Last week’s Fresh Check Day, a fair dedicated to mental health awareness, was a fun time filled with crafts, music, games, ice-cream, and even a dog. The loud upbeat hip hop music blared through the quad while people did stress relieving activities pertaining to mental health. I felt out of place blinded by the sunshine and forced positivity surrounding this event. I was the one in ten, the reason why the fair had to display a number for people to call the suicide hotline.
The reason why people from the counseling center were there is that the schools fears liability, at least that’s how I feel, coming from someone who feels like a liability on campus. One thing that makes it hard is that I live in the grey area of suicide as I have a brain that is constantly at war with itself.
There is something beautiful in having a part of you that wants to live so much it will ignore the part of you that doesn’t. Despite suffering this battle and having them be a part of my daily life being public about it comes with baggage. I have been called attention seeking and a liar. I have been treated as a negative person who should be cut out of other people’s lives because of my depression and eating disorders and I have been told by people in my life not to write about my depression because it worries and upsets other people.
The choice of how we tell people things and our comfort levels are what I think should be part of the discussion pertaining to mental health.
The people who can’t deal with my depression shouldn’t be a part of my life and learning to accept that was hard. In the past, I tailored myself to fit others, but that didn’t make my depression go away.
Other people’s comfort should not come before your own, every time. A depressed person shouldn’t be forced to shield people from their reality either or sugar coat experiences like trauma and grief.
And that’s not to say we always expect you to know what to say, we just don’t want to be ignored or forgotten. The more we regress, the worse it gets.
Back to Fresh Check Day. My favorite booth was the elephant in the room one where people got to write something they were dealing with on a literal elephant.