A Mental Health Breakdown Is Your Reinvention, Not a Nightmare
Being undervalued is a blessing.
When I first publicly spoke about my mental health breakdown people around me told me to be quiet.
“Shhh… people will think you’re crazy and you’ll be unemployable.”
They were right. But I’m a millennial who doesn’t know any better so I didn’t listen. I shared the story on LinkedIn originally. Then I took it to my local Toastmasters public speaking club to test out its effects on others. Finally, I spoke in front of an audience of work colleagues and former bosses — shortly after I exited my banking career, high on life.
Sharing my mental illness story became the last hurrah.
People misunderstood the point of sharing the story. It wasn’t a please-feel-sorry-for-me story. The mental illness story was part of my reinvention process.
A day spent with mental illness.
Walking around with mental illness feels weird. Your mind plays tricks on you. It makes you see things about the world that aren’t true. My mind told me food made me sick. This is ridiculous if I zoom out. At the time the lie I told myself felt like reality.
I lived as a person with an eating disorder. I felt scared eating in public. My mind imagined public vomiting as the end of the world. I went to the toilet a lot with images of not making it to the bathroom when around others.
Reality became distorted, and I distorted it.
I’d come home at night exhausted. Playing these mental mind games occupied most of my thoughts. I had no time to think about life, or finding love, or buying a house, or getting my dream job. I became consumed by mental illness. In other words, my brain had no capacity to think about anything other than my made-up fears.
This led me to become introverted. But I am the least introverted person you will ever meet. I like talking to people. I like meeting new people. Mental illness took away my ability to socialize. It’s impossible to socialize when you’re petrified of what people you’re going to be socializing with might think of you. So I lived in fear. I let mental illness run my life. Nando’s chicken became the only escape, followed by a slurpee from 7-Eleven.
When nobody is looking, and you’re squatting in the alley next to a chicken shop, you can be yourself and eat as if you have no problems. In those moments I had no eating disorder. Mental illness hid in the fast-food paper bag.
When I came home, sleep became the way I entered an alternate reality. Junk food and sleep are the two escapes that made my life worth living. They eased the pain.
A mental health breakdown is a wake-up call.
That’s why it pays to be thankful for mental illness. Mental illness won’t ruin you unless you let it. The wake-up call I needed was mental illness. It showed me how out of control my life had become.
Mental illness is an invisible illness.
When I learned to see mental illness, everything changed.
I changed. But more importantly, I saw people differently. I could see the guy screaming at a pedestrian crossing the road as a person just like me, who used anger as an escape instead of Portuguese peri peri chicken. Mental illness helped me have empathy for other people. I never had empathy before mental illness. All I cared about was my own survival.
When you see the collective in the same light as you see your life, you understand one cliche truth about life: we’re all in this together. Mental illness is a separation from the collective nature of humanity.
Mental illness is when you’ve forgotten you’re no different from the man, woman, child or human being standing next to you in the line at the supermarket who can’t pay for their groceries because their check is late or they found out they were unemployed yesterday.
Your life is reinvented when you give people a break because you are them.
A mental health breakdown shows the size of your ego.
The Empire State Building couldn’t cast a shadow over my former ego. My ego was extremely tall. When your life gets out of control so does your ego. Your ego starts feeding you lies such as “I don’t deserve this.” Or worse, “I’m better than this person.”
My inflated ego became a shield I used to fight mental illness.
When I didn’t like myself and my mental illness very much, I flexed my ego. This took the physical representation of a BMW, a fancy suit, a round of drinks at the bar, satire writing on social media, a personal trainer to build muscles, and the worst one of all — endless insults directed towards others to make me feel better about my shitty life.
A big ego is a nightmare. Noticing the size of your ego and doing something about it is personal reinvention.
Everyone loves an underdog.
A breakdown creates an unsuspecting underdog. When mental illness wiped out all my progress in life and I had to start again, people ruled me out. They crossed my name out from their life.
Being undervalued is a blessing.
It means you can quietly get yourself together again without anyone caring too much about what you’re doing. You can avoid the distraction of opinions and go about your reinvention quietly. The best reinventions happen quietly, when nobody is watching. In the peace and quiet you can work out what went wrong and where you want to head to in life. This is how you build self-awareness.
When you become self-aware your comeback starts.
You go from underdog to ‘who the heck is this person?’
A mental health breakdown is part of your life improvement plan.
The key isn’t to fear a mental health breakdown. Quite the opposite.
A mental health breakdown can be the first step of your life improvement plan. The pandemic has squashed our mental health like a bug under its foot. You can be Eddie Champion working on Wall Street and driving a Lambo. Whoever you are, your mental health has been affected.
Humans aren’t made to be locked in the cages of our homes. The situation is changing. Solutions are coming. Life after been stuck at home is coming to a town near you. In the meantime, the effects on your mental health may have been catastrophic. You might be one step away from everything falling apart.
It has taken me seven years to learn when everything falls apart, reinvention isn’t far away. Why? Reinvention interrupts the pattern.
Mental illness is a pattern that repeats itself. When everything falls apart the pattern is interrupted. Your habits change. You take different actions. And this is the first step of your plan to improve your life and escape mental illness. I watched the pieces of my perfect startup life crumble. I locked myself at home. Then I finally had enough. I published my first piece of writing online. That was the second step of the reinvention.
Now I look back at mental illness not as a nightmare, but as a total reinvention. This opportunity isn’t limited to a tall, skinny, guy from Australia. The same opportunity awaits you when you change your perspective about what a mental health breakdown is.
A breakdown is reinvention in disguise. Let everything fall apart so your life can be rebuilt.
