World Mental Health Day: A Note from Someone Still Figuring It Out!
Be kind to yourself today. And tomorrow. And the day after that.
I am a terrible driver.
Not the “oops, I accidentally cut you off” kind of terrible; I mean the sort where anxieties turn every roundabout into a personal nemesis and parallel parking into an existential crisis. My driving instructor once told me I had “all the skills but was constantly scanning for threats, which led to tension and mental fatigue,” which is possibly the most accurate description of my entire existence.
Here is the thing about mental health that nobody puts on the posters: it doesn’t always look like what you would expect.
I studied computer science, which sounds impressively technical, doesn’t it? Except I found coding absolutely mind-numbing. My ADHD brain would look at lines of code and just... drift off. I would start a project and find myself three hours deep into Wikipedia articles about medieval siege warfare instead. Not exactly the tech success story people imagine. So, I went the marketing route for a career!
And depression?
Well, that’s been a proper companion over the years. The kind that makes you forget to check on friends; not because you don’t care, but because some days it takes all your energy just to exist. I have had those dark, very dark thoughts, too. The ones that feel like they are whispering that the world would be simpler without you in it. Public spaces can feel like battlegrounds where everyone can somehow see through you.
You know what has helped me? Writing. Just putting words on a page, even when they are messy and don’t make sense. There is something about externalising the chaos in my head that makes it feel a bit more manageable. And long walks, proper long ones where I can’t quite tell if I am trying to outpace my thoughts or just giving them space to breathe.
I have also learnt that there is help!
Help is absolutely out there. Therapy exists, medication works for many people, art and support groups are real. But, and this is the bit that’s hard to hear when you are struggling, you have to meet it halfway. You have to be strong enough to reach out, to make that appointment, to keep showing up even when every part of you wants to stay in bed. If I didn’t write everyday, I would go mad.
That’s not fair, is it? Having to be strong when you feel weakest.
It is like being told to swim to the life raft when you are already drowning. But that’s the reality. Mental health support isn’t something that finds you; it’s something you have to actively seek, and that takes courage you might not feel you have.
If you are reading this and recognising yourself in any of these struggles, the anxiety, the depression, the forgetting, the hiding, please know you are not alone.
We are all just trying to navigate this impossibly complex thing called being human. Some of us just have brains that make it a bit more complicated.
Be kind to yourself today. And tomorrow. And the day after that.
You are doing better than you think.
