This is a not my usual politics post, it is a personal post that I wanted to share and to write following a difficult recent break up that I'm still working my way through. This tough personal experience has made me think about mental health and just how fragile and easy to reroute a person’s mental health can be. I also wanted to write about the impact social media has on mental health especially during an emotional event.
It has been about 3 months since my own break up following an over 6 year long relationship with someone I loved deeply and had made long term plans with. It's the first real break up I've been through and it's been challenging. I'm usually a self-reflective and self-analytical person, I can analyse a life decision or a political event but a break up has been unlike anything. The loss of the hopes, dreams and plans for the relationship has probably been the hardest thing to get my head around and at times I have struggled to stay positive, to think clearly and work out what is best.
A break up pushes your mind down routes that you know you can't go down anymore. Expecting a text, thinking when/if you'll see them, wondering what they're doing, are they thinking of you or missing you as much. All these things become swirled in your head and the mist they create clouds clear thinking. These little, normally insignificant things lead your mind to start fighting itself, pushing itself down paths it shouldn't.
I know from my own experience that your heart and head don't want to let this great thing die but they also tell you that you shouldn't think like that. It has made me realise just how little it takes to push your mental health off course.
Things can begin to spiral... grumpiness, loneliness, disappointment can build and build. It can be a spiral that some won't recover from and it can grow into depression and beyond. Having never been through a tumultuous emotional event before I guess I hadn't thought about how depression can begin and can snowball. A small knock can send mental health on a slide that is difficult to slow and sometimes impossible to stop. That has been one of my biggest realisations, of just how little it can take to push mental health down a path that is hard to recover from.
I feel social media is an incredibly dangerous element that can speed up any potential decline. Social media forces one to compare lives and emotional wellbeing with others on a completely false scale. Going through a break up has helped me to experience exactly this, constantly comparing my own sense of upset and loss with the other person, inevitably coming to conclusions where the other person is coping immeasurably better and inspiring more negative thoughts and doubt about the relationship you had, the strength of feelings and so on.
It has surprised me just how easy it is to firstly slip in to a decreasing mind-set and secondly how that can be accelerated and increased by social media. It has dramatically altered my prior opinion on mental health which underestimated just how quickly and powerfully mental health can be impacted by seemingly insignificant events.
In my own case, I'm pushing on with changes in all areas of my life despite harbouring regrets, hopes of reconciliation and lingering feelings for the person. I've found music, time with family and writing to be a help and although I have great days and bad days I'm gradually improving. I'm still working out how to manage social media, still working on how to analyse all my thoughts and feelings. However my message to anyone going through something similar is to keep working on it, find some way of expressing or releasing, like writing is for me, and take it a day at a time.
My biggest takeaway and my reason for writing however is the realisation of just how fragile mental health is. To encourage people to speak out and for the issue to be taken seriously. I now know everyone can struggle with mental health, especially during difficult periods in your life, and it deserves proper and financial recognition. Social media I believe has only increased the fragility and I would like teachers & parents to give it the weight and seriousness that it deserves with regards to mental health. I hope that my openness and my story is one small addition to the push for mental health to be taken seriously and given the importance it deserves.
Thanks for reading!
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