Prioritizing My Mental Health

By Kavika Taylor, Speakers Coordinator

I’ve spent a lot of my life arguing with my own emotions. I’m used to looking at my life from the outside and telling myself that someone like me shouldn’t feel this way. I’ve spent years believing that because I have so much support and opportunities, I shouldn't feel the way I do. That belief has made it easy to ignore my emotions, to brush them off as overreactions or as a weakness. I didn't have the words for it then, and I don't think I can even explain it now.

For most of high school, I went undiagnosed with a learning disability. It took my mom being diagnosed with breast cancer for me to see that there were some issues in my learning. That assessment revealed more than I was expecting. It listed 3 things: Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Specific Learning Disorder. To me, that feels like someone else being described on that piece of paper, and having a document telling you what is “wrong” with you doesn't help you understand how to move forward. I’ve never read through the full 13 pages of my assessment in an attempt to detach myself from a significant part of who I am. I blamed the results of that assessment on what was going on with my mom at the time and continued to ignore what I was feeling long after she had entered remission.

I was doing well for a while, thought that I had finally gotten away from whatever I was running from, but after the loss of someone incredibly close to me, I fell back down. I was faced with the nightmare of becoming that “person” again, and I quickly did everything I could not to feel a single bit of emotion. My grandpa’s death was incredibly significant to me, but I simply looked at it from a logical point of view in hopes of not letting anyone see the effect it had on me. Later that summer, my mom was diagnosed with 2 severe brain aneurysms, and all the fear from her being sick came back, but once again, that was not enough for me to validate how I was feeling. She was the one who was sick, and I felt as if I didn’t have the right to feel sad or scared. I’ve worked hard to understand my learning disability, but I have never taken the time to understand my depression or anxiety, tricking myself into thinking that it's not me. I look at what has happened in my family, seeing those just as moments in time, and I am no longer allowed to feel any emotion about it. Somewhere along the way, I decided that it was easier to shut down than admit that these moments were affecting me.

My dad and I aren't close, not like the usual father-daughter relationship. We rarely call, and when I’m home, I see him less than a handful of times. When he told me in October that he was diagnosed with Cancer, I came up with any excuse to not let that news sink in. I felt that we were not close enough for me to feel these ways, and that the only reason I was feeling these emotions was that he is my “dad.” Even as I sit here writing this, knowing that it's all okay, I look back on all of these moments and feel that I am complaining or that this is just a moment in time that will eventually pass. Lying to myself, thinking that these moments haven't built up over time and doing everything not to become the person described in that assessment. I can admit that I have poor habits when it comes to dealing with significant life events, but something is stopping me from taking action.

I feel conflicted. I have so much to be proud of. I have access to an incredible education that many didn't think I would be able to achieve, I have a world of opportunities ahead of me, and I have people who care for me. But for some reason, that is the one thing I can't lie to myself about. I can physically see my accomplishments, how much I have grown, hear it from the people around me, but I feel nothing for it. I am forcing one foot in front of the other, trying to run away from a part of me that keeps pulling me back. Invalidating my accomplishments, emotions, and simply feeling nothing is easier than tearing it all down and starting from scratch.

I am not ashamed of my mental health. I am open about it with everyone around me but myself. I am scared of what might happen if I slow down long enough to really feel it. There is an indescribable emotion that I keep running from because I don’t want it to swallow my motivation, my grades or my future. Maybe slowing down is its own kind of strength, choosing to sit with emotions I’ve spent years minimizing, instead of proving how “strong” I am by pretending they don’t exist. It's permitting myself to feel the weight of what has happened to me without immediately explaining it away as “just life”. I’m still learning what it means to validate my own feelings instead of comparing them or minimizing them. Maybe for me, validating my mental health starts with simply admitting: what I’ve been through is real, what I feel is real, and that alone is enough.