CITIZENS FOR KEVIN SHEEHY issued the following announcement on July 22.
I am incredibly open about my struggles with anxiety and, as a result of that, I do not shy away from talking about my worries to people in my life.
I remember one day I was in work and someone asked me about my anxiety and how it feels. A former boss was in the room. He knew that I had anxiety and mental health issues in general. After voicing them, my feelings of paranoia and concern about the world around me, he called me a negative person. Since that day I closed up and did not mention any more about my anxiety when he was around. For a long time, this was not just simply because I was shut down but because for a moment I felt as though I was the problem and I hadn’t felt this way in a long time. I am the kind of person who does not get offended easily but I strongly dislike being called negative. It is crystal clear why – no positive connotations are attached to it.
On the other hand, I have spent so much of my life fighting how I feel inside to be able to be positive and it upsets me when my anxiety worries are deemed part of my personality, like a trait or characteristic of me. I’m sure many with mental health issues feel the same way. The remainder of that day, I felt awful about myself and did not stop to take a step back to think that anxiety may translate as negative but that does not mean I translate this way. I am so tired of my mental health issues being deemed a component of my personality. Although my anxiety and depression have given me some wonderful characteristics such as overwhelming compassion for others going through these issues, a worried, stressed, and negative person is not all that I am.
During my years of bad depression in my early teenage years, I recall a friend of my mum’s coming over for the evening. I came down and was cracking jokes and laughing on the couch. She knew I was depressed and had attempted a suicide only a couple months back. She pulled me aside a while later and asked me: “I am confused as to why you are laughing and joking, are you not depressed?” The ironic thing here also is that she claimed that she had dealt with depression too.
This felt bizarre because it is often said that the people out in the world suffering with depression are usually the happiest people on the outside. Why was I any different? In addition, having depression is not a case of feeling depressed constantly, you can communicate and laugh with people, you can have a normal conversation with another human being. Its almost as though we all fit in this one box. I am depressed so I must be like that and show it every second of the day? Or I have anxiety so I must be a negative person who is constantly being over the top rather than simply having negative thoughts that consume me to the point of irrationality. I finally thought about all of this rationally and concluded that it is not me that is the problem – I suppose the problem is more so how mental health issues translate.
Original source here.
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