Finding Yourself
The Phases of Mental Health and Finding Yourself Inside It
There are different phases of mental health conditions. It doesn’t stay one way. It moves, it cycles, it hides, it screams. I’ve lived it. And I’ve watched how education changes how you move through it.
A person that is educated is different than a person with a high school degree or someone that has continued with school. Not better — different. When you’ve been to school, when you’ve had to name things, research things, sit in a room and defend your thoughts, you start to get language for what’s happening inside you. You learn to say “this is anxiety” instead of “I’m going crazy.” You learn coping skills, frameworks, that there’s a DSM-5 and you’re not the only one on page 278.
Someone with just a high school degree might feel the same storm, but without the map. They know it’s raining, but they don’t have words for “barometric pressure.” And that matters. Words matter. If you can’t name it, you can’t tame it.
But school isn’t everything. I have read a lot of stories of how people are cured from mental health conditions. Cured isn’t always the right word. Managed, healed, grown around — maybe. And the pattern I see isn’t always about medication or diplomas. I think the key is understanding and knowing yourself and looking more within.
You have to sit with you. Not the you that your family says you are. Not the you that your trauma says you are. The you under all that. And that’s hard work. It’s not a weekend retreat. It’s years of asking, “Why did that trigger me?” and “What do I actually believe?”
Religion and social media contribute to mental health conditions making them worse. I’ll say it. Religion can save you, and religion can break you. If your God is only shame and rules and “you’re not enough,” then you’ll never get well in that pew. If your pastor says pray it away and you’re bipolar, you’re going to suffer in silence. And social media? It’s comparison in your pocket 24/7. It’s everyone’s highlight reel while you’re in the bathroom crying on your lunch break from swing shift. It’s people self-diagnosing, trauma-dumping, turning pain into content. It feeds the worst parts of us.
Really focusing on yourself and finding you and individual spirituality is different. Individual spirituality is when you stop performing for God and start being honest with Him. Or the Universe. Or whatever you call that quiet knowing. It’s when you turn off the phone, close the book, and ask, “What do I need today?” Not what your mom needs. Not what Instagram says healing looks like. You.
I’ve been unhoused. I’ve been criminalized. I’ve worked swing shift until I didn’t know what day it was. I’ve collected college campuses like other people collect stamps. And through all those phases of my own mental health, the thing that helped wasn’t a degree alone. It was using what I learned to finally look inward. To stop outsourcing my worth to religion, to likes, to a job, to a man, to a city.
Mental health has phases. So do we. Education can give you tools. But the work is yours. The healing is yours. And it starts when you get quiet enough to hear yourself, not everybody else.
That’s when the cocoon cracks. That’s when the butterfly part begins.
