Living In Denial

By Saee Pawar

Introspection - examining your own thoughts and emotions and finding clarity is something that everyone covets but seldom find it easy to achieve. It is at these junctions of confusion, that we decide to resort to the simple act of ‘living in denial’.

These two aspects - introspection and denial - are not necessarily contradictory to each other but surely form a nexus. You could fully analyse a situation and still live in denial. As opposed to this, you could live in denial without actually having proper knowledge about what you feel. Sometimes, it so happens that you merely live in denial just so you could delay the whole process of introspecting, dreading what you might find out about yourself.

In my 21 years of existence, I’ve realized that I use ‘denial’ as a measure to form a protective layer of covering around my thoughts or facts pertaining to a particular situation. Don’t want to accept something? Go into denial. So and so response doesn’t work for me? Seek denial. Bored? Mr Denial, where are you? I feel like I let it consume me sometimes.

If you’re in denial, you’re trying to protect yourself by refusing to accept the truth or something you might think is true. In both the cases, you trick your mind into thinking that you’re right. It works wonders for some people but it might be highly dangerous in some situations. For example, you find out that you have a lump in your throat. The mere idea that it might be cancerous sends a shiver down your spine. At such times, it is but natural to deny it all. But what if this denial of yours goes on for a long time? It might worsen your throat condition.

In my case, when I was going to appear for my 12th board exams, I constantly had this fear of failing the physics exam. I knew that I wasn’t prepared for it but I kept denying it. Living in denial at this particular instance worked like a charm for me because it gave me the required confidence to write at least what I knew.

What if I had spent my time thinking about how much exactly I had studied? Two extreme things would have happened - I would have lost all my confidence about what I had studied or I’d have understood how much I was prepared for and studied harder. These are thoughts that I’m introspecting right now but had never crossed my mind at that point in time. Evidently, it wasn’t really a choice that I made, but denying it all just kept me from going to the extremes.

From what I’ve gathered from my experiences, living in denial for a short period of time is necessary to give yourself time to adjust to the truth; like in the ‘lump in the throat’ example. It is fine if the person tells himself that the lump is just another ordinary lump for the time being. But after a point of time, he has to find the courage to see a doctor and accept the truth. This just proves that long periods of denial might be harmful for a person.

I would like to call introspection as the next step of living in denial. There is a time when you’re sitting by your window, sipping coffee and watching the raindrops gracefully fall to the ground. It hits you that now you want to go after the truth, breaking all barriers of fear that are keeping you in denial. At times like these, you finally introspect; understand what you exactly want and why you’ve been putting it off for a long time.

I remember how I kept telling myself that a certain friend would never turn her back on me but when she did, I went into denial of the whole matter. I refused my brain to believe that my dearest friend would turn out to be fake just because I feared that when I peacefully think about the whole situation, I’d choose to lose her instead of continuing to be in a toxic friendship. Eventually, I realized that I’ve been living in denial for too long and I took control of my thoughts and distanced myself from her.

As Thanos preaches, there has to be a balance between human life and resources. Similarly, for a stable mental health, one needs to create a balance between denial and introspection. Former, to form a protective shell to keep yourself sane and latter, to come to terms with the reality and face it.

As I had mentioned earlier, there is a nexus between introspection and denial. The primary one being, you need to introspect to understand that you’d been living in denial. To sum it all up, I’d say that I had to introspect to understand how many times in my life had I been living in denial and now I won’t live in denial of that introspection.

By Saee Pawar