Fyw 101 - My Suffering Is My Landmark

Nene Kubata

Dr. Bakht

FYW 101 (M.W)

September 29, 2015

My Suffering is My Landmark

All throughout my life, I have felt different. From the beginning, I could sense that I wasn’t like my family or my friends, and I was different from what I was “supposed” to be. The odd thing is that people always saw me as something I never was. From a young age, I had always struggled with the idea of people-pleasing, where I would ignore my own needs, wants and emotions just so that I could make those around me happy. The majority of the time I put aside my own happiness just so that I could make others feel comfortable. For the longest time, I hid my identity and my true self at an attempt to “blend in” and to make myself feel like I belonged… that I was what I was “meant to be.” Our modern day society tells us that it is wrong to stick out. It demands for the public to conform to the ways of the world and be like one another. We are taught from a young age that there are certain ways to act and when we fail to comply to the rules, society punishes us by chewing us up and spitting us out ruthlessly. This whole process prevents us from being our true selves from the beginning, causing a chain reaction to “find ourselves” later on in life, which many people have an excruciatingly hard and painful time at completing. Many individuals end up failing miserably on this internal voyage.

This past March, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. The couple of months leading up to this point was the most challenging time I had ever had in my life. Most days I would just lay in bed and cry myself to sleep at night. I always struggled to find the energy to get out of bed the next morning. Every single thing from being around people and interacting with them to something as small as taking a deep breath was extremely agonizing and tiring, and the worst part was that I felt all alone the entire time. Everyday I would ask myself, “would it be so bad if it all ended now?” The painful thoughts of hurting myself or just ending it all never ceased to leave my mind and I would be left weak and wounded afterwards. This didn’t stop for months and I wasn’t sure if it ever would. Eventually, the pain grew so large that my only physiological response was numbness. I constantly felt like I was being suffocated, like I couldn’t catch a breath no matter how hard I tried. Emptiness became the battle scar of my soul. Till this day, it makes me clench up thinking about that time in my life.

After I was diagnosed, a huge sense of relief came over me. In a strange way, I could finally breathe and start to live my life, felling like myself again because I could address the issue. From the time I was in middle school, I could feel that there was something wrong. It was terrible because I could never pinpoint what it was exactly. I’d always feel so empty and cold even when there was a room full of people, with laughter and joy filling the space. No matter how hard I tried, I could never talk or force myself into being happy, like I was “supposed to be.” I would spend time in my room sitting and crying, feeling sad for absolutely no reason, as I did during the months leading up to my diagnosis. However, I never let anyone else see it on the outside. I always kept it in and hid because I could not bare the thought of my loved ones being disappointed in me.

Even after diagnosis, I had a difficult time dealing with my parents. They are what one would call traditional African parents. In their culture, bringing up topics of mental health can be problematic. Traditional Africans will simply deny, refuse to accept, or frown upon the fact that a member of their family and or community has issues concerning their mental health instead of dealing with it. Usually the individual would get labeled as crazy and would be shunned from the community. Although it was never this severe with my parents because they did acknowledge the fact the I had depression, they still had a hard time letting me get the help that I needed. In June, several months after I was put on medication to help with my mood swings, my parents forced me to get off them. They believed that medication should and can only be used to cure physical ailments. My extremely religious mother would tell me to “Pray about it,” and my father who only believes in logic and reason would tell me to, “Just be happy. What’s so hard about that? Everybody goes through hard times,