That’s how Ravi Ragbir sees the trauma that engulfs his long and scarring deportation battle. It didn’t spare his mental health: sudden spasms of sadness, his chest closing up, tears choking his throat, his heart racing. They’re all signs that he’s getting too close to the lake — the imaginary place where he confines his suffering.
“I don’t want to fall in; I will break down,” says Ragbir. The water is a psychological tool he uses to curb his recurring emotional anguish.
“I basically shut down for a day or two, most of the time closed in myself. It drains me.”
As he talks about the lake, he breathes deeply to regain composure, straddling a fine line between trying to describe the fresh pain that wells up unpredictably and not letting that pain overwhelm him.
Ragbir is a former green card holder who became a popular immigrant organizer in New York City when he decided to transform his deportation case into a vehicle of resistance. In March, after nearly a decade of nerve-wracking check-ins with federal immigration agents, he was told to start preparing travel documents to return to Trinidad, which he left in 1994. When he walked out of the meeting, his whole body was trembling.
[For more of this story, written by Tiziana Rinaldi, go to https://www.pri.org/stories/20...-mental-health-issue]
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