World Mental Health Day: a Millennial's Reflection

// Originally published on the 14th of October 2020, on Shifter, featuring a reflection on what mental health means for millennials in the age of LinkedIn. Written (in Portuguese), translated and adapted by me.

// Originalmente publicado a 14 de outubro de 2020, no Shifter, onde escrevi uma reflex?o sobre o que a saúde mental significa para os millennials na era do LinkedIn. Texto, tradu??o e adapta??o (para o inglês) por mim. Para consultar o artigo original:

In such a rush to live, we have no time to be sick: a (late) reflection on the Burnout Society on World Mental Health Day.

Yesterday I started my day by trying to write an article for LinkedIn about what I did between 2019 and now. For a long time now I feel like I have shared too little about what I have accomplished at a professional level. And 2019 was certainly a year in which I felt like I reached (and I dare to say that I even surpassed!) a lot of my professional goals and dreams. It was the year I checked some items out of my goals list — but, surprisingly enough, it was also the time period I was the least active in the social network I religiously used to post every single one of my accomplishments. But why did I stop?, you might ask. Because I was completely exhausted. And burnt out.

In the not-so-glamorous part of my 2019, the one no one saw in any of my social media profiles, I was completely worn out. 2019 (and the beginning of 2020) was the year I questioned everything the most: the true meaning of "simple" concepts like home, happiness and love, and if renouncing to get to know what they really meant because of everything I was doing was actually worth it. Do not get me wrong: I am very honored, grateful and happy to have participated in every single thing I did last year. But I got to a point when I was no longer taking any joy out of them. It started to look like I was only accepting more projects because I was in a competition... with myself. I was trying to push myself a little further every time, as if trying to understand when I was going to reach my breaking point — which eventually came in 2020, while juggling a master's degree (which I felt I was not qualified enough to be doing), an internship (where I constantly thought I was underperforming because I am very strict with myself) and, obviously, a pandemic (which cranked my anxiety up to a record high). Basically, when my impostor's syndrome was at its peak. My vision was cloudy, and I could not acknowledge the blood, sweat and tears I shed for all my projects.

This week, a long time after my diagnosis, I finished reading the book that managed to put down in words the lonely competition I always felt but was never able to pinpoint. I read "Burnout Society" by Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, and a lot of things finally started to make sense. In my humble opinion, it was not the most brilliant book I ever read, but it sure taught me a thing or two about my constant need to prove myself and my value to each and every one. Even if that means just sharing the "beautiful" and "instagrammable" part of things — the constant crying and will to disappear, those (I) never show. According to Byung-Chul Han, we are incapable of fighting against these less positive feelings because there is an excess of "positivity" around us: there is nothing that "threatens" us (like a virus, something external), everyone seems equally happy, almost as if in a standardized way. And that does not help us create the "antibodies" needed to fight this external positivity, which ends up multiplying inside us almost like a "cancer". This positivity leads us to wanting to do — and show what we do — more and more often. We then find ourselves lost in what supposedly was our road to self-discovery, to standardized happiness. We find ourselves having an identity crisis and trying to organize our whole lives in a Notion page on the late hours of a Wednesday night. In the end, paraphrasing the Korean philosopher, we are exhausted by the effort we make to be ourselves. Even with all the freedom in the world, we constantly beat ourselves up for not being as good as (or as equal to?) others. We are the explorers and the exploited simultaneously. And we end up become machines that overheat due to the excess of multitasking.

And this gave me a lot to think about. So much that it took me a long time to read a book that "only" has 47 pages. A friend even asked me "Don't you think it is kind of ironic it took you so long to read a book called Tiredness Society (the book tittle's direct translation into Portuguese)?". And, yes, I do. But it was even more "ironic" that, in that very day, a friend confided in me that she is tired of our field, of International Relations. "Our field is getting highly competitive", she told me. "I do not really know if I want this for my life. As much as I love it, I am getting very demotivated". But the competition she was talking about was not just the one between candidates to an internship or job posting. It was, maybe in a larger scale, the one we feel inside. These days, if we want to succeed (I dare to say in any area!), we have to be our own biggest publicists. We have to know how to sell even the tinniest, most irrelevant thing we did as if it was the most exclusive and important in the whole world. Without that kind of hustle, no matter how great we are at what we do, we will never be in the frontlines. We are doomed to live under the idea our society has of failure and oblivion (emphasis on "the idea our society has"). And, looking back, it was because I so badly wanted to be on the frontlines that I reached the point I got to in late 2019. The point of burnout. A burnout that, at first, I did not want to accept I was suffering from, simply because I did not believe I had done enough (yes, e-n-o-u-g-h) to have one.

So, in the midst of all this, the article I was trying to write obviously became irrelevant. It is 2020 and everyone has already shared their daily at-home workouts on Instagram and a dozen professional accomplishments they reached during quarantine on LinkedIn. Do you want to know mine? I learnt how to wind down. I learnt what home meant, experienced a bit of happiness and I think I felt love along the way. My daily routine, for the first time since I started obsessing about my future (around 2016, the 2nd year of my first bachelor's degree), includes resting, reflecting and even reading (for pleasure), a passion I had long forgotten. And I needed a pandemic to do so. Therefore, LinkedIn does not need another post of mine trying to publicly announce one more project I was/am involved in. At least, not today. 2020 was also the year I decided to give up social media a bit more. Not having the patterns of others to compare myself to all the time (or even adding to others' own patterns with glimpses of my own fabricated happiness for social media) was liberating. And I would even say for you to try it out sometime, but it became an almost impossible task in this unplugable generation of ours. But, at least, allow yourselves to enjoy some of life's little pleasures we still have left, from frantically dancing while listening to loud music in our bedrooms to just activating starfish mode on top of our beds and stare at the ceiling for some good 4 hours in a Saturday afternoon.

October 10th was World Mental Health Day — but today I write this at my own risk: the one of being deemed weak, crazy even, for speaking out. The ever-present stigma and discrimination people with mental health issues still suffer with is shocking. I get called out all the time for being so open about mine. I see people getting uncomfortable when I do it — but, most importantly, I also see the glowing eyes of those who are not feeling so well and finally hear someone putting into words what they are feeling. And, even though talking about this on the internet generally give us some kind of validation in the comments section, if we spoke face-to-face with some of those people their reaction could be a whole lot different. But let us learn not to care, not to apologize. Nor to accept the very common (that I hear much more than I would like to) "But you do not look depressed at all!".

Only when being open about our problems will we be able to surpass them. A friend of mine once told me he felt empowered and liberated when speaking out about his problems. "As if a weight was lifted from my shoulders". Apparently, we are the first generation open enough to talk about its own problems — there are even memes about that, comparing us to boomers and their collective shame in addressing mental health issues. So, let us take advantage of that. Let us start speaking out about our problems, let us get rid of the burden we carry on our shoulders. Therefore, let me start by doing what I should have done in the beginning of this text: Hello, my name is Catarina, I am 24 years old and I suffer with depression and an anxiety disorder. What about you?