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Aparna Piramal Raje has battled bipolarity for over 20 years. Her book Chemical Khichdi – How I Hacked My Mental Health reflects her journey and learnings. She tells us why the book is about mental wellness, rather than just mental illness
Somewhere in the mid-2000s, when the world was at the peak of the dotcom boom, Aparna Piramal had just finished a summer internship with a senior government bureaucrat in the then Andhra Pradesh government. She was about to start an MBA at Harvard Business School, and she was looking forward to it since she thought she would be rubbing shoulders with future global CEOs. The word ‘bipolarity’ was not in her family’s vocabulary. That she would be diagnosed with it, at 24 years of age, became the most urgent reality of her life.
“The excitement of going to Harvard, combined with some emotional turmoil in my personal life, was the ‘perfect storm’ that tipped me into hypomania,” reveals the Mumbai-based writer, columnist, public speaker and adviser. After suffering silently for over 20 years from the condition, she has finally managed to filter her learnings into Chemical Khichdi – How I Hacked My Mental Health (Penguin Ebury Press). Part memoir, part self-help guide, it is a book in which she makes a very private part of her life open to the public.
“Back in 2014, about 18 months after I was first officially diagnosed, I wrote a piece for my immediate family, friends and my book club. It became a template for my book.”
Back when she had to relocate to Boston to attend Harvard, Aparna had lost sleep, suffered delusions of grandeur and was buffeted by too many racing ideas. “My sister and mother had to accompany me because I couldn’t travel on my own,” she recalls of her initial experience with the condition. “I was enjoying the high, but they were baffled by my behaviour, by the changes in my facial expressions and in my eyes. When they left Boston, I became depressed for some months.”
Her official diagnosis came much later, in 2013, and, then, writing became her way of making sense of the world, starting with her inner landscape. “Back in 2014, about 18 months after I was first officially diagnosed, I wrote a piece for my immediate family, friends and my book club titled 10 Things I’ve Learnt About Being Bipolar,” she recalls. “They liked it and it became a template for my book.” At the time, her mood swings did not allow Aparna to get the distance she needed from her thoughts and emotions to write the book. “The lockdown gave me the time and space I needed to focus on completing it; it gave me a lot of purpose during a time of great uncertainty and flux,” she says.
The struggles in dealing with the condition were many – its cyclical nature with ups and downs, the difficulty of picking herself up when depressed or low, the effect it had on her physical health that led to unmanageable weight gain and the psychological aspect – and led to her addressing the triggers that cause the condition. Dealing with these, she came up with the seven therapies that she talks about in Chemical Khichadi.
“It was harder writing about the depression, and acknowledging to myself how often I have been unhappy.”
Being quite clear from the beginning that the book would be a mix of memoir and reportage, Aparna was able to go back to her periods of mania quite easily, as she felt detached from them. “It was harder writing about the depression, and acknowledging to myself how often I have been unhappy. As one of the doctors said, mania is hard on the family; depression is hard on you.”
Once you pick up the book, you are empowered from para one – just as Aparna intended. “My message to anyone who is struggling is that you can have a mental health condition and continue to live the life you want to lead,” she avers. “It is a vulnerability just like any other and we all have our challenges.”
Images courtesy Aparna Piramal Raje
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