May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and has been since 1949.
The green ribbon pictured above is the international symbol for mental health awareness.
To speak personally for a moment, I'm thankful every day for my passion in mental wellness. I couldn’t imagine a living a life not taking it seriously.
I tell people this all the time, but when I started to map out what The Recess Bell would be, the plan was for the platform to be solely mental health focused. As the ideas evolved over time, I went in a different direction, but I still wanted to have a mental wellness section on the platform.
Depression & anxiety are the two most common mental health afflictions in the world. I’ve had to maneuver my life around both disorders ever since I was young, It’s like living life waiting for the other shoe to drop at every waking moment. It’s equal parts exhausting and draining.
In 2018, just before my 21st birthday, I attended my first ever therapy session. Beforehand, I definitely remember being skeptical of just how much sitting in a semi-comfortable leather chair for an hour and openly talking about my trials & tribulations would actually help me reach a breakthrough in my battle versus depression. Deep down, the idea of speaking on all of my issues off the cuff to another person sitting right across from me terrified me. Keeping all my trauma bottled up within obviously wasn’t the ideal way to go about things alternatively, but at the same time, speaking them out into the open would make everything real. I didn’t know if I was ready for that.
After my first session, I was admittedly still skeptical about pursuing therapy long-term.
But at the end of the day, it did feel slightly relieving to finally vocalize some of my inner pain & to have somebody across from me help rationalize everything that I was saying — for the first time ever, really. That feeling was enough to bring me back to the next session the following week.
And I’m so glad I came back.
I’ve been in therapy since. There’s been a few gaps here and there over the past 6 years, but largely? I’ve been locked in. It’s developed into a wildly positive asset for my life.
If you’re reading this, haven’t ever given therapy a try, and don’t really see how it would help? I respect that, but allow me to make the case for why therapy is so impactful.
I grew up in a Nigerian-American household — an extremely conservative upbringing. As a young boy, I was trained to not cry when sad or disappointed, because men were supposed to be strong and fierce. Crying was taught to me as a sign of weakness. So, naturally, I carried that mentality all the way into my adult life. On the latest Always Be Creatin’ episode, I spoke on the fact that there was a 10-year period from 11-21 years of age where I did not cry one singular time. Looking back, that’s insane to think about.
I believe that human beings are simply not built to harbor all their trauma within the soul over long periods of time. Think about it like this: Computer systems & hard drives are vast in the amount of information they can hold, but they all have storage limits. Once you come close to reaching the storage limit on a device, the device may start to malfunction, glitch and slow in speed. That’s until you remove some files and downloads from the software, and before you know it, the machine is operating at an optimal level once again. Human beings, in theory, are the exact same way. We approach our healthiest mentally when we’re consistently dealing with our emotions in healthy & clean ways, such as exercising, journaling, and throwing our 'baggage' in the trash on the regular by doing things like going to therapy. We do NOT even come close to approaching our healthiest mentally when engaging in vices like alcohol, drugs, "doomscrolling", etc.
This Mental Health Awareness Month, let's try to be as cognizant as we can about that. Prioritize healthy coping mechanisms over unhealthy ones. It should eventually lead to you treating yourself much better on a consistent basis, which should raise your self-esteem, which leads to you treating others better, fostering a cycle of betterment. All this stuff goes hand-in-hand, and, hopefully -- it won't just be for the remainder of the month -- it'll become a whole lifestyle change.
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