My mental health
This is a more refined blog article about my mental health that I wrote and shared last year.
Wish I could say I miss being a kid, but like many people who didn't grow up with a normal childhood, I don't. It sucked because I was struggling with problems with my mental health that were made worse by religion and school.
School
School life was really stressful. I felt like I was walking on eggshells all the time, like I might mess up and do accidentally break some random rule or unintentionally do something terrible and face terrible consequences. I would always second guess everything I was doing, and it made me miserable asf. On the outside, I looked like a normal student, but inside I was a wreck and freaking out all the time. I was jealous of the kids who were in trouble all the time and never cared, wishing I was the same.
Religion
I was consumed by thoughts that made me feel guilty all the time. I was terrified of God and thought I was going to hell for even the smallest thing that I did or didn't do. I tried to shake off these tormenting thoughts but couldn't. They were intense and would sometimes guilt me into doing weird random things like clean some random object or rearrange furniture or read some page of a book, over and over again, until I felt like I had done enough to not be doomed.
Phobia
I was involved in an incident with a car that left me with a fear of vehicles which makes me super anxious around traffic. I'm still terrified of crossing roads and try to avoid it as much as possible, because sometimes I'll freeze in the middle of the road. Ironically during my college days, I loved walking on the busy streets in the evening or night, but I'd always unnecessarily take the long way around places just to avoid crossing the street.
Emotional state
This is something I don't completely understand or know how to explain. My emotions are all over the place - sometimes I feel completely numb, other times I feel specific things way too deeply. Sometimes I like to interact and talk to people, and other (most) times I have no mood to socialise. I guess I might be almost a sociopath except sometimes I'm not and sometimes I am (?). To almost everyone, this is how I am, but with specific people I'm different, I'm always in the mood to (over) socialize. It might not even be be with someone who I know. It's the same thing with empathy—sometimes I feel empathetic and sometimes I don't, and (again) depending on who you are, I might always be so.
Since I was a child, I've never really felt any kind of emotion for my "father" - no love, no hate. He was just like a stranger and it never ever bothered me, and still doesn't. But thanks to this parent being a shitty person, I did start to feel something - hatred, which wouldn't be a problem if I weren't living in the same house. It made me addicted to indulging in dark thoughts and violent fantasies because of me being a very vindictive person.
Identity and personality
I used to feel like I had no genuine personality, as if I was always putting on a fake persona, especially in school and around family and acquaintances. I felt so fake because I had no clue who I really was and I was constantly switching up my personality depending on where I was and who I was interacting with.
I never once thought that these things were not normal but there was some thing else that was always bothering me : my being gay. I hated it so much because I was taught that it was unnatural, so I tried really hard to change. For many years I tried praying for it to go away. Feeling ashamed and hating this part of myself, which made me even more miserable than I already was. Nothing I did could change me so I coped by trying to bury this part of me and pretending like I was straight, if I had to.
Slow Recovery
Thankfully, after the school years, my mental health improved. The tormenting thoughts that made me feel guilty all the time no longer bothered me especially after I understood who God really is and what his unconditional love and grace actually meant.
This improvement in my mental health happened during the time when I was just starting college at Edmunds. My life changed so much there. Although my anxiety was still present, it wasn't as bad as it used to be. I was beginning to understand who I was. I was meeting new people and made new friends who without realising it, helped me to be more real, I wasn't showing any fake personalities (most of the time). I finally felt like I was being almost completely authentic, although I was still acting like I was a straight person everyday.
There was no pressure to do well in class, or to be careful not to break rules. I was ditching way too many classes and didn't care about my grades or my attendance percentage. I was clowning my way through life, wasting my time, doing what made me happy, not caring about anything I didn't want to which got me in trouble a couple of times and I was doing things I never would have dared to do before, because "sin” and “hell". It wasn't all good though. There were many things I did that I'm not proud of but what's important was that life was finally worth living.
After spending three years at Edmund's, I did my master's at Anthony's (which I didn't complete). That was another wonderful period of living a guilt free and stress free life, meeting new people, making wondeful friends, continuing my mental improvement and (finally) growing to be a better person (learning from all the mistakes I made during bsc college) but more importantly this was the time when I was beginning to actually learn what mental health was and how it related to me. I began to realise that what had been happening in my head, since my childhood, wasn't something that was supposed to happen.
Now
So, here I am, many years later, grateful to be free from the things that made me miserable and most of the other things that bother me mentally. It took several years, but I finally became comfortable with being homosexual and have fully accepted it and there's a lot of things I want to write about this, when I'm brave (or bored) enough to, I will. I still have mental health issues, but most of them are manageable such as my emotional state being still as chaotic as ever, maybe even more. There's also new troublesome things that I had to deal with during these recent years.
Wrapping up
I wrote this blog article because, over the recent years, I've become a little bit more open as I get older and after sharing more about myself, I realised how freeing it feels each time I do.