I Wrote About My Mental Health for the First Time

Here’s a collection of unfinished drafts, underlining most of my thoughts since then.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my mental health for the first time. The article detailed my struggles with my diagnoses and the things I’ve learned along the way, flecked with a generous dose of inner conflict. It prompted a series of questions and realisations that have subjugated my thoughts since.

What I came to be increasingly cognisant of is the fact that a 3-minute read doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. I’m bursting at the seams to say more. More about the issues I’ve grappled with. More about what I’ve taken away from it all.

Have I stepped around the word “depression” too gingerly?

Am I invalidating other people’s struggles?

Have I been melodramatic in verbalising my own experience with mental health?

Why did writing it make me feel like I was being flung high into the air, with no visible contraption to abate my inevitable fall?

Depression on its most functional days is literally like visualizing yourself walking up an endless flight of stairs. You can’t turn around. Some days, you feel like if you work hard enough, you’ll actually get to the top. Some days, you realize that there’s no way you’ll ever get to the top, but you have no other choice than to just keep climbing. Many days, you want to just stop where you are and cry, because you can’t see the bottom where you started, nor the top where you want to end up. Your life has become the staircase. An uphill climb. Every. Single. Day.

I reckon you take life for granted, until you’re at the cusp of losing it. Perhaps that’s why I recognise the value of my life. It isn’t because I was caught in a dramatic life or death situation. I was entirely at my own mercy. Staring down the barrel of my own self-hatred. Looking over the edge of the cliff of my own contorted sense of self and feelings of worthlessness.

I have a bizarre relationship with depression. Does it make me miserable? Absolutely. Do I want to continue living with it? No, of course not. Has it taught me invaluable life lessons that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise? Yes.

• When I recognised, acknowledged and accepted my frailties, I became more robust.
• When I understood that comparison with others was fatuous, unnecessary and more often than not, downright harmful, I was liberated.
• When I stopped worrying about the what ifs and concentrated on the what is, I relaxed.
• Total acceptance of absolutely everything is a concept, but it’s a concept worth conjuring with.
• When I understood that I don’t experience objects as they are, I experience them as I am and that I can change that experience, I felt empowered.
• While my mental health struggles moulded me, they don’t define me. My expression belongs to me.
• I am not what happened to me.

It’s far from finished yet.