As someone who is clinically diagnosed with depression and anxiety, I can attest to it's lifelong struggle. Getting diagnosed meant accepting that there was, infact, something wrong with me. Throughout my life, I've always had people tell me that I’m good at empathizing, so I should become a therapist. But I realized I’m always the one empathizing with others, never the one to be empathized with. So naturally, it was hard for me to accept therapy as my career. But towards the end of college, I came in touch with my emotions and depression. I realized I want to be able to help someone else who's struggling with it too. If I know how to take care of mine, then I want to teach someone else how to take care of theirs.
I am currently striving to become a mental health therapist, specifically for the Desi and Muslim community. Being a person that talks about mental health, explains how it works, and explains all the feelings of it — I try to validate all that comes with depression. I don't want my future patients to live the life that I did, where they're constantly having to prove their feelings to other people. It's one thing to accept depression within ourselves. But there's the other thing of having to prove it to our family and our close friends. There's so much that I could have avoided if I just had someone to help me through it. I want to be that for someone else and I also want to teach that to our community.
Depression has taught me the importance of understanding both someone else and myself. Once you understand that there are two sides to every story, you gain a level of empathy. In the Desi community, we don't carry or teach empathy and it's very exhausting. But being an empath myself, I know that part of me has this ability to always feel someone else's emotion to validate them and make them feel like they're understood. So I guess I came to the conclusion that if I’m one of the only people that can empathize this deeply, then I’ll use it to the best of my abilities to help others overcome what they struggle with internally.
