My Grandmother with Social Isolation Schema

As a kid, I kept asking my grandmother, why people left her?
My Grandmother with Social Isolation Schema
Image for representational purpose only.Source: mapixel


“There comes a point in your life when you realize;
Who matters,
Who never did,
Who won’t anymore,
And who always will.
― Adam Lindsay Gordon

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.

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 content those message used to carry but it was always the tone, style of narration, and above all the melodious voice which used to hook me up. 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 lone fighter in battle against physical and material world.

She made me understood that “One neither has an eternal companion nor has a strong support but rather a fragile and weak shoulder which keeps bending with time and then breaks off, further the bitter, but 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.

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

My conversations always concluded on 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 demand of the time was 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 that time, I would have cried a lot.

21 June 2021, was that time when my grandma met her eternal love and now she will never return. She left us; she left us all, same 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 actually suffering from social isolation schema. Unfortunately she couldn’t find about it, neither me, and unlucky I found the root by just clicking away.

All she told me about her dealings with people around was full of negativities. In her stories I found only pain, loneliness, cunningness, longing, mistrust, deception, dishonesty, disloyalty and above all hypocrisy rather 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 during 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 twinkled, thinking that these stars are talking with him. The stars became like 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 the 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 human organism, 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 advices 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 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 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, with the intention of rebuilding 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”, say Emanual Kant.

Hikmat Yar is a degree holder in Mass Communication & Journalism from Kashmir University


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