Originally posted by: _priyaa_
Why did Ishani lost the ability to cry in epistle-20 ..& again she lost the ability to cry four years ago..I'm a bit confused here..Interlude-3 was once again brilliant.. The intense conversation of Ishani & non-existent Ranveer in the bathroom was quite poignant...beautifully penned..But I have a doubt..Does scars really give temporary relief..I mean self harm...Being suicidal is something else when you have lost the desire to live & simply want to end your life...and I could understand that..But self harming is the thing which I m finding a bit difficult to grasp...😲
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The reason why she lost her ability to cry in Epistle 20 was because she was emotionally numb after she realized that she had done to Ranveer. It was the first time that she realized that she had the insurmountable power to make or break Ranveer in her own hands, and to see the way she used that temporarily rendered her dumbfounded and shocked.
When she lost her ability to cry four years ago, she had given up on the emotion because she no longer wnated to be weak. She wanted to become an independent woman, a woman who had the strength to build an empire by her own two hands rather than a helpless woman who cried upon her cruel fate and how she was left all alone.
As to your question upon self-harm, hypothetically speaking, yes, it does give the victim relief from the emotional and psychological trauma that they are going through. Like you said aptly, suicide and self-harm are two different things even though they do come along the same page if matters get worse in terms of self-harm. But yes, the psychological concept of self-harm does state the fact that the victime enjoys the pain inflict they upon themselves.
And that's why I used the psychological reason of perfectionism over here. Perfectionism in its negative association makes the victim want to master anything that renders him'her vulnerable. Ishaani, over here, considers tears and pain in itself to be the biggest vulnerabilites that she faces and hence resorts to the temporary relief of using the scalpel that keeps her in control.
Like I hinted in the chapter as well, when she originally got into self-harm, her purpose was simply to ease herself of the agony that she felt mentally and emotionally at the loss of her parents, Ranveer, the divorce, and being left in poverty all alone. The pain she physically inflicted upon herself helped her ease the mental ones. During the course of providing herself a scar in one week, she soon realized that she could channel what she was doing in a more productive channel.
She sought to rid herself of the one thing that she considered was her greatest weakness and now chose to eradicate pain with pain. Mastering the ability of not feeling any mental agony, she let herself fall emotionally numb, while her weekly administerations did not bother her much. That was where she decided that he has finally gained perfectionism by having full control upon her emotions. The day she achieved that, she stopped using the scalpel.
Every emotional repression has a certain level, and Ishaani found hers breaking the day she overheard her employers calling her a cold, manipulative bitch. That's the reason she went back to the scalpel.
I'm not going to give you a guarantee as to how right my idea on self-harm is because this was the ghastliest topic I've had to research upon (apart from heart diseases), but I think this is pretty much how the entire thing works, atleast in Ishaani's case. There are several more sphere to the concept of "self-harm" in general, but the basic rules remain the same.
Edited by LadyMeringue - 9 years ago
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