One of the changes I’ve promised myself for 2018 is to make ‘mental health’ a topic on my blog, to talk about it more often than I used to, because it’s important. I’ve previously talked about depression, anxiety, stress as well as relationship issues but what needs to be talked about more is the need for counseling in general. What I’ve come to believe after all these years is that every people more or less suffer from mental health one way from other, it’s just how well people learn how to hide it under a smile.

As for me, my anxiety isn’t as severe as my depression is, and thus I can control my anxiety, unlike my depression. Anxiety isn’t just over thinking, and over worrying, it’s way severe than that, it’s what makes you curl up and lay in your bed when you should be out in the world doing what you love to do. My husband is a musician and a photographer, some years back before he let his full-time job take over his life, he was well-known among local musicians, and I swear he could calm down a group of die-hard metal fans with his soft music. People loved listening to him, and they would see him walking down the stage, satisfied, they would come to greet him for him performance and he would be at his happiest. But what nobody ever saw was me literally dragging him to the stage, he hated it, he hated going to the stage until he was actually on the stage. People would contact me, asking him to perform and he would say decline, it used to take me too much effort to convince him to accept the offer, sometimes I would accept the offer instead of him, go to the stage, perform a solo accoustic music and then call for him from the stage, and the crowd would do the rest. The smile he used to have on his face once he was on the stage was worth all my effort to get him on stage. I knew it was nothing but his anxiety holding him back from the stage, and once he would reach the stage, his anxiety would vanish into thin air.

And he does the same thing while I make plans to go somewhere, he doesn’t waste any moment before pointing out all the problems we can face if we carry on with my plans and if I still make him come with me I still see his grumpy face, the one I used to see while dragging him to the stage, and again once we reach the destination, he ends up enjoying more than I do, he goes into his ‘photographer mode’ and thanks me for dragging him against his will. Sometimes, it gets a little exhausting for me, especially since I’m fighting my own demon, but knowing what I’m actually dealing with helps. Had I never taken a counseling session, had I not known what anxiety is, I probably would have given up a long time back, but I know exactly what we are dealing with, I had taken too many counseling session online and offline that I know how to handle it. I’m not saying I’m doing my best, because if I did, he would have taken a session for himself by now.

Sometimes it might look not a big deal, I mean, how can not going out and not making plans be a big deal, right? But it can, when it’s too severe to affect your career, it is a huge deal. For someone who has taken multiple counseling sessions both while going through a rough patch as well while going through the time of my life, I know how important it is to get help. Our lives today aren’t as simple as our grandparents have it, there are too many complexities, too much competition and it isn’t as easy to have a sense of fulfilment in our lives as it used to be upon a time. It doesn’t take us much get stressed out, it doesn’t take much to slip and fall into the darkest phase of our lives; most survive it, but some don’t. Taking a counselling session makes it a bit easier to survive, and even when you aren’t actually going through a rough patch, the assurance that you have taken the right path, makes life a lot more fulfilling.

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