But You Don't Look Sick
Today is World Mental Health Day. It shouldn’t take a world-wide holiday to get us to talk about these things as for most of us they’re a living, breathing part of our everyday. However, I’m one to admit (regrettably) that this is my first year acknowledging this day. It takes a great deal of strength to stand with this moment and embrace the branding you’ve been given. I applaud the thousands of people who have shared their journeys with mental health and beyond.
In the world we live in today, of social media façades and decadent Insta-stories glittered with face filters and stickers that tell us how one another is feeling, its become a normalcy to feel like you’re not enough. I for one can let myself feel so worthless while I scroll through the lives of others, and their remarkable days of sunshine, flowing champagne trips to wine country, and picture perfect home lives. That’s not to say that social media is the root of all evil. Social media is in fact serving as a platform that has the power to pivot our societies views on mental health altogether. Seeing influencers and mental health advocates such as Jen Gotch put her journey on visible display via Instagram has dramatically changed how thousands (including myself) view mental health.
In similar wording to Jen’s, it’s time to stop shaming ourselves, hiding, and acting as though we’re not worthy of sharing our struggle.
Over the past two years I’ve found myself feeling in ways that I never have before. Perhaps I’m on the brink of moving from one life-moment to another, from being youthfully ignorant to almost adulting. Maybe I’ve always had a slight-melancholic side to me that I’ve never been so conscious of before. Either way - these past two years have brought me some of the hardest moments, and also some of the most greatest joys that I’ve ever know. I’ve grown personally as a woman, and professionally as a creative who is defining her own role and where she fits at an ever-shifting company. I’ve watched my family change in ways that I’d never before thought would happen. I’ve sat up in bed after a difficult day leads to a hard evening - sobs heaving through my lungs as my heart begins to race to catch up to my wandering mind. Some moments have been so hard to get through that my body starts to physically ache, and my mind starts to go numb - as though forming sentences and cohesive thoughts was something that it had forgotten to do. It feels like your physical body starts to betray you while your mind runs rampant, showing reruns of scenes from your personal hell.
The worst moments I remember have been in the mornings. I find myself so overwhelmed, waking up with a pit in my stomach and my throat so tight that it feels like I’ve just had vocal cord surgery. It's on mornings like these that I get ready like a zombie - shower, dress and try to not burst into tears while I’m applying mascara. Some mornings, I get through it and make it out the door. Others, I’m alone in the apartment and the walls feel like they’re about to cave in on me and I burst into heaping tears that roll down my freshly foundationed cheeks. And then I hear my grandmother in my head, she used to always hate it when I cried - and she’d say, “Stop crying, stop feeling so sorry for yourself, it's not pretty. You’re not doing yourself any favors.” But then I think, well fuck being pretty. I’m already not anyone’s first pick at pretty anyway. I leave, face swollen and blotchy, throw my giant sunglasses on and rush into an aggressive commute - to get to an aggressive downtown, to sit at a desk that maybe doesn’t even want me there. All day the thought going through my mind of, what am I doing wrong and why can’t I just break free from this? I look around and think to myself that there is no way other people feel like this. They look so normal, so carefree and so blissfully unaware of any struggle of the mind. In a perfect world, we’d all just be able to cry together.
You're at work, in a conference room because you’re most definitely in a meeting with other people. It would sort of happen like a ripple affect, take one person and then would spread like wildfire. You’d all share what was going through your mind, cry and comfort one another and then be able to pick up the pieces and start to patch back together your day. Feeling just a bit better that you were not the only person in the world going through this - that there are others, much closer to you than you might have thought, right there with you.
However sadly, we’re told to not cry at work and leave emotions at the door, and are exiled into the bathroom to quietly tear up into a ball of toilet paper, flushing every so often in hopes that you can flush the feeling right out of the building. I’m not entirely sure what mental health acknowledgement would officially look like in the workplace but that's a rough sketch.
These moments are most often unpredictable, and come at the most inopportune times. I’ll be in my Chariot on the way to work and will be suddenly overcome by a rush of self-doubt and self-hate. I’ll run through a list of things that I’m neglecting or not doing enough of - how I should be doing this but I didn’t get to it. How I’m not being a good daughter, girlfriend or friend. How I’m totally going to get fired, remembering that I’m replaceable and need to prove myself every moment of every day because I am just another line on the payroll.
What I do know is that these feelings are incredibly complicated, thus making them difficult to articulate to others. It's a journey to go through these personally, and a marathon to go through them with another human being. For me, it's very challenging to share large parts of myself that are often quite hard to vocalize because they make me feel ugly and broken. I never want to be looked down upon, felt sorry for, or dismissed for being “unfit to deal”. I’m very lucky that my personal life is filled with support in all different areas. I have a support system that encourages me to talk about these struggles and doesn’t shame me for feeling them, airing them out and letting them pass through me like a wave of nausea. But that's really all that I’ve learned that I can do with these feelings - is to feel them, let the anxiety move through me. I recognize it, say hello to it - then actively tell it to screw off (it never does) and then ride the wave of turbulence until I feel somewhat like myself again. I’m not broken, and neither is anyone else. We’re human, we’re fighting to stay that way, and I’ll be damned if there comes a day when I stop fighting. I’m not defined by my anxiety, depression, or self doubt. I’m defined by the way I tell myself and others that they’re worth fighting for. The more we talk about our journeys, moments and lives with mental health is the moment we all become stronger - and give ourselves a fighting chance at normalcy.
All that said, looks are incredibly deceiving. I hide behind my sunglasses - others behind a façade amplified by social media. Whatever it may be, we don’t need to look sick to be unwell, and our wellbeing is completely dependent on your relationship with mental health.
