be open and honest and stop feeling shame about my situation surrounding mental health

I suffered a major and severe mental breakdown about 4 years ago and have relapsed in recent weeks, probably due to stress at work. Through the dedication of my partner, family and the community mental health team, I am already on the road to recovery. I have told the colleagues I worked with about my breakdown and they were all incredibly supportive. I hope to return to work soon. However I think I need to admit to myself that it is okay to have mental health problems. Unfortunately I hide this too well sometimes even to myself.

this way.

and somehow I pressed a key accidentally and it all disappeared. Computers, eh? I’m not sure how much to read into that. Maybe it just wasn’t the right time. But I’ll try again.

To start with, at least on the internet. I haven’t been able to be open to making new friendships with people, because I’m always thinking they will leave the instant they find out about me, about my problems. So when someone is friendly with me, I can’t even reciprocate like a normal person, and most of the time just want to run, to pre-empt the rejection.

The thing is, if I look around the internet, so many people have similar problems. Everyone has or has had or knows someone who has depression or other mental health issues. (Where on earth are these people hiding in “real-life”? Why does everyone have to pretend to be so well-adjusted?)

The only way I can get past this is to just lay it out in the open, in my internet profiles and homepages, and then if people still want to make contact with me, I know they already know this and it’s not a problem for them.

I’ll write more on this tomorrow maybe.