16

Vulnerability—The Chink in My Armour

‘It has been said, “time heals all wounds”. I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.’

—Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy

Almost everyone who has been through cancer will agree that we always look for emotional anchors. Sometimes we find them, sometimes we don’t. But it doesn’t stop us from hoping. At this time, I too was looking for the same, and that neediness made me take some wrong decisions. One of them was choosing the wrong person to have a committed relationship with.

I chanced upon a few old pages from my diary:

I was emotionally vulnerable. I had no idea what awaited me. Without mincing words and being honest, while still preserving the identity of the other person (as I don’t really believe in mud-slinging), I would like to elaborate. I do so with the intention of accepting my mistake and maybe sharing my learnings with those who might need to learn from my experience. When we are in a vulnerable state, we tend to face pitfalls.

I have invested a huge amount of my living hours on the wrong friends and the wrong man that I can’t really ignore it any more. I simply cannot pretend everything is hunky-dory in my castle. It’s NOT!

A deep bond is created when we give good-quality attention and appreciation to people. I long for such friendships now, where I can comfortably call someone and he/she runs to help me and NOT make a big deal of it, where I would be sure that I am priority no. 1!

Choosing a partner is the most important and trickiest thing in the world. I say tricky because it deals with our own ideals and expectations. Yet when we get attracted, how quickly we forget the core values that are essential for a peaceful, loving, long-term relationship! We start looking at reality with rose-tinted glasses, refusing to see its real face. Eventually, the truth hits us, but if you are like me—stubborn—it takes a long, long, long time to finally accept it has been a defeat of sorts. Hell yeah! By the time one has accepted the setback one has been battered emotionally, mentally and sometimes, physically.

I was so sure that THIS TIME god had taken pity on me and sent answers to my prayers by letting him walk through that door in March 2013. I could smell the aircraft on him as I opened the door of my New York apartment. He had come to drop a book my friend Mona wanted me to read. I was down with loads and loads of chemo and had a bald head and swollen face with no eyebrows. My eyes looked tired. I used to gaze at people with a stark and empty look. I had turned into what I was running away from—I had started to look like other cancer patients.

I wondered if I looked human at all. I could not understand why he was so kind to me. He was so good-looking—tall, broad shoulders, long hair. He seemed so strong, yet so gentle and kind.

He came a couple of times afterwards. We exchanged emails and he told me of a few alternative treatments that I could try if the chemotherapy didn’t work.

He knew a lot about alternative treatments as he had tried and tested every possible option for his parents when they were unwell. He had talked to many people about the different cures available. He told me about a doctor in Germany who did some alternative therapy. He even went ahead and fixed up my meeting with him. All I had to do was fly down to Germany if this first-line treatment—chemotherapy—did not work for me. He came in as a huge support to someone who needed it badly then.

I loved the way he said, ‘WE will get past these days and come out a winner.’

‘WE’? Who does that? Who has the time and inclination to visit a dying woman with old parents looking after her? No one! My own friends had more important things to do. The boy I had been dating then had no time and no money to travel to New York. Once again I had made a blunder by choosing a person who could not be there in my hour of need.

I realized that probably it was my fault. I must not be worthy of a responsible and committed relationship. I felt lonely and scared.

And that’s when THIS man walked in, stayed for long and kept on visiting me. I started to wonder if THIS WAS THE GUY! I was attracted to him but did not feel worthy of such a charmer.

It all started with me ignoring the fact that he was IN A COMMITTED RELATIONSHIP. I only saw that he was so good! I wanted to taste a bit of what dreams were made of. I argued with myself that I deserved this dream. This Prince Charming had walked in at a time when I had only death to look forward to. I was ugly, yet he saw beauty in me; I was unlovable, yet he made me feel worthy of his attention. The truth is, I ignored all the signs and all the obvious facts.

I started to make this dream my reality as I wanted it to be so. We had become good friends during our New York days—exchanging emails, calls and texts. He was there to give me support during my weakest times—during my chemo days; when I was apprehensive about how I would be received at airports; when I was scared of a cancer relapse in Kathmandu after Dr Makker discovered a new spot on my organ.

Nine months of kindness and loving friendship later turned into a full-fledged relationship in November. It had been a few weeks since I returned from Kathmandu and I was alone in Mumbai. He became my sole companion to various hospital visits in Mumbai and New York.

Everything was going perfect until I started to ask about his other ‘someone’. I guess this was the beginning of the end of this romantic saga. He started to lie when I asked him about it. He told me that they were separated BUT STILL CONTINUING FOR THE SAKE OF COMMITMENT. That emotionally there was a disconnect between them. He painted a very grave picture of their relationship.

But I began feeling doubtful. I wished that what he was saying was the truth. I had a failed marriage behind me so I believed him when he said that he was in an unhappy relationship too. I prayed he was not lying to me.

He came in as the protective alpha male who would comfort me. ‘I will protect you from the world,’ he would say. I felt like a child amid mishaps. Very vulnerable. The relationship was like that between a rescuer and rescued. As long as this was the equation, it worked, as the roles were very clear. But the moment I wasn’t in that victim role any more, and wanted to be on an equal footing, things started to unravel. The only problem was, I was deeply in love with him.

When his betrayal became apparent it shook my world and the effect remains to this day. It’s not easy to recover from a heartbreak.

Ironically, it was at this time that I watched Ek Mulakat, in which my friend Deepti Naval portrayed the role of Amrita Pritam. It was a play about the unrequited love between the great poets Amrita Pritam and Sahir Ludhiyanvi, who were madly in love with each other but had other commitments and partners of their own. This play stayed with me long after it was over.

Midway through the play, it struck me that somehow, my story was similar. My heart was breaking and I was moving out of the relationship. Mine too was a story about unrequited, unfinished love.

My aunt’s words echoed louder in my head, ‘Manisha, you’re very lucky in your work, but very unlucky in love.’

I was in danger of falling into depression and had to save myself. Initially, this friendship had made me strong, it had helped me fight through the pain. At that juncture in my life, it was almost a godsend. My need to be appreciated at my lowest physical, emotional and spiritual state had been met. He had helped uplift me and given me strength to fight. But now it had turned toxic.

I was also constantly mindful of the fact that I had a 90 per cent chance of recurrence right before my eyes, and I needed to pull myself out of anything that was painful and toxic. I was scared of falling into yet another emotional drama–packed relationship. My marriage had ended on such a note.

Was there a pattern here that I needed to release out of my system? My antennae were up. I didn’t want anything to bring me down again. My focus was to win in the race of life, and I just didn’t have space or time for anything that would pull me back.

I knew that I was not even ready for a relationship, as physically, emotionally and mentally I was still recovering. I knew that I needed to pull myself together and get the emotional strength to protect myself. If I succumbed now, I would regret that there were certain lessons that I had not learnt even after cancer. I was clear that I wanted to unlearn the bad patterns of attracting drama into my life. I desperately wanted peace and balance in all spheres.

So I gathered my strength. My survival instinct took over and I decided to detach from anything I was not ready for.

It was the bravest thing I did. I had dealt with cancer and come out of it. But to deal with a broken heart on top of that was painful.

I wasn’t going to ruin whatever was left. This new me who had been given a second chance at life and wanted to choose life over death knew that giving into an emotionally toxic relationship could ruin my health and make my cancer recur.

It is only when a moment becomes a memory that you realize its true value. My determination to not see him without his wife had sounded the death knell for our relationship. He wanted to continue the relationship the way it was going. My condition was that I wanted to meet him with his wife to see for myself if his marriage was really over. He never met that condition.

In the gentle light of forgiveness, I felt deeply grateful to him. Grateful for the lesson he taught me.

True, the experience broke my heart, but it also gave me an understanding of my self-worth. It nudged me towards honouring myself and sticking to my principles at every step.

After the turmoil of emotions I had been through, I suddenly felt a deep peace descend over me. I sighed. This sense of closure was beautiful.

The new me wanted to only feed her soul with what was good for her and bad for the cancer cells.

When every cell in my body ached to hold my love for him tighter, wisdom whispered to me—let go.

Herman Hesse, the German-born poet, novelist and painter, was so right when he said, ‘Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.’