Boy’s aren’t supposed to cry. I heard this a lot when I was growing up. Hide your feelings is another way of putting it. That’s what I did when I was in middle school through college. No, that’s a lie, I still hide some feelings, but I am way more open now than I used to be. I also put a lot of weight into what other people thought of me, more than what I thought of myself. Now, I know that way of thinking was very damaging to myself in many ways, socially, mentally and physically.
I held my emotions in until I exploded. I remember coming home from middle(?) school one day and writing “I am stupid” tens of times in a single sheet of 8.5×11 single lined paper. I don’t recall the reason why, but I have to assume I thought that “I was stupid”. After that I started to go to therapy every week for a number of months. I can only remover a handful of things that happened, taking an IQ test and forgetting what the Eiffel Tower was called, even though I knew the location and going to the comic store afterwards to get Usagi Yojimbo and TMNT comics. Continue reading Mental Health