coming to terms with my mental health journey

As you get older, you start to piece together some stories from your past that begin to outline an arc of who you are. When I was around 19 or 20 I hit a stage where I had a very catastrophic event happen to me. After recovering from that event, I started to look back at this trail of breadcrumbs that I had left over my life because of past traumas and past events. And I started piecing the story together and started to come to terms with what mental health meant to me and ultimately what I would classify as the demon living with me; coming to terms with what they look like, how they act, and how to interact with them in a way that’s healthiest for myself and equally, if not more so important, healthiest for those that are around me that I care about. Demons can often put on your entire skin suit and wreak havoc on the world around you. And then, once you wake up after a good night’s sleep, they’re gone. And you’re like, wait, now I have to deal with your mess. What are you doing, man? That’s not okay. 

So I started out my sophomore semester moving to Seoul. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to take a gap year but that wasn’t quote-unquote allowed. I am very fortunate that my parents pay for my college, so I wanted their approval to take a gap year. I needed to take a pause but at that point, they didn’t feel comfortable giving it. So I went to South Korea.

Seoul was rough. We were living in Gangnam. There were two beds in my apartment. But on the worst days, there were five people sleeping in our room; two sleeping in my roommate’s bed, two sleeping in my bed, and one person sleeping on our floor. We were all sad. So, so very much, but not telling anybody about it. 

There were a bunch of different factors that came into this, but the one biggest was finding out about one of my best friends from high school, somebody that I had spent time with more than an hour a day, every day, my entire senior year of high school. I loved him. I still do. He’s amazing. I found out he died in a car crash along with his mom and dad, and they were burned beyond recognition. And I remember being told by another one of my friends… he texted me in the morning and he was like, Hey. Have you heard about Oscar? And I was like, no, what’s up. And he said Oscar is dead.

I just remember feeling totally numb. When you experience trauma like that, your mind and body are thrown into this world where structure no longer exists. And that’s easy to say because I’m saying it with language that has structure. But the idea is the absence of anything. And I can’t communicate that to you because we need a shared structure to communicate.

All I can say is if you’ve experienced the true absence of structure, it’s terrifying. It’s like you’re lost in a void. And that’s how I felt. Lost. I felt like nothing mattered and everything mattered. So I just cried in my bed for a little while and texted my then-girlfriend and let her know what was going on. She came over and I just kept on crying. I didn’t tell anybody else for a while. I remember taking that day off from everything. I went to a cafe and I just started drawing. 

I think once you start to take mental health seriously, you also realize that you can’t really run at a consistent pace in the world. With school and especially with work, you’re expected to show up at a consistent pace. The difficulty with that is mental health as a journey is personal. And it’s something that everybody has to tread on their own. If you’ve ever beaten your own path, sometimes you run up against obstacles that just take longer to figure out. I was fighting very, very hard and it took most of my energy. So I couldn’t go to class. I couldn’t achieve at the level that I know I’m capable of. I think I missed like 16 classes and three assignments that I couldn’t turn in. I was drinking like eight or nine coffees a day, which is not good. I learned that later. If you’re dealing with depression, you don’t want to give yourself anxiety. I didn’t really understand how I could show up consistently for class if I was spending so much time unwrapping what the fuck was going on in my brain. 

Ultimately I would say that’s the most suicidal I’ve ever been. And I say that with a very heavy heart and very heavy hands. I know what I’m saying. I know the power of those words. And I’m saying, with full knowledge, I was suicidal. And I didn’t think I would make it out of Seoul alive. Some part of me still thinks I shouldn’t have.

This experience ramped up into a 72-hour panic attack. Which is not fun. I mean, you run a marathon in four and a half hours and that sucks but imagine not being able to sleep cause you’re shaking and imagine, not being able to eat cause you’re shaking and you’re just disassociated. You’re not in your body. The only thing I remember from the 72 hours is the people that I care about giving me tours of both heaven and hell in my head. Heaven was a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, I had a dog, I was a firefighter. I don’t remember what Hell was. I had to come to terms with the idea that death was the solution to the pain that I was experiencing. 

I think that there are a lot of people that think that therapy and psychiatry are the end-all fix for mental health. It reminds me of the 1950’s perspective in the US about policing;  give the police a huge budget and make them handle everything. I think that therapy is quickly running into the risk of being the catch-all solution in mental health; it’s not, and neither is medication. Everyone was saying, find a therapist, talk about your problems. And so that’s what I did. I found a therapist and talked about my problems. The difficulty is that therapy is personal. Licensed therapists have individual approaches to practices. Some therapists show empathy, some don’t, when you’re dealing with a mental health issue, you also don’t know the kind of therapist you need. You’re left with this external pressure telling you to find a therapist and internal pressure, knowing you can’t find one that works for you. It’s like you’re dating therapy. You need to find the therapist that works for you. But if you’re in the middle of a mental health journey, you need someone to show up and just to be good. And that didn’t happen for me in Seoul. The therapist I was able to see had a method that was not good for me. The only story I’ll say from that time was I remember feeling this very intrinsic need to share with them an entry that I had made in my journal because I needed help thinking through it. When I got done reading it and I looked up, they were crying and I think ended the therapy session. So I was like, what am I going to do now? I went to a psychiatrist, got some medication. I was on medication for like two days but I hated it. And then my mom flew to Seoul and took me out. It was like mid-December or something. I’m sparing a ton of details, but that was the moment. As an adult, I would say that was the moment I finally summited my mental health mountain and I started to look back on my life, at the breadcrumbs and began thinking, “Oh, maybe this is a thing I’ve always had to fight”.

The first time I ever had any form of suicidal ideation was when I was eight years old. I had broken my femur; the big thigh bone. Breaking your femur is apparently the same pain threshold as giving birth, which is crazy. I don’t know if that’s true. I’m not a doctor, but that’s what I remember the doctors telling me. It sucked. Looking back on it, that’s where my mental health journey started. 

I was in a full-body cast for six months at eight years old. I couldn’t go to school, I didn’t want to see my friends, anything like that. When I finally got it off, I was doing physical therapy because I had to learn how to walk again since my leg muscles had atrophied. I don’t know why, but the physical therapist discharged me saying, “he’s never going to run right again”, which was bullshit because I ran today with great form out in the snow. You can imagine the pain that a child goes through being told these things. He doesn’t understand the impact of it all, all he’s hearing is this advice coming from a doctor, and in the mind of a child, doctors are deities, parents are deities. I took that doctor’s words as truth for a little while but, after a few years, listening to a doctor gets old and I just decided to do it myself if they weren’t going to help. 

Fast forward a little bit, to fifth grade, a best friend of mine was involved in a car crash where he lost his big brother, his mom, and his dad, which was incredibly painful. I remember my mom telling me and saying, do you want to go to the wake? And I was nine or 10? I remember changing my mind four or five times but ended up saying, no, I don’t want to go. I spent that time watching “Curious George” the movie and just felt terrible. 

Then fast forward a little bit more to seventh grade. That same friend had moved in with his grandparents and his grandma passed away from breast cancer, which is like, dude.. oh my God, this man is going through pain; he always reminds me of Job from the Bible. By seventh grade, at 13, he had lost his mom, his dad, his big brother, and his grandma. So all he had was his little sister and his grandpa.

Then I decided to skip eighth grade and go to a different high school. I wanted to challenge myself, so I went to a school that had the IB, but when I left he took his own life. He overdosed on pills. I wasn’t his best friend, but we were friends. I carry this weight with me, always wondering if I could’ve done something. I just feel some sense of responsibility about that. It was just hard, at 14 years old, losing somebody to suicide. That sucked. 

I’m painting this very large arc of I would say that there are two moments in my life where I left. I left my friends that I had grown up with since kindergarten to go to the IB. And I lost a friend. And then you know, I went through high school with people that I cared about. And then I left the United States to go to Seoul and I lost a friend. So I looked back and thought to myself, I am a plague. Slowly but surely the world is going to take people that are closer to you over and over again until it’s you. That’s what I thought for a while anyway. 

Mental health is stigmatized. It still is. I think that compulsive suicidal ideation is something that other people latch on to as suicidality. But there’s a difference between having those thoughts and wanting to take action. For a while, I had the two mixed. I had these thoughts that kept on coming in and I couldn’t control them and I didn’t know what to do about them. But everyone was like, Oh no, he’s suicidal. Treat him as though he is suicidal. If someone is suicidal, they deserve everybody in their community to show up for support. If somebody has compulsive suicidal thoughts, they need help working through those thoughts. If somebody’s actually suicidal, if they are planning to take action and they are harming themselves, then you should take away some of their autonomy, because their autonomy is dangerous. But when somebody has compulsive suicidal ideations, what they need is help dealing with where those thoughts come from, how to deal with them on their own. You need the toolset. I’ve been working for years now to develop the toolset.

I live by a few values now that I wouldn’t have beforehand. The first and the most ever-present is, “Those that have the courage to speak up, should”. Those that feel confident speaking up about their story, those that can articulate it in a way that other people can understand, those that have some type of conclusion about what happened to them, should speak up, even if it’s still ongoing. People need to speak up and say, You’re not alone. 

I would say the second value is, “Treat your time with the same care a billionaire treats their money”. If you were Warren buffet and you had billions upon billions of dollars, where would you put it? Would you spend it on green tech? Because I would spend it on green tech. I would spend it on ending or combating racial injustice. I would spend it on making sure women have the rights to their own bodies. I would fight for things I care about. Now most of us aren’t Warren Buffet. So what do you have? You have time. That’s what you have. So find areas in your life that are force multipliers for the things you care about and spend your time on those things. You don’t have a million dollars (or maybe you do), but everyone has an hour. And so spend that hour investing in the problems you care about. Start working on a thing you care about regardless of the money you have, regardless of anything else.

And so I think that accomplishes this idea of a mental health journey, especially when you’re forging your own path and learning to deal with and live with your demons on your own. It creates this world where you’re your own protagonist and antagonist. You’re fighting every day. So it’s important to take the skills that you learn fighting for your own mental health and for your own good. And then apply them to the world. Because truly from the bottom of my heart, I believe somebody that can forge their own journey to true mental health acceptance of what they need in this world, that those people are very talented. But I’m not bragging about myself. I’m taking myself out of the equation. I’m talking about the people that do fight every day. I think what they may not see in themselves is that they’re incredibly talented, persistent, and incredibly thoughtful. And the fact is we need more of those people. We need people that can fight for themselves because those people can also fight for others. They know what pain feels like. 

The third point to remember is that your brain and your body are dumb pieces of meat and they need very very basic things.

Basically what I’m saying is that you live in a meat tube and you need to take care of it so that your brain feels okay. And once your brain feels okay, it’ll start taking care of the meat tube. Once your body feels okay, it’ll start taking care of the brain. I’m not really saying anything new. You’ve got to sleep. You have to track your caffeine. And remember from before, don’t give yourself anxiety. Track your food and listen to what your body actually wants and feed it. Your body’s pretty smart. It’s evolved for quite some time to be pretty good at keeping you walking forward. You need to start getting this connection between the mind and body and connecting them with what you feel because what you feel is ultimately how your body has evolved to this point. For centuries. So feed your body good food. The last comment I’ll make on the third point is I was listening to a podcast with the dog whisperer. He said that dogs are really simple. Because once you see enough of them, you kind of understand what they need. He said all dogs need five things. They need to run. They need to eat. They need to poop. They need to sleep and they need to play. Those are the five things; I might be misremembering but the point stands. If a dog does those five things, then they’re fine. They wake up, they stretch, they play a little bit, they eat. It’s very simple. Humans are pretty simple. Do the thing that gives you serotonin. For me, that’s running. I don’t know what it is for other people, but what’s the thing that makes you feel content? You need that. You need something that makes you feel content. What gives you dopamine? What thing pushes you forward? For me that’s work. And so I work because it gives me dopamine because it creates the chemical in my brain and I need that. Humans need to eat, humans need to sleep, humans need to poop. We need these things. The older you get, the more you realize these like antiquated sayings are really true. You understand them in more depth. As an adult, your parents aren’t here anymore. You gotta be your own parent. Sometimes you just gotta force yourself to do it. Find and do the things that give you the ~good chemicals~; that’s what your brain needs! For me it’s running, it’s working, it’s joking, it’s cooking. I think life is a process of continually discovering and accepting these things as pillars in your life. They may change, be open to that! But once you find something that gives your body and your mind the stuff it needs, stick with it.

So yeah, “Speak Up If You Can”, “Invest Your Time Like You Would Invest Your Money”, and, I guess, “Feed Your Meat Tube and Meat Computer”. I guess, above all else, don’t forget the strength it takes to fight a mental health battle, and don’t let that strength go to waste. We need people that can fight for themselves in this world because they can also fight for the good of others.