CARING FOR OUR

As an international student living in Canada, I finally got the chance to go back to my homeland, China, after two years of separation from my family. I had to quarantine for one month after I arrived because of COVID. During this period, I really struggled with my anxiety because of the stress of being back in China, as well as managing my workload from school.

Procrastination made it worse. I stopped checking my email for a while because each one of my tasks would remind me of how much I hadn’t done. While I was happy to have time on my own, I was playing online games every night and I often felt an emptiness that terrified me.

Later, after *another* COVID-19 exposure, I was put into quarantine again! I spent fourteen days in a hotel plus another seven days at home. The first fourteen days were the worst. I couldn't see my family at all. Every day in China was precious for me, so I felt anxious and angry at myself, and mostly sad and guilty for my family. I had to keep reminding myself that things just happened the way they happened, and that it would be all right. Thankfully, since I was back in the same time zone as many of my friends, we got to chat online every day.

Spending so much time in quarantine felt devastating and disempowering. When you’re trapped inside, you need to plan ahead and encourage yourself to do little things to keep going. Avoidance is not the way to overcome loneliness. I learned that even when we feel isolated, it’s still possible to keep living our lives. It’s so important to have lovely people who can talk and share their feelings with you. That part was great, even though I don't think I ever want to quarantine again!

I’d like to say I always knew exactly who and what I was, but that's just not true. I spent a really long time testing out different identities and trying to figure things out, but it was never easy.  

What I can say is that I’ve always felt different from other people. Even as a child, I felt what can only be described as a sense of being out of place. I wasn't happy like other children. I didn't engage myself the same way most children would - I had this deep understanding of sadness far beyond my years.

When I first came out, I was lucky enough to stumble into a world full of people who knew how to help me access therapists and other supports. I quickly realized that this sadness and misplaced feeling is something a lot of non-cisgender people experience.

At the time, my identity didn't feel right and didn’t make me feel good. Later, with the help of a gender-specific therapist, I discovered the term agender and everything it meant. This helped me learn to love myself a little more every day. I learned not to focus so much on how the world saw me. I no longer felt the need to fit into a specific bracket. It gets easier every day.

Now, I can focus on how I’m a musician, an artist, and a loving, accepting person. I learned to love all the small things about me, and I found a great community who loves me for who I am. The road travelled was hard, and because of it, I found myself learning more about mental health and becoming more trauma-informed. Today, I'm able to offer youth who find themselves in the same situation a hand to lift them up, like how I was lucky enough to receive the same.

I’m reminded of my favourite Joan Rivers quote, “I wish I could tell you that it gets better. But it doesn’t get better. You get better.”

My compulsions, intrusive thoughts, and constant restlessness have not improved since my childhood diagnosis. I live chronically with mental illness, and that’s okay.

Daily life with OCD manifests itself as a kind of mental tug-of-war. I’m constantly pulling myself off the ledge—trying to stay on the path of normalcy, rationality, and sanity (which, I’ve heard, is lovely). It takes me longer to complete simple, everyday tasks. I obsess over small details. Intrusive thoughts interrupt my every action and interaction.

The internal voice of OCD is the ultimate drama queen. Just like how pursuing the perfect life can be a fruitless quest, so is carrying out your compulsions to feel “just right”. The beast is never satisfied, so you have to resist feeding it as best you can.

Growing up gay means having to deal with some discomfort. So does growing up with mental health issues. But I’ve learned to make a life for myself anyway. I hope that finding meaning in suffering through the years will also help me find some peace. It’s all about expectations, I suppose. Happiness is a passing feeling, as is sorrow.

It doesn’t necessarily get better. You get better.

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It’s still quite daunting for me to think back on what happened two years ago when my mental health was so severe that I was hospitalized. The worst thing about it was that I didn’t realize how bad it was. I simply thought this was who I was.

People around me had offered support, but I rejected them up until the social worker at my school referred me to the hospital’s emergency department. Two months in the mental health ward was not a pretty recovery journey: it was scary and felt like hell. But I also learned more about the way I am supposed to be, and deserve to be.

After being released, I was able to continue to recover because of the change in my mindset. I took full responsibility for recognizing and fighting harmful patterns, and asked others to keep me accountable for my actions. The battle is ongoing between me and my mind, but I know the enemy I’m against, and I have many allies on my side. As I begin to feel better, I've accepted that I need help, and that I can’t do it all by myself.

Two years later, I’m finishing my university degree, and I want to share my experience to let others who are struggling know that it's okay to feel scared or broken sometimes. We can and will get better. It’s important to be vulnerable and to open the door for support. My message to allies is that sometimes you might get frustrated or question if you are doing the right thing, but please keep trying to help us, and remember to take care of yourself, too.

I grew up dealing with generalized anxiety and I’m still dealing with it to this day. I also grew up in an era of mental health awareness, hearing about all the things a person can and should do to maintain a balanced state and become happy, vibrant and productive: Exercise. Meditate. Sleep. Eat healthily. Cook. Talk to a counsellor. A therapist. A psychiatrist. Bullet journal. Art journal. Play games. Take breaks. Say no. Stand up for yourself.

If I wanted to be a better person and live a balanced life, then I should learn to juggle all these things at once.

Something that’s only sinking in recently is that the pressure to be ‘mentally healthy’ is not unlike the pressure to be academic, morally perfect, or the pressure to live up to any other social standard. If I can’t find the time to sleep, if I over-booked myself, if I indulged in self-pity, or got distracted, or burst into tears at work despite everything, it had to be because I *wanted* to be miserable. Otherwise, why would I not try harder to find a healthy balance?

I’m learning that I don’t have to constantly strive to be ‘mentally healthy’.  All these “flaws” and neuroses are part of being human. People are messy and far from predictable - just like the rest of the universe. I’m far from being at peace. But at least this means I don’t have to know everything, do everything, and be everything. I can be flawed and stay flawed. In some sense, it’s liberating.

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