enough and gone on strike.

Sleep is a distant memory now. I heave myself out of bed and trudge to the kitchen to make myself a cup of cocoa. Several minutes later I’m seated at the window sill, cocoa in hand, silently watching the velvety night sky lighten as the house sighs with sleep.

I haven’t realized it yet but this is the first time I’ve left my bedroom in a week.

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