Are you struggling to wear a mask right now?
It’s a bit of a challenge right?
- Getting the right fit?
- Steaming up your glasses?
- Forgetting to put it on?
Since March this has been a big consideration of our lives - taken over by this new global pandemic called coronavirus. Whoever would have thought something so simple could have such an impact? There are headlines - its groundbreaking - we’re talking about it.
Yet everyday there are some of us that put on a different mask
- Not knowing where we fit
- Our judgement steamed up and clouded
The difference being that we don’t often forget to put it on. Nor do we feel it's safe to go out or stay in without it.
Mental health and the stigma around it has created an environment where we have to hide who we are and how we are feeling. It is a very real mask that so many of us wear. We don’t have to, but society often makes us feel like we do and that pressure so much more intense that the one put on us from coronavirus, because this mask has to be invisible.
My glasses do not steam up with mental health but my vision is blurred by my tears, my pain, my sadness. But all you see is my smile. I hide from you behind my mask - but I don’t know why.
Like coronavirus the mental health pandemic is so misunderstood, so unknown, does not have a set pattern of who it affects, why it affects and how it affects us. But what I do know is that it is real and a pandemic - affecting more people and most definitely killing more people than coronavirus, yet still we are not treating it with the same importance.
But one think we do know that is very different is that if we can talk and remove the masks that we wear, that we will start our road to recovery or at the very least something better than we are today.
I will not be alone in my mental health vs coronavirus comparison
I will not be alone in my cry for recognition that mental health global pandemic
And maybe for one day I will not be alone.
#worldmentalhealthday2020
