A Person with Social Isolation Schema

Hikmat Yar

“There comes a point in your life when you realize;
Who matters,
Who never did,
Who won’t anymore,
And who always will.
So, don’t worry about people from your past, there’s a reason why they didn’t make it to your future.”
― Adam Lindsay Gordon

When I was a kid, my grandmother always used to tell me about her life experiences, her childhood, her married life, family, relatives, her struggle to sustain, and moreover about her friends.

As a kid, I was unable to understand the meaning of those messages, but it was always the tone, style of narration and above all the melodious voice which used to hook me to her stories. The messages being conveyed used to carry the life in revealed form and the interpretation of its stages. She used to share with me the experience of being a lone fighter in the battle against the physical and material world.

She made me understood that ‘one neither has an eternal companion nor has strong support but rather a fragile and weak shoulder which keeps bending with time and then breaks off, further the bitter, but the true essence of life is recognizing yourself. The haste never adds beauty to it rather spoils and makes it homogenous to an extent that one cannot separate the two.

As a kid, I kept asking my grandmother, ‘why people left her? Was it because she wasn’t good or was it because they too were fed up with existence or what?’ The grandma used to silence me by saying: ‘I wasn’t good for all of them.’

Grandmother made me understand that we humans besides hating each other have a weak creed of loving somebody to the moon once in a lifetime. We always tend to stay, walk, talk and laugh with that person whatever the circumstances.

My conversations always concluded with the sentence: ‘Did you find that person in your life grandma?’ The response always used to be “No, not yet”. Grandma knowing it well that time reveals everything as per the demand and the time demanded to keep me in deception. She somehow told me about the arrival of that person who will stay by her side eternally and that person she was talking about never came in my presence.

I know now who that person is and why he will never cease to love her but knowing this; jubilation took a back seat in my life. I also understood that if the same would have been revealed to me at that time, I would have cried a lot.

June 21, 2021 was the day when my grandma met her eternal love, never to return. She left us, she left us all, the same way as she was left alone by her close ones.

Recapitulating again her stories, I now know what she was telling me in my childhood. Now, I understand and can interpret all her stories what exactly she meant. My grandmother was suffering from social isolation schema. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find out what these feelings are all about.

Social isolation schema is a mental phenomenon where Individuals experience certain forms of disconnection or rejection which in turn develops one or more of these schemas: abandonment, mistrust/abuse, emotional deprivation, defectiveness/shame, and social isolation.

All she told me about her dealings with people around was full of negativities. In her stories, I found only pain, loneliness, cunningness, longingness, mistrust, deception, dishonesty, disloyalty and above all hypocrisy rather than something good.

In her life, she faced all types of adversities, but her positive approach in dealing with all this is a forever lesson for me. “Ath Lagan Jigre te myane gaasha dunya chunna pewaan basawun, natte diyyan ne nebbar nearne” which meant, it takes courage to face all this, besides people around will not let you live. These teachings taught me that you don’t always get roses, thorns accompany you too.

I remember a story in which she told me that once there was a man who looked towards the sky in the night. The man fell in love with the stars and thought these are his friends. The man used to wave his hand towards the sky when stars twinkle, thinking that these stars are talking with him. The stars became part of his life. The man was happy with his new friends. One night, he looked into the sky and found there where no one among his friends in the sky. The man waited for many days but no one returned. Deeply sad and depressed, the man started cursing his fate.

One night in his dream he saw these stars laughing at him. Angrily he told the stars why they are laughing at him and his response was: ‘O man, why you fell in love with us when you know we can’t stay for anyone? It is in our nature to fade away and we survive like this. Moreover, nature has reached its heights of perfection in the form of humans and know it, you human beings attain the peak of perfection in individual consciousness. Be always conscious in your life. Don’t curse your existence, you humans are unique, love yourself, and be human.’

All I could understand from the advice of my grandmother is that don’t get attached to anyone in this life as no one will stay always with you. You have to live this life all alone. Make your ends meet by yourself and make it to the end. You will gradually but certainly come to know that who and what matters and vice versa. People come and go, consider it a mere routine. Just live and let people live.

My grandmother besides having a notion of social isolation schema dealt with it all alone, perhaps because she had already understood how to deal with all this.

We all have our own thesis of our lives, our experiences serve us as antithesis, and we have to synthesize our lives based upon our experiences. We have to learn things with each passing time sort out the good and bad and then relearn to make this life better. This activity of building and tearing itself apart, to rebuild itself is the life of being.“Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal Law of nature”- Immanuel Kant.

Author is a Mass Communication and Journalism pass out from the University of Kashmir’s Media Studies Department. He can be contacted at: darhikmat011@gmail.com