The distancing and isolation the pandemic brought, with the issues that implied when it comes to tension in interpersonal relations and teleworking, brought me a lot of pain and increased my insecurity issues. ![]() Yet we do it like that just too often.įor me, as with probably many other people, the additional issues started to add up as soon as COVID began (though some, minor ones had started to appear prior). Whatever the reason, doing that is not the way to go. Or sometimes even out of a fear of making other people feel bad, specially when our issues come from the personal relation to them. Sometimes it may be out of a genuine thought that we are burdening others with our own problems. Sometimes we think like that out of feeling that we have to take care of our own problems, we have to own up to them. I thought so too, and I was terribly wrong. As the saying in my native Spain goes, “dirty clothes are washed at home”. Some of you may think that little issues can be swept under the rug and dealt with in private. From that point, any additional untackled issue will just keep adding up, piling up, until the mountain is too big to handle and collapses on you. Through the years I have tried to work on those aspects of my character and try to become resistant to them, but they always stayed there in a way or another. Those are elements that - and I think we can all agree on this - can make a dangerous mix when it comes to emotional stability. I have always been a kind of person that is deeply affected by how people in his environment feel and, perhaps more often than I should have, cares too much about other people’s feelings even above his own. And last, but not least, I am a person that focuses excessively on other people’s feelings. In addition to that, I am a person with very strong emotions in all senses: a person that can love very intensely, but also feel very negatively about things, and be very passionate about things in a strong way. I have always been, from a young age, a very insecure person and with a low self-esteem, afraid of trying to do or say certain things or about feeling certain ways out of fear, out of worry about what others might think, or just out of pure fear of rejection. In my case, depression has been building up overtime with a progressive but constant summing up of elements that have added up to a series of starting preconditions of my character. In the same way that erosion changes a coastline through constant action by the sea but you don’t realise until the effects are visible and obvious, depression is a longer process of lengthy erosion that culminates with the collapse of your emotional landscape. ![]() These problems build up over time, they are a bigger process than just being sad. ![]() Depression (and mental health issues in general) is not something that just appears out of the blue, a state of being that isn’t there and then just pops up like an annoying advert on a website. This affirmation is something that has taken me months, and perhaps even a few years, to realise and say openly. “At the moment, I am dealing with depression”. However, with World Mental Health Day being around the corner and without the pretension of erecting myself into a sort of example or guide for others to follow, I have a feeling that speaking up about my personal (and still ongoing) experience dealing with mental health issues will do more good than harm and might actually even be useful for others to open up and keep them from being afraid about speaking about their emotional well-being. While I am a person that generally doesn’t have that many issues opening up about his negative emotions in detail within closed circles and with trusted people, I am not super confident about doing such things in the wide open of a media outlet (I might actually regret, out of pure worry about what others may think, writing this piece and sending it for publication).
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