I was born into a North-Indian family and I spent my childhood with my grandparents in Haryana. As my grandfather served in the Indian Navy, I belong to an Indian Defence Family. I grew up learning about the importance of discipline, honor, respect and the welfare of my country.
Eight years ago, when my grandfather passed away, I moved to Mumbai and the next chapter of my life began which changed everything. As a teenager, I was super-sensitive. I used to take every mark about myself from my peers or people every seriously. As a teenager when puberty hits there are a lot of changes in one’s body and initially, I had really bad breakouts of acne and I gained weight due to anxiety. At that point of time, I heard a lot of mean comments from my peers about how I looked, or how I was going to look in future.
I was always good at academics as well as co-curricular activities. However, about three years ago, when I passed out of 10th standard and took a decision to choose arts stream, I faced a lot of criticism from a lot of people. Questions like – “Oh did you not score well?”, “Dude, you won’t have a career, it’s a mistake”, and it all started coming up in most of my conversations with them. Some of my ‘friends’ unfollowed me on social media, and even stopped recognizing me. As a teenager, I was facing both peer pressure and societal pressure as well.
But that was the end of the beginning. Soon, I realized how many people go through such incidents on an everyday basis. I learned that bullying is very common. As a young person who felt responsible, I identified the need to start destigmatizing conversations around mental health. Two years ago, I started a youth-based organization Beyond the Bounds which aims at creating awareness on mental health among the youth. However, it was not easy since I faced a lot of rejection as mental health is still a taboo in India, and people did not think of it as important and some still don’t.
But my family supported me, so I kept going on and didn’t lose hope. We started out with campaigns on social media. Slowly and steadily, people started realising the importance of these conversations. We started taking sessions and workshops in schools and colleges addressing different topics related to mental health as well, and reached out to more than 12000+ people, launching 4 projects across the country and expanding our initiative internationally to Kenya. Our work has been acknowledged by Harvard University during HMUN India 2019 and I’m also a KidsRights organization changemaker.
I have learnt a lot from my teenage journey, the mistakes, the people, the failures, etc. I want to tell my story to the world not because I want to tell the world that I’m a victim, but because I want to let those of you know who have experienced bullying, low self-esteem, stress, anxiety, depression and other mental health issues in their life (which we refrain from talking about because of society) that have a hunger for your ambition. Turn your interest into action, and just follow your dream no matter what people say about it.
