The Immigrant Route #2: Normalizing healthy discussions of mental health
It's challenging, discussing your inner struggles with your immigrant parents. But its important that we change it.
“The Immigrant Route” is a weekly column published on Mondays featuring personal essays on self-care and love, mental health, family, careers, and personal stories from the voice of an immigrant. To gain full access to the story, consider becoming a paid subscriber here.
There are those days where you’re sitting in bed staring into space - maybe you feel overwhelmed that your brain is malfunctioning, or you’re stressed and angry and just want to scream into a pillow, or perhaps you feel depressed that you’re closing in on another breakdown. We all get those days where we don’t feel normal, and that’s okay. But it doesn’t mean you should bottle it all in and hope it goes away, but rather find the space and opportunity to manage your emotions in healthy and consistent ways.
My mother had taught me to keep my emotions in, to not draw attention to myself and bother other people with my problems. That’s how I’ve always dealt with my emotions growing up and, to other people, I often appeared cold or unfriendly (one of my best friends thought I was a bitch when she first met me!) and isolated myself so as to not disturb anyone with my issues. Any type of outburst I had bubbling inside me - anger, frustration, sadness - I would suppress it as much as I could.
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