Fear

So, I heard that it was mental health awareness month. Want to know a secret? Mental health is still very stigmatized in the black community, especially when it comes to black males. Well let me tell you that this has been true in my experience, more than people realize. It has been bothering me for a while but I feel like there is no better time to write about this so I shall share.

Growing up, I was introduced to many mental health issues very early. My brothers are twins, but I shared a room with one of them my entire life. He was born slightly autistic with schizophrenic tendencies. He always needed his medicine and without it he would hallucinate very often. I got numb to seeing people who hear voices and see visions simply because he was in the bed next to me. I always saw the  television shows or news reports where you hear about the person who stops taking their medicine and they slaughter their entire family due to hearing voices that convinced them to do so. Well I always felt that those hit close to home because I always felt like that could happen. The fact that he is highly functioning and usually on his medications causes a lot of my friends to not know what he deals with so people rarely knew the extent of his issues… but I did.

When it comes to my other brother, he also had some issues that were less noticeable to the public. He suffers from OCD and I personally believe he has some paranoia issues that crippled a lot of his progress in his life. He knew this as well. His life was sort of put on hold as he stayed to make sure my mother was fine due to paranoia and I witnessed this as well growing up.

My aforementioned mother has a lot of other issues that I witnessed growing up. She suffers from many health issues on the physical end, but mentally she battles terrible depression. I have had many conversations with her trying to convince her that she is loved and that people care about her but as with depression, I learned that external validations do not matter if the afflicted does not believe it.

The other half of the two people who created me would be my father. Though my parents divorced, I was always well aware of my father and we had some relationship, no details on how good or bad it was. I do not know if he suffered from any mental health disorders but from when I was able to form memories I knew him to suffer from addiction. e was addicted to alcohol and drugs, and anyone who has dealt with an addict knows that it literally changes the person’s mind to the point that they are not the person they once were. This, along with all of my other immediate family, made me numb to mental health issues. I would see them, live with them, learn to interact with people suffering from them, but it caused one side effect that I did not want. It made me live in fear.

I decided to write this piece because regardless of how educated I am, or how much I know right from wrong, logical from illogical, I constantly live in fear. I downplay most of the negative situations that happen to me in life. I bottle up problems when I have them, I don’t reach out to people if I;m truly going through something as much as I should, and the reason for this is fear. I live in fear that I too will suffer the fate of being “messed up” as society will deem us. I literally always felt like the only “normal” person in my household. I felt like someone needed to not have any issues to balance us all out. Ironically, this crippling fear may perhaps have caused some sort of mental issue, or it could itself be one. I have such a fear that I do not want to go talk to anyone if I am feeling any type of way. I know that it is wrong but I also know how I feel and how growing up in the conditions that my family grew up in made me feel. Everyday is a struggle and everyday I have to make sure I am on the closer side of happiness on the emotional scale. I literally live my life trying to avoid having to deal with something that will make me like the people I sought out to balance and let me tell you it is not fun at all.
   
I do not write this to have anyone feel pity for me or my family. I also do not write this as a cry for help. I wrote this piece to tell people that we shouldn’t live in fear of judgment. We should not live in fear of asking for help or talking to someone. We should not let social stigmas cripple us. I know all too well how it can impact a life, from seeing it to living it. I am still on a journey to get to a place in life where I feel I need to be, but slowly and surely I am more open to talking about my problems. I hope that if anyone, older or younger, reads this, it can help them to realize that they may not be alone. You matter. Your health matters… especially your mental health.