My mental wellness journey….

I have been seeing a shrink lately. Ai, let me be respectful, he is a psychologist. A good one for that matter. Every Monday at lunch time I religiously go see him. I call it my mental wellness Mondays. It has been a liberating experience – in a good way. Well, most of the time. When I am there, I get to talk about anything and everything. I get to experience every feeling that comes to me without pressure to feel different – you know like when you are hurting and someone says, “it will be over soon”. Yeah right! How do they know that it will be over soon.

What I have appreciated about the process so far is that it has been helping me to see and understand things in my life from a different or new perspective.

Let me backtrack a little. How did I end up with a shrink in the first place!

This is supposed to be a short story, but it is not. It all began towards the end of 2022. There was an incident at work that pressed my buttons. I was blamed for something I didn’t do. Let’s just say I lost it, and I lashed out at my colleagues. A few days later another colleague made an observation. “Pholo, these days you are on fire. You are behaving like you don’t care.” She was right. I didn’t care.

Days later I thought about what she said, and I realised that she was right. I was not myself. I had not been myself in a while. I was like a live electric wire. I could not be touched. Stress had affected me mentally and physically. Recognising where I was, I decided to do “the honourable thing”. I quit my job. Yes, I quit a job I enjoyed doing. As far as I was concerned, my work environment was the “source” of my stress.

 All this happened at the end of the year. During the holidays, I made time to reflect on the year that was. I realised that I might have made an impulsive decision. In fact, one of the first things I realised was that, though my job is stressful, it was not my main source of my stress. It just brought things to the surface.

I needed to understand my actions from a different perspective. So, I went to see a psychologist to help me unpack my situation. *sidenote* In the past I didn’t believe in therapy or psychologists. I believed they were a waste of time. But I needed help this time. I needed someone who didn’t know me. A psychologist made sense. It turned out to be a good decision.

But yoh! I was not ready for how the whole thing evolved.

By the end of the second session, we were no longer talking about work. We were talking about my health, death of my parents (happened more than twenty years ago), family politics to financial security for my kids when I am no longer around. It was this “other stuff” that made me wheep like Donald the Duck. They were the real issues that were leading me to be stressed the way I did. Not even once did my job frustrations make me cry. By session four I had realised that I was dealing with a far deeper issue than I imagined. And it was probably because of these issues, that I had become such a mess at work. I say probably because this is still in progress. But the pillars of my issues have emerged already.

What is my point!

My point is this, trying to be in a good space physically and mentally can be a difficult journey. First you will need to understand yourself. That on its own is tricky. So, you will need help. Try it with someone you trust and know they will be honest with you, rather than self-assessing. We all have blind spots that can make it difficult to be critical of ourselves. Oh, and don’t start if you are not ready. You will either waste money or not follow through.

#mentalhealth #pholoramothwala #lifebeyond #diaryofpr