SHAKTI PERSPECTIVES

Shakti perspectives: Bobby

When we speak about mental health awareness, for me that awareness began with the journey of becoming self aware. Self aware of the things that made me feel uneasy, self aware of the people that made me feel uneasy & self aware of the environments that made me feel uneasy. What I learnt in this process was university really was a trigger to a decline in my mental health, being around others that ostracised me, made me feel strange, unwanted & weird which in effect all fed into heightened anxiety. 

The 3 years weren’t all doom and gloom but I can safely say that those were the worst, the years I wished then that I could erase, that I could completely forget about as if it had never happened. But fast forward to now, the beauty I see in the pain, struggle and alienation of university taught me the power of loving myself in a whole new way. What once used to bother me about being different, now makes me thrive, what once used to make me feel uneasy that I didn’t fit in, now makes me excited, what once used to bother me about what others thought, now makes me live my life more honest than ever. 

Mental health awareness is constant, and the beauty of it is that when you become fully aware of your mind & body, when you make peace with the notion that your mental health is like the weather and can change on a day to day basis, you learn to love & appreciate yourself in a way no one else could ever teach you. My turbulent mental health which is always ongoing- and there’s no shame in admitting that, has allowed me to discover ways to deal with it but most of all it’s taught me that my life is beautiful, it’s special, I’m special & the person I am today, is an evolution from the person I was yesterday.