This is a series of photos attached with stories focusing on mental health and how common the challenges are.
“I think I have depression and I think I have anxiety, well I mean that’s what I was diagnosed with in high school. I thought my life was so terrible and it was just more of a cry for help. But I didn’t know how depressed I could get until I graduated high school and was in a terrible relationship. I used to have these dark and negative stages in my life that defined me and I don’t want them to define me anymore. Talking to anyone helps. Especially me as a person I keep everything inside until it explodes. I started opening up to people and actually having a voice I think that’s when I really started changing. Once I got out of the relationship and was by myself and would speak to people, I realized all the negative thoughts in my head was the voice of another person. If your friends with people who have the same mental issues who have terrible coping mechanisms, it’s going to rub off on you and you are going to do that too. I used to hang out with drug addicts and they are all very depressed. He was friends with all of them and once he was gone, they were all gone.”
“I definitely go through periods of my life where I am not motivated to do anything but just stay inside. The most recent time it got to the point where I was just so sad I couldn’t feel anything. I think the best thing that helps me get through these situations is recognizing that I’m not okay and I need to do something to make me feel better. Communicating and talking to people, especially people who genuinely care about you is the best thing you can do. I feel like since I kept everything inside it made me so sad. I had the lowest energy and usually when I’m around people I’m the one who gives off light and I just want people to feel good. I’ve always been that way but I wasn’t anymore and everything made me sad. I realized I could get better on my own if I just faced my truth. You have to stay true to yourself and you can’t let anyone get in the way of who you are.”
“We have to check those people in our immediate circle because they literally affect us and who we are. So we have to ask ourselves who’s here to help and who’s here to just tear me down and break me. After we start with our immediate circle, the second step would be to look within. Trying to find the triggers that we set off for ourselves. I always believed it takes two to tango type of thing, so we got the people around us and we got us. We’re both participating in bringing ourselves up or bringing ourselves down. Literally just be by yourself and talk to yourself. I believe in talking to yourself, I do it all the time. After my divorce, I shut everyone out and stayed in my house. Four walls, studio apartment, can’t really go anywhere type of thing. And I stayed there. Everyday I would do something positive and I would talk to myself. Everyone has the best advice to give you for what you’re going through when they don’t even know and they’ve never been there. I had to separate myself from everyone and I had to find out who was talking and I had to hear me. It took months. Months. Then I finally heard a voice and it was my voice. Boom. It was like ‘Hey, what’s up? It’s been a while.’”
“I have bipolar disorder. I want people who struggle like me to not feel ashamed because I felt a lot of shame when I was first diagnosed. I was diagnosed three times because my psychologists weren’t taking me seriously. They thought I was too young and it was just teenage angst. I finally found one who made me feel valid and secure. I did feel a lot of shame because I was like fuck I have a disorder that makes me uneven, basically. How am I going to deal with this for the rest of my life and how am I going to explain this to people when they come across my symptoms. The hardest part is having to deal with the guilt and shame after having a manic episode. People like me who experience psychotic symptoms would naturally feel guilty or embarrassed but I don’t think you should feel that way because it's not you, it’s your disorder and you can’t control that. I go to group therapy on the Lower East Side and it’s helped me so much because I’m able to listen to people’s stories and they’re just like mine. Advocate for yourself and if your friends don’t understand or at least try to, then you shouldn’t be friends with them.”
“The half of me you don’t know:
I struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder. Almost everything in my life is done by a specific routine or through numerical repetition and when things disrupt those routines, I have emotional episodes or outbreaks. I’ve recently started owning my OCD by using it as a strength and reshaping the way it defines me and if you relate to this you can do the same.
xoxo,
A Badass Organizer”
“I went on birth control the summer before my freshman year of college and I started noticing I had these really dark times. I’d be overthinking and overanalyzing everything and it would just spiral from there. After a few months I stopped taking it and I thought I would be significantly better. I couldn’t get out of bed and there was a constant tightness in my chest. I needed to get help, I couldn’t deal with it on my own anymore. I wanted to find a psychologist and get a diagnosis because I knew something was wrong. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, they kind of go hand in hand. But I’m happy because I feel like I found someone that I can actually connect to and talk to without feeling like I’m stupid or I’m exaggerating things. Whatever makes you feel better, makes you feel better and I knew I had to go to therapy.”
“I may care less about what people think of me compared to some people, but I still do care and I am scared of being hated. Growing up, I was fortunate enough to have been surrounded by the most loving people everywhere I go, and I never knew that people could hate others for reasons that do not make sense to me. After learning that those people do exist, I became even more afraid of showing my true self to other people. It will always be hard for me. But what is important is to know how to get over them, although you cannot completely forget about them. For me, I recently learned that a lot of people stopped talking to me because I am not heterosexual and coming out was one of the first steps of showing my true self. But at the same time, some of the people who I was expecting to leave me stayed and told me that they will always love me for who I am. Knowing that I have a lot of people like that around me is one of the things that helps me get through a lot of bullshit.”
“I was diagnosed with panic disorder and mild depression. I finally found a therapist who takes me seriously and actually wants me to feel better. I’ve had really bad experiences with therapists before who were just very unprofessional. One therapist had me write and repeat the phrase, “Life is empty and meaningless.” It was horrifying. I went to another therapist and he decided to prescribe me five pills a day. Imagine taking xanax twice a day. He told me I was permitted to take up to 10 of those if I felt like I was having a panic attack. I thought to myself, I am going to die. I didn’t realize how serious this medication was until later. All energy was drained, I just felt dead. I decided to stop taking the medication because I didn’t want to feel like that anymore. I didn’t actually get back on proper medication until I got back to the U.S. I’ve been taking care of myself, not overcommitting myself. For anyone who struggles with mental health, you need to prioritize it before everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything.”
“Weight is one of the biggest issues I’ve struggled with my entire life. Family members would constantly compare my weight to my sister’s. It was an unhealthy competition that I had in my head between my sister and losing weight. I had a very unhealthy relationship with food. As a dancer, you’re constantly looking at yourself in the mirror and you have an instructor who tells you what you should and shouldn’t work on. I had a book where I would write what I am going to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and it was usually around 800 calories a day. Which is really nothing. Especially since I went to the gym and had three hours of dance everyday. It was very hard to come to that agreement with food. I would eat and make myself burn off the calories on the treadmill directly after. Or I would literally miss dance class because I was a little bloated and I would see that in the mirror and I couldn’t accept it. So last semester I started speaking to people but what really helped me was coming to terms with myself. It was hard but I threw away the book and I stopped journaling. I’m the heaviest weight I’ve been in my entire life right now but I’m okay with it. It’s a process but I’m working on it. I believe self-love really comes from within. I kept telling myself that I was fat and constantly asked my sister if I looked fat. I never wore jeans. I always focused on my legs so I always wore baggy clothes so I didn’t have to pay attention to my thighs and the way they looked when I sit. My wrists were also really important to me because I thought if I couldn’t circle it with all five fingers than I’m not okay and I need to lose more weight. Mentally I wasn’t okay and I wasn’t happy. When I let all of that go and stopped focusing on just the body, I realized how important the mind is and now I’m working on my mental health. I’m learning to accept myself and love myself.”
“I grew up in an environment where you were looked at as being over dramatic if you spoke up about your mental health. People who think, “Well if you’re not going to kill yourself then you’re fine.” Things like that. I’ve always accepted that every mental illness is valid and you don’t have to compare yourself to others. You don’t have to be better or worse than someone for it to be there. I just recently started taking anxiety meds for the first time and it’s working out really well. But a lot of the problems I have are kind of with how people see me. I overthink and overanalyze the way people interact with me and the way I interact with them. Am I being fair to them and are they being fair to me. And I hate that because I get so caught up with myself and I would like to just be okay with who I am. Something that helps is reminding myself that we’re all different. We’re all from different parts of the world and we we’re all raised differently. We’re all capable of different things.”