Quite a few years ago, while I was working as a Visual Merchandiser for Al Tayer, I had spent the entire night working with the team putting up the new Saint Laurent window display. Afterwards I was driving two colleagues back home in the early hours of the morning, when a car ran through a red light and hit my car at around 100kph. Both cars were pretty much write-offs. My collar bone was snapped in half from the pressure of the seatbelt. Thankfully other than that we all walked away safe and sound.
For weeks after the accident I had to wear a sling, it did feel and look pretty uncomfortable. I would get flowers sent to me from friends and family wishing me a speedy recovery, I would walk into a mall and strangers would open doors for me seeing that I was injured and recovering. Everyone I met would comment on my injury and wish me luck and health, people went out of their way to make me feel the very best. I never felt alone, and to be honest I think because of all the wishes it someone put me in a mental space to get better much sooner than I thought.
Fast forward four or five years and I broke something else that seemed to never heal, that seemed never ending. This time it wasn’t a physical struggle but a mental one. I had a pretty dark and low period and my mental health was out the window. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t do the basic things that gave me so much happiness. But unlike my collar bone, no one saw a sling, no one saw that I was injured. No doors here opened, no friend or family calling to see if I was okay, to wish me a speedy recovery. I felt so alone.
It was easy for me to tell everyone and anyone I had broken a collarbone in a car accident before, but this time it was pretty impossible for me to say anything about my mental health. I’m not sure if it was a cultural reason why I couldn’t talk about my mental health or whether it was because of my own expectations of myself as a man that hindered me reaching out to anyone.
Thankfully I managed to get out of that dark period but it left a massive impression on me as to how important and how ignored mental health is. If I was unable to talk about it I wondered how many of my friends and family around me had mental health issues and felt so alone that they seemed incapable to ask for help? Making a conscious decision now I make sure my mental health is at the top of my priorities of self-care.
You can’t see if someone is struggling mentally, there is no sling for your brain, so you have to make a conscious decision to talk about how you are feeling and what mental blocks you are facing. The stigma of discussing your mental welfare is still at large in the Middle East and for a lot of men globally.
If you don’t ask for help or if you don’t voice your struggles then there is no way anyone can help. I always use Robin Williams as a tragic example; he could make the entire world laugh but the one person he should have made smile he never could; himself.
Talk about your mental struggles, don’t feel like you are alone, much like a broken bone your mental health can heal and heal even stronger than before.
