Can Knowing Yourself Heal You?

A Story Of Personal Experience.

It was the end of November 2018, I was living in London, Ontario, Canada, far away from my family in India. I had come this far for my PhD program to do some scientific research and build my academic career. I don’t remember what day it was, but I had just woken up from the sleep, and was about to get ready to go to lab.

I saw 3 missed calls from my brother, who lived in India. I would generally talk to him using WhatsApp audio calls via internet, so these international phone calls didn’t make any sense. Then I saw 7 WhatsApp audio calls from him as well, over the night, when I was asleep. It must have been afternoon in India.

My heart started pounding and I had this strange feeling that something very wrong, very bad must have happened. I could feel the time slowing down as I dialled my brother, half-heartedly expecting him to say that everything is okay and all these calls were some technical error. But, deep in my heart, I knew something was wrong.

“Hi brother, you called over the night? Sorry, I was asleep”, my voice already cracked while saying those words as if my mind and body already knew what was to come, “Hi brother, Sorry, Papa is no more”, he cried these words to my ears.

I remember those words very strangely, as time froze for my mind, which didn’t know how to react, how to process the information it had just received.

In that moment I knew that I am never ever going to be able to talk to my Dad ever again. I talked to him 2 days ago. He had some health issues few months ago but he was doing fine now. “What happened?”, my voice already shaken and broken with the news bomb that my brother has dropped on me. “He had a cardiac arrest, and he passed away in his sleep.”, I couldn’t accept what I was hearing. I didn’t want to.

I wanted my Dad to visit me in Canada, I wanted to show him my university, my laboratory, where I was doing some high impact research and helping push the boundaries of human knowledge. I never cared for my own achievements, but I liked what it meant for my Dad. From his reaction when I first got this offer, to see his son going to live in a foreign country for the sake of science, I wonder if he felt proud. It’s something every parent feel when their child does something good. I wanted him to have this feeling of pride, when he would visit me in Canada. All of this was coming to my mind, my thoughts running almost at the speed of light.

I wanted him to see the traffic in London, Ontario. It was so much less crowded and much more organized than what we had in our hometown in Lucknow, India. He would have liked how drivers here respect the pedestrians. I wanted him to take grocery shopping with me. He would have loved the huge red tomatoes you could get here in the supermarket, as opposed to the street side vendors in our hometown. I always imagined how he could bargain at the supermarket.

I wanted him to attend my graduation ceremony, when I would be given a doctorate degree, the highest of education degree you can ever get, he would have been proud and happy perhaps, had he lived for a few more years.

All these thoughts coming to my mind, had a feeling of pain attached to it.

A pain I knew, that was for me to bear.

By that time, I have read enough of psychology and philosophy to have some understanding of human mind. I wasn’t an expert but I did know enough about how my mind works, what tickles me, how I can relieve the mental stress from work.

I had some knowledge of what was happening to me in that moment, to my mind and my body, yet I was cold and shaken.

I felt like a little baby left out in the cold, crying for help, but no one could hear those cries.

Knowing myself didn’t really help me in that moment.

I had already lost my Mom when I was 15. My Dad was my only parent left. And now he was gone too. When my Mom passed away, I remember him saying, “We will have to have some courage, son!”. How was I going to have that courage now?

All those years of healing after my mom’s passing away, has been broken again.

My mind was like a broken plate which was fixed somehow using a ceramic glue, and had now shattered again into pieces.

Healing looked like a dream in that moment.

That day was years ago, and as they say life goes on and you eventually heal.

I am truly grateful to all my family members, friends and colleagues, who have helped me out during those hard times, and helped me eventually get back to the new normal, if there is something like it.

As I reflect back upon this experience, I realize that however much, we know ourselves, there are things in life, we cannot outrun, we cannot do something about.

Sometimes we just have to let it be.

Grief is among those brutal truths of life, that we cannot escape. It is in our human nature to feel it, experience it, and let the time do it’s job to help us heal from it.

In this particular case, I believe knowing yourself doesn’t heal you, Time does.

Special Thanks!

Thank you for reading this far! This has been a very personal story which took a lot of courage for me to put them in words and share it with you all. This in itself has been a healing experience.

I would like to thank Know Thyself, Heal Thyself and all its members for providing this platform where I could open up the bottle of trapped emotions and heal while I write my way here.

Once again, thank you for your time and attention!

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