The pieces not seen on social media - Mental Health Awareness Month

May is mental health awareness month, and I have thought a lot about what that means and why it is important for me to put pen to paper and share anything at all.  This is the third piece I have written on this topic, which is why May is almost over and I am just posting.  Mental Health Wellness (as I have been told is the proper way to address this) is near and dear to my heart because I have battled depression and anxiety since I was in high school.  Although I do post about selfcare and mental health wellness, I rarely, truly share my journey in writing.  I am vocal when I see someone struggling, or when I am chatting with my friends, but I have never put anything out in the universe in this form for so many reasons.

One of the reasons pertains to why I have written this piece so many times.  It is because people will never be able to speak their truth without offending someone else that may be struggling in a different way than they are.  Even using the word “struggling” might be offensive to someone out there, but for me, “struggling” is the best word to use when describing MY mental health journey.  I would never want to trigger someone or make them feel that I am doing anything to hinder their journey or hurt the feelings of someone who lost a loved one to a struggle they knew nothing about. So, allow me to preface this article by saying that I am not a therapist and I am not licensed to advise anyone.  But I am a person who struggles and has struggled for the majority of my life with feelings and thoughts that took me a long time to get a hold of and understand.  This is my journey and these are my feelings and experiences.  Please know that I speak for no one other than myself and I will be using the language that best describes my feelings and the language that I am most comfortable with.

Writing about this topic is important to me because part of my therapy and what helps me get my feelings out is writing.  I share a lot of my life on social media and with clients, but I have not been as open about this part of my life.  The stigma that can sometimes come from saying out loud “I am depressed” can be scary, but I guess that is part of the awareness.  It is equally as important to be aware that everyone is different and to be aware that we all wear our “wellness” or “illness” (as I identify with that word more closely) differently.

The word awareness had me stuck when I began writing because I do not think there is a way to make everyone aware of mental health wellness as there is no blanket explanation or definition.  Again, each person struggles differently, feels different things, looks different and reacts/ handles (for a lack of better word) things differently as well.  I will not begin to describe how I think people see me, but I guarantee that most people are not guessing that I might spend an entire Sunday in bed crying after a big wedding weekend where everything went smoothly and perfectly.  Why am I in bed feeling blue?  I could not say, but it happens and people would never know unless you are my husband or a close friend that I have let into that piece of my life.  Does this stop me from running a successful business and getting up every day and living my life, taking care of my responsibilities, being a good mom, a good wife or a good friend?  No.  But for some people it can be more debilitating than it is for me.  And even for me, some days can be more debilitating than others.

I knew at 15 that I had feelings that were heavier than what I could even comprehend and l knew I was not handling them correctly.  I was lucky enough to have a friend who noticed signs that no one else did (or if they did, they did not let me know) and although she might not have understood how to handle it as a 15-year-old, she had enough knowledge to pull her mother in for help.  Although I had asked her to keep what was happening a secret, she broke that trust and I was grateful that she did. 

Her confiding in her mother was what brought me to talk about my feelings and, although not right away, eventually it would take me to therapy and set me on the road to better understanding myself and how to handle the times that became too heavy; even now.  I spent years searching for something that I always equated to a physical person that I thought would “fix” my feelings and make me feel “better”.  I thought someone could love me enough for the both of us.  Unfortunately, my self-worth was affected lot more by how others treated me rather than how I treated myself.

Now, at 41, I can recognize that the reality is that I was trying to cope with things well outside of my age range. I know now that there was nothing anyone could have done to “fix” me. I know now that there are some things that I can control and some things that are just ... me!  But knowing what it means to be me and how to cope with the pieces of me that are more challenging is ultimately up to me to understand. And While I cannot always control things, I can control the people around me that do not support me and only make me feel less than “normal”.  I have learned that it is okay to cut out toxic people, no matter who they are.

Initially when I wrote this piece, I wanted the message to be that you should not have to know that someone is struggling with mental health wellness in order to be kind to them.  I wanted people to be aware that being just plain nice is something we should all be more aware of no matter who we are interacting with.  But now, I guess what I want people to understand is that there does not need to be a stigma associated with any kind of journey that any of us are on.  I would like people to be aware that all struggles were not created equal and all roads on the mental health journey do not lead to the same place.  I want people to be aware that there is no “look” that identifies us all, and that sometimes, we give signs to those in our lives, but sometimes we suffer in silence.  Neither of those coping mechanisms are anyone’s fault.  It is about how we handle things - not about how open people are to receiving our feelings (at least not for me).

I would want people to be aware that sometimes things are more severe for some people than they are for others but any struggle, no matter the size, can feel like the weight of the world. It can play games with your mind and your heart and it can certainly isolate those that are affected in that way, such as myself.  No one outside of that person would ever guess, but inside, you never know what goes on.

I have come a long way since that 15-year-old girl, and I know now that I did not need to be “fixed”, I just needed more understanding of myself and what makes me “tick”.  I know now that this is always going to be a part of who I am, but this does not define me.  I know now that some things seem like mountains to me, but to other people, it is nothing but a small hill.  I cry even when I do not know why I am sad but that is okay, because, for me, I laugh a hell of a lot more than I cry, and it took me many years and a whole lot of getting to know myself to say that.  At the end of the day, these are the things that make me, me and I know now that I do have support, outside of myself, and I have people in my life who love me for who I am through it all.  I would also want people to be aware that the things you see on social media are really me, but this part is really me as well.  All of the pieces of me are a part of my mental health journey and I guess I just wanted to make you aware of it.