BENGALURU: “My goodness, you’re really funny!” she shouted out. “I had no idea you could be funny too.”
“I hear this quite frequently,” says Sylvia Harris, a 23-year-old social activist from Bengaluru. Sylvia writes heart-rending songs and maintains a blog of self-serving, existentially glum poetry. It is not surprising for this young adult when people walk up to her and tell her that they had no expectations of smiling while they watched her do what she does.
“I would also expect myself to be just as depressed in person too, if I would not be aware of who I was. I am certainly not the only one in this absurdity,” she adds.
The gloomy comedian typecast stretches to almost all entertainers and beyond into most jovial people. Research shows that often people who are childish and funny, struggle to be so because they know how it feels to be depressed and by compelling bliss into their knack and communication, they fake it till the time they make it.
Many times, this humour takes a step further. It dims into something melancholic and inappropriate. It is difficult for a majority of the people to hang around with those who are familiar with that kind of darkness and illness, because they rarely actually live there.
“I cannot recollect a time when I did not feel needlessly heavy, when being alive was not a burden. I first tried to kill myself at 14. The last time I cut myself, I was 21. That was only two years ago. Like many women who seem to ‘grow out’ of their self-harm as they get older, I have learned to channel my desire to not be alive into other, more subtle methods. I don’t eat at all, or I binge-eat for days.
I don’t sleep for nights on end, or I stay up until 4 a.m. and sleep until 3 p.m. I isolate myself from anyone who could do me any good. I overwhelm myself with productivity and projects until I start to crack under the pressure I get myself into. I don’t like talking about my depression. If you ask me about it, I will acknowledge it and move on to the next subject as quickly as possible. I have avoided going to therapy because I hate dwelling on it, actually looking it in the eye and acknowledging,” asserts Sylvia.
“It is bad when there is a family gathering, because if I am in a depressive state already, I can’t absorb the reality of long sad discussions. My first impulse is to make a joke about it. To lighten it somehow because there’s this dark, writhing creature in my brain that’s already squeezing hard and trying to kill me and if I take on thinking about one more unpleasant thing, I might actually kill myself,” Sylvia adds.
According to psychiatrist Dr Gunjan Sharma, such inappropriate humour is noted to occur in many psychological experiments when subjects find themselves placed under a high degree of emotional stress specifically involving perceived harm to others. This describes why some psychologists classify humour as one of the ‘mature’ defense mechanism we summon to safeguard ourselves against overwhelming anxiety. We can live in denial, but it is as good as putting a plaster on a very big, nasty wound, adds Dr Sharma.
Internalising the Hurt
Many people facade their depression with humour. They learn early in life to hide their deepest, darkest feelings from others. Depressed people are not popular; they are encouraged to lighten up which they do. They smile and make others laugh. They make other people feel good. Sometimes in the process they even experience their own humour and temporarily escape from their own pain. Not wanting to be a burden to others and believing that others do not want to hear their pain, they do not seek help. Instead, they internalise their pain often becoming loners. The morose humour, the awful jokes, the out of place hilarity is all a method of seeing something dreadful without actually seeing it. It is an escape out of the death trap which is depression. Perhaps we should listen more attentively to those who hide behind the mask of humour.