My Mental Health

I’m really scared of myself.

It’s hard to put into words -- it’s not that I feel uncomfortable in my skin, it’s more so that I’m terrified of how unpredictable I can be. I’m in constant shock at how I cycle between the utmost joy and complete rock bottom multiple times in a day. While people around me might see a predictable person -- 6:00 AM run every morning, at work by 8:00 AM, mostly excitable and driven -- I’m emotionally volatile and I’ve learned to hide it really well.

Talking about my mental health doesn’t come naturally to me and it doesn’t feel like I ever have the right vocabulary to properly articulate my feelings.

This is my best, organized attempt at sharing with you my mental health journey, with the hope that you connect with some piece of this in pursuit of your own happiness.

I can’t honestly remember the last sustained period of time that I felt happy and I know that I have a hard time enjoying the moment. My mind is always thinking about “what’s next?” usually in the context of what difficult thing will I have to deal with next. If I had to pick a physical object to describe what my mind feels like, it’s like a coil of barbed wire: the chaos and impossibility of unraveling that coil sums up the pain and headache that comes from mixed emotions, mixed feelings, and a lack of clarity about the choices I’ve made -- whether it’s dropping out of school or distancing myself from people because of my fear of intimacy or even making the move out to New York. I’m not as gentle to myself as I wish I was.

I don’t think I was always like this. I had a happy childhood with a family that I loved and that loved me back. I got to travel quite a bit to exciting places, pursue the things that I was passionate about, and spend time figuring out who I was and how I wanted to move through the world. Over adolescence though, I feel like I changed mostly because of how I allowed externalities and things I had no way of controlling consume me.

Throughout my 20 years, I’ve experienced four traumas -- I count them, it’s a little weird. While I don’t feel comfortable yet (and maybe ever) openly discussing these outside of the closest people in my life, I can tell you that they made me feel less safe in myself and in the world. When I think about them, I feel worthless. And while, in the grand scheme of things, they should be blips on the radar, they feel all consuming and like some of the biggest knots in my mind of barbed wire.

The common thread through these changes from adolescence to now and through each trauma is my depression. It honestly started like any other bout of negative feelings I’d experienced before: a bundle of unease, boredom, exhaustion, and submission. But since it first started, it’s persisted. It goes through cycles of coming to the fore versus fading into the background, but it always maintains a presence. If you’ve ever heard of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, it’s how I think about my depression -- constantly trying to climb out of a hole and just when I think I’ve reached the end of that climb, tumbling right back down.

The thing about depression for me is that it often feels like an escape.

I lean into it because I experience my depression as something that allows me to just stop thinking about some of the biggest challenges I face -- it’s a distraction. A specific example? Naps. I’m not a napping person -- I go to bed usually around 9:00 or 10:00 PM, get my eight hours, and then I’m up for the day. And so, when I feel really down, I nap during the day to take my mind off of the things that make me feel terrible. I’d rather be asleep than have to spend more time actively feeling wrong. Usually it isn’t that hard for me to fall asleep either in those moments because I’m genuinely exhausted from exerting so much energy on negative emotions.

What depresses me? Rarely is it one thing. It’s a combination of my traumas, anxiety over money (am I really budgeting the right way?), stress over the news (when a school shooting happens, I excuse myself to the bathroom to get out a quick cry), and the accumulation of little things throughout the day.

I don’t think my depression will ever fully fade away and I’ve noticed how I’ve changed over the past few years as a result of the things that weighed down on me. What hurt me most about the changes that I went through was how it had such a visible impact on the people that I cared most about. My parents and sisters have gone through emotional turmoil over the “new Tej” and how different of a human I am than who they’ve seen before. As a family, we’re mostly at peace with what’s happened, but it’s a thing I carry -- that I hurt some of the people closest to me.

A lot of what I’ve written sounds really sad, but I promise you that despite everything, I really like my life. I love my family more than anything, I love my friends, and I love the work that I get to do every single day making a difference in the world. I take joy in the little things (finding a seat on the subway, eating a Häagen-Dazs ice cream sundae) and I pride myself that in spite of everything, I’ve kept going. I’m moving forward.

I’m trying to treat myself better. I’m trying to unlearn the feeling of being broken because of the way people have treated me in the past or the residual effects of my traumas. I’m trying to trust more and continue to spread love, rather than become jaded or hardened.

I’m trying to be powerful through my resilience and not through my fear.

I’m proud that I’ve prioritized my self-care now more than ever. I go to therapy every Monday evening and openly get to process the life I live with someone who passes no judgment -- they’re just there to help me unpack the emotional suitcases stored in my mind. I go for runs most mornings to just listen to music and clear my head before the craziness of the day begins. I read fiction about South Asian identity and write short stories just for fun.

I’ve mentioned my family a few times and it’s because they were so important in me recognizing my mental health struggles and getting the right resources to work through them. My senior year of high school I had a major foot injury, I felt lost with the impending doom of college, and I felt hopeless in the things that I was trying to do. Truthfully, the only reason I started going to therapy was because that year my mother had a tough conversation with me and bluntly stated that I needed it. She saw the way I was changing and knew that it was something that necessitated professional help. I owe much of the happiness I’ve managed to achieve in the past few years to her care, her checking in on me, and her nudging me to talk to someone openly and honestly.

That’s why I’m so proud of the Mental Note: Take Time For Yourself campaign that we launched in partnership with Harry’s. It’s my story lived out and translated to a national cause campaign -- empowering tens of thousands of friends, brothers, sisters, parents, partners, and more to show up for the guys in their lives and provide them with accessible mental health resources designed to help them process and take care of themselves. I believe that this is one of the most impactful campaigns that I’ve worked on at DoSomething -- it makes me so incredibly happy that so many young people relate to the campaign and are inspired to participate.

I’ll leave you with this: living life is hard and at 20 years old, I’ve definitely not figured out the best way to do it (and I know that folks much older than me say the same thing). I know that I’ll never not struggle with my mental health, but I’m happy with the way that I deal with it and the ways that I take care of myself. I’m learning to be more gentle with myself and I hope you will too.