From obesity to reaching a healthy body, it takes effort to change one’s lifestyle. Living with a mental health condition and living with a person with a mental health condition requires the same – change in lifestyle.
“It feels like I am a burden onto my family. If I wasn’t around, this world would have been a better place today.”
People think she doesn’t know that self-harm is not the best choice. People explain to her that anger is threatening to them. And, people around her think that crying and feeling sorry the next minute is childlike. Here is the thing – mental illness does not have a rule book to behave. People with mental health conditions know that self-harm is a bad thing, their anger is erratic, and feeling emotions unpredictably is stressing.
What does society think by talking about mental health? we are reaching a solution. The answer is no. Live with a person with a mental health condition and you’ll know their families suffer with them. Cutting herself is not a choice, screaming and yelling is painful, and feeling emotional unpredictability is tiring. Before your family and friends tell you that you’re a version which they hate, you should know this– people with a mental health condition hate the version of themselves which is so overwhelming.
It reaches out to their family and friends, so it definitely kills the person living with it. To ask a person who was sexually molested to get over it is not the answer to their mental wellbeing. To push a person to a corner who admits they’re suffering is not the process of correcting their behavior. People with mental health conditions don’t hurt themselves so they can put their loved one’s behind bars. Instead, they’re broken inside to deal with another suffering.
Imagine a child witnessing sexual abuse. The same child grows up to experience physical and emotional abuse. No! people with mental health conditions are not dramatic. They are not trying to abuse others. They are not manipulative. They are people who are trying to make peace with situations of their lives that have shaped them to become this. With a lack of consent in sexual harassment comes immense helplessness. This helplessness turns into anger in every other situation.
She would change her lifestyle and the illness wouldn’t go and that’s when the family doesn’t understand – She wished it was like fat in the body that changes in routine could reduce it to any shape or size she’d love. It’s an illness that the person who has it hates more than you can think.
Believe me – if you saw her the way she saw herself, you’d never want to see her again. She saw herself as the problem… this society could never change!
