My Mental Health Journey

Content Warning: depression, mental health

I would like to start this off by saying this: everybody has struggled with mental health sometime in their life, and many often still struggle with it everyday. No matter what your situation is, you are never alone. 

Throughout my whole life, I’ve battled with my own mind. Through my years in middle and high school I had terrible self-esteem, body image, and bouts of depression. It hasn’t been until the last two years of my life that I’ve taken the time to address my feelings, work through them, and try my hardest to move past them. 

Still, to this day, there are mornings when I can hardly get out of bed because of the way my brain perceives itself. I feel literally sick to my stomach when I look in the mirror and see who I see. I see a human being that doesn’t look like she feels on the inside, and it hurts. This is the mentality that kept me from getting into a relationship for 18 years. I couldn’t find it within me to love myself, and I thought that no one could love me the way I was.

I struggle with these feelings of self hate everyday. And you probably have too, sometime in your life. Self hate is a terrible thing and yet often feels impossible to stop. What’s kind of ironic is whenever I hear my friends talk about things they dislike about themselves, it makes me sad or even angry. It’s hypocritical, I know. But we can never fully understand why someone feels the way they do because no one person shares a mind. We don’t know how the other one thinks or perceives their situation.

When I struggled with depression in high school, I recall telling a friend one day that I could feel absolutely nothing. I felt devoid, like a completely different person, like my true self had just withered away over time. That feeling of emotionlessness is impossible to fully describe. It’s just pure emptiness, the feeling of being a spectator in your own life. I felt so tired all the time, an exhaustion that was internal and that no cup of coffee could cure.  All of this because I was drowning in expectations, uncertainty in my future, a job, an overwhelming course load, and unhappiness in myself. 

I didn’t give myself enough room to just be a person. But I liked being busy because it made me feel like I had a purpose, and without the busyness I felt like I didn’t deserve to exist. I remember waking up back then just wanting so badly to even just be sad. To feel the passion I’d lost for life and my interest, things I had staked my identity on. To establish real connections with the people around me. But it felt like there was a cloud of impermeable smoke keeping me away from all those things I desperately wanted back. And I couldn’t fight it at the time. 

Some of you reading this right now probably didn’t know that I was feeling this way, and oftentimes that is normal. We’ve been so conditioned to keep our feelings hidden, stuff it down inside, that it’s practically innate within us to do so. We create this facade of happiness on the surface believing that it will pull us away from whatever is hurting us, that we can fake it until we are happy, but not realizing that those actions actually do the exact opposite. 

What I learned  from my experiences is that you cannot outrun what you feel. In order to move on, you have to bask in whatever is hurting you. Face it. Learn about it. Know it. This is what heals you. And you don’t have to go through that process alone. I know that I was stubborn about admitting I needed someone there for me, but there is nothing to fear in asking someone to help you. And while you’re in the midst of whatever you’re facing, please don’t compare your experience to others. Every single story is unique and valid. 

Mental health is an ongoing journey of discovery: high and lows, valleys and mountains. It’s not always easy, but the more we go through it, the easier it gets. I used to see no point in life. But with time, patience, and lots of reflection, I’ve learned that life can be, and often is, really beautiful. 

The people of The Daily Gamecock: we see you. We stand with you. You are not alone.

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