Catharsis : Volume 1

 It’s 1pm. I’m at Third Wave, sitting with my laptop, somehow trying to find a way to pass time till my VISA biometric appointment. I don’t see a way to do that. Let’s work, my workaholic brain says. “Let’s make some alpha!”. I’d normally be happy to indulge in the intellectual endavour as always, but I was kindof bored today. So I let it slip. “Shadow work” called out my brain again. Ugh, not nowww. If anything, I’m least interested in a therapy session, that too sitting in a cafe. Too public a setting. I cannot let anyone see me cry, right? What’s the harm in trying though? Anyway, with my therapy sessions so far, I have’nt really cried once, I don’t see how that is to change today. “Let’s try”, I say.

I pick up my phone, go to whatsapp to load up the chats which need the phone application to sync. In what felt like ages before the older chats actually showed up, I contemplated if it was actually a good idea to do this. “Maybe not”, I say. If it’s taking so long maybe it’s a sign to call it a day. Just then I saw the pdf make itself visible to my eyes. “Ugh, let’s suck it up and try it anyway”. To be completely fair though, the contemplation was actually biased. The real reason the chats took so long to load is because the document was sent to me more than a month ago. You see, my therapy so far has focussed mostly on getting me out of shock and actually feeling my emotions. Childhood, and my breakup left such a deep scar on me that for the first few months I hardly felt anything. Grief, pain, hurt, everything was submerged under layers of shock. My body froze at the thought of anything it sensed danger in, and I simply dealt with this for hours at a stretch. It has started to change over time and now I am at a point where all the pain from the last two years, and a lot of trauma and baggage form childhood has started to surface up. Not in a way that’s been that extreme though. Simply some pain here and there, and a lot of bursts of rage and hatred. My therapist has been adamant on childhood trauma though. She believes a lot of my current pain and limiting beliefs stem from deeep wounds form my childhood. I guess I understand why, but I don’t see how, becuase I don’t feel anything about those wounds. So in reality, my skepticism about the effect of shadow work is actually justified. Yeah, I answer some questions about myself, what’s the big deal. The feeling would’ve flown in by now if it had to, and it has’nt. That being said, the concept of shadow work and hadow energy is particularly fascinating, and I do see the point in why it does work in general (disclaimer on a future post on shadow energy and the shadow self).

I sucked up eventually and started reading. Page after page, word after word. Till I got to the first prompt. “What painful memory from childhood affects your life today?”

Hmm, that’s a nice blocker to think on. Maybe it makes sense to start listing down all my bad memories from childhood. There’s something magical about writing. They say it’s cathartic, and in my personal experience, it truly has been. More than catharsis, it helps you list everything, look at everything on face value and then let it all sink in. I wrote down everything I could remember, until I found myself going over a loop. I’m not really in the mood to elucidate the entire train of thought here, and today, so I won’t go over the details. But fuck man, childhood has fucked up a proper part of my personality. I see instances from when my fear of abandonment could have started to take it’s shape, I see why a normal child would probably not have gone through these chain of events in life. I’m not really blaming anyone, but it was never really my fault too. I did not know any better, no ten year old does. My emotional lonliness in school, along with a loss of close support during my formative years were actually too huge to leave a dent on my life.

Tears started rolling in, it was way too overwhelming for me. I took a break, cried it out (in the bathroom though because “ Too public a setting “). But yeah, I’m lowkey proud of myself for having made it this far. It’s one of those days where I finally see these last few months of therapy having a step effect on my life. A long way to go, but atleast I know a part of the root cause of my issues, causes for my overthinking, villanizing, emotional disregulation and constant state of anxiety.

I went for the biometric interview with a light heart. I’m not a bad person, I never was. Yes, I’ve made mistakes, hurt people and taken decisions which broke people at times. But I’ve always had their best interest in mind. I never knew how to get out of the agony I was in, how to regulate my emotions, how to calm myself down. I never knew why I spiralled on certain topics, why my anxiety levels seemed to always be high. I never understood why I used to constantly keep giving power to other people over me, and feel frustrated that I am unable to let go. I never knew a million other things that were going on with me subconsciously, but consciously I wanted to leave everything behind and process it all out. I’ve had my issues, and I am working with my life to get over them, so that no one ever gets hurt because of triggers that invoke a dangerous side of me. I’m glad the process has shown me a day with a reward. Finally! Sparse rewards make credit assignment problems difficult, especially long horizon credit assignment. But they’re still solvable. It requires consistent effort and repititions, but it does get better and it does get resolved. I just want to apologize to everyone I’ve hurt because of my issues, and I owe it to them to become a better and calmer version of myself. I promise I will walk this path through to the end.

To everyone who’s put up with me despite my issues,

Thank you.

May 19, 2025

- Catharsis Volume 1