Reflecting on Mental Health

I didn't intend for this post to go the way it did. I was gonna talk about the holidays and what I was looking forward to, but this went a different way. Instead of fighting what was being written, I just decided to see where this post went. I hope you learn a lot in this post, not only about me but about my insights.

I've struggled with my mental health since I was kid. I remember being at a friend's birthday party when I was five or six and having a full on emotional breakdown during it (if that friend is reading this, I'm so sorry if I made your birthday party awkward or ruined it). I also came up with extreme punishments when I was a kid whenever I did something bad. I'm talking like no snacks, no video games for a long time, very extreme punishments.

Now that I am older, I can look back at those instances and realize that they were symptoms of mental illness. Since I was a kid, however, it wasn't addressed seriously until I was older and had engaged in more self-destructive activities. I wish that my mental illnesses had been addressed earlier instead of festering and wrecking more havoc on my life.

I didn't address my mental illnesses until about two years ago. By then, I had done horribly in middle school, high school and my bachelor's program in college. While I was smart, I didn't apply myself and I barely graduated with my bachelor's degree with a 2.0 GPA, having started college with a 3.1 GPA from high school. I finally got diagnosed with comorbid mood disorders and put on medication to address them. But I still struggled with my mental health, in part due to where I was in my career and life. I had a bachelor's degree, yet I could not get a job in my field and ended up working in retail. I was living with my parents and making minimum wage during a pandemic, while attending community college to better my abysmal GPA from university so that I could get into a master's program so I could get out of retail. I became very depressed and thought that I was just taking up space and disappointing everyone.

In a way, I was falling into a trap a lot of people fall into: thinking the medication would solve all my problems. It solved a lot of my symptoms but not the damage my mental illnesses had already wrecked. I am still trying to fix some of the damage I caused when I was unmedicated but I don't think I'll be able to fix all of it.

Thankfully, my life turned around for the better. I got out of retail, I got a stable job, I moved out of my parents house, and I got into a master's program. I've also explored non-destructive ways of dealing with my mental illnesses: writing, drawing, meditation, reading, creating music, learning new skills, journaling, photography, and more. I did therapy for a while and got to a point where I didn't need it anymore but I may start again because of what I say below.

In a weird way, it's discomforting how stable I feel right now. I went for over twenty years having instability with my mental health and my life that I feel like something bad has to happen, like my life is too good to be true. I think that's something people who struggle with mental illness for a long time don't talk about: adjusting to the good when you were surrounded by the bad. When you are so used to being around something bad, anything good feels temporary and being surrounded by it for a long time feels like a dream.

I hope to be more comfortable with the good things in my life, but I don't think I'll ever take them for granted. I don't even take feeling happiness and joy for granted, as I never thought I would feel those ever again. Even if the good doesn't last forever, I want to remember how it feels and keep it for as long as I can.

Now, here is the weirdest part of this whole post: I would not change what happened in my life with my mental health. In a way, it helped me grow and understand things I would have never understood before. I understand my mental health better. I understand my creativity better. I understand my life better. I am who I am because of the course my life went. Would I want someone to undergo what I went through with my mental health? No way in hell. But someone had to go through it, and unfortunately, that someone was me.

I'm running out of things to say and I don't want to be redundant, so I'll end my post with this: take nothing for granted, because others may not have what you have. Cheesy, but true.