It’s OK to not be OK

The Importance of Being Honest 

There are days when you tell yourself everything is fine, even though you’ve been in a funk for what feels like an age, you’ve been avoiding seeing people you used to love being around, and you can’t raise a real smile no matter how much you try.
Your friends around you are seemingly happy and are busy getting on with their lives – it’s hard to tell them that you’re not yourself. It’s hard to tell anyone. To make it clear, you now have two choices: stay in this numb state or find a way out.

This is my story of how I learned to feel again…
It was a last resort that should have been my first option. I didn’t think I’d ever need professional help, therapy, or any sort of counselling, because I am a strong man and strong men aren’t supposed to need help. Weakness was always someone else’s issue, like hay fever or nut allergies.

Then the day came when I realised that it takes real strength to ask for help. Not just from friends or family – this is an important step too – but from an expert. Your emotions are like any other part of you. Just because you can’t see or touch them, doesn’t make them less important. When they’re injured or experience trauma, they need physiotherapy. They need expert help to heal. It’s like if you broke a tooth. You wouldn’t go to an electrician for help, would you? You’d visit a dentist. That’s their area of speciality.

I had always assumed that life operated in cycles. If something went wrong and I stayed on the best course, good times would come back around. The funny thing is that I settled on this thought at a young age with little to no evidence. Then ‘The Event’ broke the cycle. I was doing the same things, but I wasn’t getting better. It was something different – A New Pain – valleys and peaks of emotion with deeper dips and shallower summits. The pendulum would swing and I’d go from feeling everything, to feeling nothing at all; an unpredictable anaesthetic. I knew that I needed help that my family and friends couldn’t offer, but honestly had no idea what to do next.

‘The Event’ was a break up and a particularly damaging one at that. It had been my foundation (more so than I’d realised) and had suddenly ceased to exist. I mistook my “successful relationship” for a “successful life”. I was doing what I thought was necessary to be a man that I could be proud of. I was someone who had convinced himself and much of his world that he wasn’t scared. That he wasn’t crippled by fear of failure, to be an ambitious and successful black man standing as an example to others, to be a son/brother/uncle of legend. This was a lie. I was already on the edge.

See, you make plans for tomorrow based on the assumption that not much will change between now and then and you have a good grasp on what might. Nothing changes all at once. It rarely happens. But things are always moving. You need to pay attention or it will ruin, like a relationship or when frying plantain.

All wasn’t well. It felt like I was on the outside of my life looking in. Like a pane of glass was blocking me and dulling my senses. I was active. I went to work, I trained in the gym regularly, I socialised, I ate well, but it felt hollow. Life was cold to the touch. Explaining all of this to my loved ones was one of the hardest things to go through. I’ve always been the low maintenance one who had himself together. Suddenly I needed help and hadn’t a clue how to ask for it. Like a lot of young men, I’d never learned how.

Days blended into one another. The only compass for my time was work. I’d turn up and do my thing, but feel empty and listless during journeys to and fro. It was the mask I lived in. I knew it was time to change. Barely existing wasn’t going to be enough. Here’s where the hard work began…
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Part two of this will be released tomorrow.
If you’ve gone through a similar experience, share with us in the comment box below.