I Didn't Understand Mental Health Until It Was Me

For most of my life, the matter of mental health existed out there in the distance — something I'd heard about on the television, caught a glimpse of on the pages of a magazine, or witnessed others discuss with a kind of sympathetic remove. I knew mental health mattered, but it was a concept, like a warning on a road that I never had any intention of driving. I believed mental illness happened to other people — to people who had suffered beyond expression, to people who were in some way "other" from me. I believed I understood it, but the truth is, I didn't. Not really. Not until it occurred to me.

It started sneakily. I was under a great deal of stress — work pressures, domestic issues, and the growing sense that I wasn't where I was supposed to be in life. I wrote off my fatigue and anxiety as normal. Everyone feels overwhelmed sometimes, I told myself repeatedly. But the feeling didn't go away. Instead, it grew, a weighty feeling like an invisible pack tied around my back. I started to lose interest in things that I used to enjoy. I started pulling away from friends, not answering calls and messages because I couldn't muster the energy to fake that I was okay.

Nevertheless, I resisted the idea that something was wrong. I mean, I could sit up in bed. I could push myself through the activities of my day. To me, this meant that I wasn't "really" having trouble — that I didn't struggle like the people I'd read about. I minimized how I felt, thinking that if I acknowledged I needed help it would somehow suggest weakness.

But mental health doesn't work like that. It's not a light switch that's on or off. It's a spectrum, and I was inching further along it without realizing it. It wasn't until anxiety turned into panic attacks — heart-pounding, air-gulping seconds of unadulterated fear — that I had to wake up. I couldn't ignore it anymore. I wasn't "stressed out." I was sick, and I needed help.

It was one of the hardest things I've ever done to seek assistance. Being in a therapist's office for the first time, I was humiliated, embarrassed that I wasn't strong, that I had failed at being able to stand alone. But the therapist said something that shook me: "You don't have to earn your pain. If you're hurting, it matters."

I learned in therapy that I had missed so much all those years when mental health had felt like a problem for someone else. Mental health is everyone's problem — because it's just being human. It's not something about being "strong" or "weak"; it's just about the understanding that our brains, as well as our bodies, sometimes need help and care.

I also learned how deeply ingrained stigma is, not just in society, but in each of us. I had learned to think that it was shameful to battle mental health, something to hide. But the truth is, there's nothing to be ashamed of to be human. There's nothing to be ashamed of to need help.

Since beginning my healing journey, I’ve been more open with the people around me. To my surprise, many of them shared their own stories — stories they had kept hidden out of fear and shame. It made me realize how many people are quietly carrying invisible burdens, just waiting for someone to say, "It's okay to talk about it."

If there's one thing I wish I could tell my former self, and anyone who feels like they're drowning by themselves, it's this: your feelings are valid. You don't have to reach rock bottom before you're deserving of assistance. You don't have to compare your pain to someone else's in order to justify seeking help. Mental health is as real as physical health, and taking care of it is a sign of strength, not weakness.

I still have good and bad days nowadays, but I greet them with more compassion — for others, and for me. I now realize that mental health is not someone else's story. It's all ours. And sometimes, only when we can find ourselves saying: it could be me, too, do we get it.

#EndTheStigma #MentalHealthMatters