BE LIKE DORY
This account details a fourth-year Electrical Engineering student's personal journey through self-harm at IIT Kharagpur shared with her permission. Identifying details have been withheld. No method or specifics of self-harm have been described anywhere in this piece. If any part of this is difficult to read, please stop and reach out to one of the numbers listed at the end. Take Care.
She grew up moving. New city every couple of years, new school, the whole cycle starting over. She listed it out so flatly we nearly missed what she was telling us. The first year somewhere she'd be the outsider. Maybe a wrong accent or wrong clothes but picked at for both. By the second year she'd have two or three people she could sit with. Then it would be time to pack.
Ninth grade was when the thought first showed up. It was not really planned. It was more like noticing a door in a wall where there never should have been a door.
By twelfth it was a thought she had often. Boards, JEE, everyone's expectations and an opinion of herself that had been curdling for years. That was also when she started hurting herself.
"When I am in emotional turmoil, it's paining in my heart and my brain and I don't really understand what to do. Society tells us emotional pain doesn't exist. So one reason was so my body could attach that emotional pain to a physical one. To make it real."
She also has ADHD, with anxiety sitting on top of it and a head that would run every possible disaster on a loop until she couldn't hold one thought still. The pain inflicted was louder than that loop, it shut the loop up for a minute.
That's the hard thing to say out loud about a coping mechanism. It isn't stupid, it works for about a minute, badly, at a price she went on paying long after the minute ended, in scars and in hiding the daily work of not being found out.
You would have known her in the first year.
She was everywhere. Three societies, full acads, projects of her own on the side, department work, loud in the corridor, first hand up whenever anyone needed volunteers. The kind of fresher whose name seniors learn by September.
First year was the worst year of her life.
"The self-hate never went away," she said. "I put on a mask of being this bubbly, hardworking person. Behind that, my mind kept saying I was lying, and I punished myself for it."
She could hold the performance up all day. She couldn't hold it up alone at night, and the drop between the two was very far.
Which takes apart the thing most of us are quietly assuming that we would be able to tell. That someone drowning would look like it. She looked like the most alive person in the room, and then the door shut behind her and she came apart, and nobody here knew.
She was careful about it. Exhaustingly careful, because being found out felt worse than the thing itself. It would mean questions. It would look, she said, like a plea for attention.
"Some people might use it as a plea for attention. Not because they simply want attention, but because they aren't getting any support regarding what they are facing internally. People do that hoping someone notices and shows up for them."
By the end of first year she was carrying a folded piece of paper in her wallet. She'd written it months earlier and never thrown it away. She describes that stretch as passively suicidal. Not planning anything. Just an indifference to whether the day worked out or didn't and a piece of paper in her wallet, in case it didn't.
Then she told one friend.
One friend, on an evening that was otherwise nothing. The friend was visibly shaken, and she remembers feeling awful about that, like she'd handed someone else something heavy without asking first.
They walked out to the bridge and got chai. Her friend made her take the paper out of her wallet. She tore it up at the railing in the dark, a cup going cold in her other hand, and dropped the pieces over the side and watched them go down. "At that point," she said,
"I decided that this action should signify a new start."
She was almost stern about not letting this sound like a miracle. Nothing was fixed that evening. What happened was far from fixed and much more important. She stopped being the only person who knew.
"It wasn't an overnight wake-up call where everything was suddenly fine. It was simply realizing: this is not normal, and this should not be normal. Let me try something different."
She told a few more people. She got rid of what she had been using, so the “impulse” and the “means” were no longer in the same room. She started catching the urge and looking at it for a second instead of being defeated by it.
She has relapsed once or twice since, in genuinely bad stretches. She told us so without flinching and we are leaving it in, because a recovery story that runs in a straight line is a lie and it's the particular kind of lie that makes people feel like failures on a bad week. When we spoke, the last time had been about a year and a half ago.
We really need you to know this
Telling a friend is where this started, not where it should end. A friend can stand next to you at the railing. A friend can't treat ADHD or anxiety or whatever is sitting underneath. The counselling centre exists, and so do the numbers at the bottom of this page, and calling one of them is not a bigger admission than what she did that evening.
We asked what it is about this place, and about first year especially. Most of her answer was about arriving with no idea what you want and being handed three hundred options. Societies, selections, acads you don't understand yet, professors you don't feel entitled to talk to. But underneath all of it is the thing that actually runs KGP: your sense of your own worth, kept in somebody else's hands. Grades. Selections. Posts. CDC. Every one of them converted into a verdict.
"I had a self-imposed belief that I wasn't good enough, so I tried joining multiple societies to prove my worth. But the monster gets hungrier the more you feed it."
A senior said it to her somewhere in the middle of the worst of it, and for whatever reason it landed when heavier, better-meant advice hadn't.
"Be like Dory from Finding Nemo, five-second memory, just keep swimming."
As long as your mindset is attached strictly to the outcome rather than the work, it will never be enough.
Keep the big goal if you want it. Just stop measuring today against it every night before you sleep. Zero to one, then one to two. Make the list for the day embarrassingly small, do the things on it, cross them off and take the satisfaction from having done them, not from a result that arrives in March and might go badly for reasons that have nothing to do with you. "That rebuilds your self-worth on your own terms."
Yesterday was hard. Today is a new small list of smaller hard things.
Some of you have been reading this with a very particular kind of recognition. You know about long sleeves. You know the arithmetic of hiding something. Maybe it was three years ago and you have never said it out loud to a single person; maybe it was last week.
This part is for you.
You are still here.
We want to say that, because we don't think anybody ever says it to you. There were nights that could have gone the other way and didn't and the reason they didn't is You. Some stubborn, unglamorous part of you that got up, went to class, answered a message, made it to morning. Nobody acknowledged. You just kept going and then the next day you did it again.
And you haven't failed at anything. Not if you relapsed last month. Not if you're not over it. Not if the urge still wins some days. She relapsed too and she's still counting. You're allowed to start again today, from whatever number you are actually at, and you don't owe anyone an explanation for the number.
You don't have to be recovered to deserve any of this. You only have to be here.
And you are.
Near the end, she told us she never expected to be on this side of it, the side where you get to say it got quieter. For a long time she wasn't sure she'd be around to say anything at all. Now She walks the same roads you do, past the same cycle paths, and most days now they're just roads.
None of us is doing this alone. Some of us just haven't found out yet.
The Institute's counselling services are available to every student, confidentially and free of cost. If you are struggling, or think a friend might be, reach out.
SETU
Location: IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur – 721302, India
Appointments: three ways
Via Phone
+91 3222 281173Visit SETU and take an appointment
Information is provided at the SETU front desk. Located opposite Technology Students' Gymkhana.
Location - https://maps.app.goo.gl/WLCYtHCnvB5fkL4VA
