Nevita Sankar
Getting the poison out/The making of an antidote
Controlling without force; emotionally manipulative, abusing innocent trust; false passive behaviour to make you feel guilt and invalidation. Misrepresenting your words, your truth, and your pain. Cowarding away angrily when you are growing resistant; not going to listen without burning you some more.
The pain persists, and it might feel like self betrayal when even with the poison stopped, you mourn and cry and still feel the pain and fear.
The sly venomous sickness of a person, who is only human too, has been sent away and gone for a while. The poison lessens, but the mind forgets slower. The poison lessens and you are freer, but the pain is still too accessible.
You grow bigger than the pain and build renewed loves and visions. The ones around you hurt less too. The memory is still there, as both poison and antidote. And you feel waves of pain and healing, knowing it must be worth feeling, to have grown so much.
You learn to let yourself be, to be okay with what you used to hide, the thing thought to be weakness but is only the protective and changing human inside.
Who you were all along you finally show to yourself. Because that is what you had hoped for, wished for and needed. You wished for someone to show you the love and care you shared always, and now you allow yourself to show unconditional love inwards. Tolerance and patience to what heals and not what poisons.
To beg for support from false friends, endure silence and indifference as you crumble and fight to stand, but continue to be warm, hopeful and hold out your hand. To endure such a backhanded act as you grow kinder, will not be your loss, but the poisoner's reminder that you, and the ones around you have grown resistant, closer and wiser.
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About Nevita Sankar
Nevita is a multidisciplinary artist based in Scarborough. She works in drawing, painting, film, photography, sculpture, writing and more. These different mediums and forms of working are sometimes brought together into multimedia pieces. With interests in both the sciences and the arts, there is no limit to the direction in which her work can go.
This piece was written during the beginning of the pandemic, which also happened to be at the start of the tail end of many other large life events that had just occurred. This was written all at once, without an idea of where it was going, just knowing I wanted to write and clear my mind. I was speaking to myself in a way, but also just speaking to nothing or no one in particular; or to everything at once. Looking back at this piece now, there is much I had forgotten, it was like reading it for the first time. Presently my mindset is mostly in a very different place, things feel different and I feel I have grown exponentially larger than that moment. And yet it is seeing through the past until now, and these moments before transformation, that I can fully appreciate the full scope of change and growth that has been happening so steadily until now. So many small moments like this, have served to completely transform my world, and will likely continue that way. Everyone is capable of change, but it is not a result, it is a beautiful ongoing process.