#PeopleOfDonatekart: Meet Charita Cariappa
“I was driving when I had my first anxiety attack. At that point in time, I had no idea about what was happening to me. My mouth became dry, my heart started beating fast and suddenly, everything turned black in front of my eyes. I stopped my car and called my mother. I wasn’t able to explain what was happening to me. I just hoped to go back home as soon as possible.
That was the first time and there have been more. And my therapist says that’s normal. Anxiety, he says, doesn’t go away on its own. One needs to work towards that — tackling anxiety, I mean. The first step towards that is embracing the fact that one has anxiety issues.
There’s so much shame and taboo around mental health issues and the worst part, I think, is how it is trivialised. “Meditate, do yoga, sip that green tea’ — when will people get that mental illnesses are real and they need to be treated with equal fervour as physical illnesses if not more?
I have my bad days. Days when I am not able to get up from bed. Days when I can’t look at myself in the mirror. And it’s not all pretty — it’s not sitting with a tub of ice cream and crying over Bridget Jones’s Diary. It is a condition that needs a lot of patience, love and care. But that’s me. The entirety of me — having anxiety issues doesn’t make anyone ‘mad’ or ‘crazy’ or ‘oversensitive’ or ‘mental’. How I wish more people understood this…
Growing up, there was not one day when I didn’t see new people around the dining table when we sat down to eat. Some of them had come to meet my grandfather, a few needed his opinion on a long-drawn case of theirs, a couple of them had come just to ask for help — they couldn’t buy their son’s books for the new class. No one went home hungry. All of us ate together after their concerns were taken care of. Like a family. Empathy and kindness have been intrinsic to my growing up and that’s why I am so happy with my work.
Even on days when my mental health isn’t that great, one of the major things that keeps me going is my work. I know, someone, somewhere needs help and that’s motivation enough for me.
My anxiety issues taught me something else — speaking up. It is important to register your dissent, to raise your voice and talk about things that others shy away from. Even if it’s just an Instagram story or short blog post — time and again I have seen how raising one’s voice has helped strengthen someone else’s resolve to fight back. That always keeps me going.”
Charita Cariappa, Senior Manager — Content
