“You are allowed to be both a masterpiece and a work in progress simultaneously.”
Mental wellness includes your self-love, your self-worth, your well-being, your happiness, your peace of mind, your self-esteem, your inner self-talk, your feelings, your emotions, your soul, and your being. While your mental wellness is yours and yours alone, you are not alone. There are always resources to help you if you ever want to improve your mental wellness or think you need help tackling your problems.
MY BACKGROUND. Growing up, I had heard about self-esteem to some degree and was taught it was important to have good self-esteem. While I had heard about “stress,” I wasn’t taught how to deal with stress or why too much stress can be bad for you. Most importantly, I wasn’t taught about the importance of my mental wellness or the necessity to monitor and preserve it. Until my early 20s, I was never explicitly taught to care for my mental wellness.
As a child, I prioritized being well-mannered, especially in public. I lived primarily in the moment and embraced all my emotions as they came. Whatever emotion came my way, I expressed it in the moment, as most children do. If I was ever angry or upset, I could stifle my words but never my eyes. If I was in public, I was taught proper etiquette over all else. I was never too argumentative, too pressing, too judgmental, or too much of anything. As a result, I felt I grew up without much of a voice and understanding of how to handle negative emotions or feelings other than to stifle them. This was one of the factors that drew me to study psychology in undergraduate school. Unfortunately, the theory learned in class was hardly comparable to the practical usage of coping skills during stressful situations. I hadn’t even known about “coping skills” until after college when I worked with children with autism. I was 21 years old. Even then, I was under the impression that “coping skills” were limited to individuals with disabilities.
Looking back at my childhood, the closest I came to learning about mental wellness was during drug awareness programs in school. However, these programs never addressed a lack of mental wellness or inability to cope. These programs mentioned the importance of staying away from drugs, the harmful effects of taking drugs, and other negative consequences of drug usage. These programs failed to explain what led these individuals to the path of drugs or a belief that drugs were their only option. In my adolescent mind, I naively believed people who did drugs did so because they were drug addicts or made wrong decisions. I don’t remember a single person ever referring to a mental impairment that people with drug addiction(s) struggled with or were taking drugs to cope with feelings they couldn’t deal with themselves or understand. I remember hearing the stories from individuals recovering from drug addiction, but the stories were so far removed from my own life that I could not relate. Unable to relate to these individuals’ traumas and hardships, I could not understand much of what they were dealing with. From these programs, it was my (mis)understanding that these individuals had the same mental capacity as everyone else yet chose to take drugs.
Society must continue to accept and promote the significance of our mental wellness. Our self-worth and feelings should be embraced openly and not disregarded as inappropriate or dramatic. The more we learn to love and respect ourselves, the more we understand others. The key to our humanity has and always will be EMPATHY.
Sip of Ambition 