I Don’t Consider Sharing My Mental Illness Struggles “Brave”
The articles I write are as much for me as they are for anyone else
I’ve written more articles than I originally thought I had ideas for, and the vast majority of them have been on mental health. In some of them, I’ve outlined various personal experiences and events from my own life. Whenever this has happened, I’ve noticed at least one comment praising me for being “brave” enough to share my struggles.
I’ve often replied with a polite thank you or something like that, but there’s been more than one occasion where I almost wrote back an entire essay on why I don’t consider it brave. It’s happened often enough to make me want to write an article on it. So here it is, the simple truth:
I don’t consider it brave of me — at all — to share my struggles with mental illness.
It Doesn’t Negatively Impact Me
A while ago, an actress appeared on the cover of a magazine. She was apparently quite overweight, and it seems the picture of her was revealing. She was lauded as being brave.
From that incident, I inferred that people consider it brave to share details about themselves which objectively could expose them to judgement, shame, or ridicule. Fair enough. If…
