A Good Support System Will Go A Long Way In Helping You Cope With Your Mental Struggles
By: Benny Lim
Tags: Health, Mental Health, Support, Mental Illness, Mental Health Awareness

I’ve written a couple of times about the mental struggles that I’ve gone through in my life. From being in the darkest moments of my life more than 15 years ago to having smaller attacks of worries and anxieties since then, I’ve shared my experiences with my readers openly.

What I’ve not really done though, is shared with people that I know personally in real life.

Aside from my wife, I’ve not really spoken about the mental struggles that due to the pandemic that we’re currently facing and all the changes it has brought to our lives, have occurred on more than a couple of occasions in the last couple of months.

My Medium community is made up of people that I mostly have known through the platform itself. I do have a couple of other writers/readers on the platform that I know personally in real life and who are good friends too but at the moment, we’re on different continents.

Those who are living in the same country as me, who I interact with on an almost daily basis probably don’t really know about my little adventure as a writer on this platform and probably have no idea about the stories and experiences that I’ve shared over the last year and a half that I’ve been writing.

But it was about time someone did, someone aside from my wife.

That person was my immediate supervisor and the relief I felt after letting her know about the struggles that I’ve been going through, especially over the last couple of months was nothing short of amazing.

If a drug addict or an alcoholic was able to go days/months/years without falling back into their addiction, it would be called being ‘clean’ because they were able to abstain from the very thing that caused them harm in the first place.

I would like to think that not having had any anxiety or panic attacks for many years would make me ‘clean’ too.

When I was in a deep depression at 19 years old, that was the darkest place I’d ever been in my life. It was even worse than the depression that I was in when my dad passed away back in 2013 (when I was 27 years old) and that says something.

After I recovered on both occasions, I rarely had any depress feelings nor went through any anxiety or panic attacks. I think when I recovered back when I was 19 years old, I didn’t go through any depressive state until my dad passed away more than 8 years later. And when I recovered and started to get over my dad’s death, I didn’t have any depress feelings nor went through any anxiety or panic attacks — until this year.

I don’t know if it’s a direct result of the pandemic or the effects that the pandemic has brought to everyone, but things definitely went downhill for me emotionally after my country went into lockdown.

I had one panic attack after another or I would just start to feel really anxious for no reason at all.

It affected me personally and also professionally.

Needless to say, my colleagues started to notice it and it was getting harder and harder to just brush it off and come up with excuse after excuse as to why I wasn’t performing at the standards that I had been in previous years.

Things finally came to a point that I just had to come clean with my supervisor and there was no better time to do that than during my latest performance review.

It started off normal, at least for the first few minutes.

Then the dreaded question came.

“Benny, is everything OK with you? I’ve noticed you’ve been quite different these last few months. Are you having any problems?”

I went quiet for a good 10–15 seconds.

I then took a deep breath and told my supervisor that there was something that I needed her to know.

I started off with what happened to me back when I was 19 years old, to give her a brief history. Aside from my wife (and all you readers out there), no one really knows about what I went through back then.

But to tell her what’s happening to me now, my supervisor needed to know what happened to me then.

After a short 5 minutes of ‘Benny history,’ I told her that in the last couple of months, I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting random panic and anxiety attacks and whenever it happens, I get paralyzed and just crippled. I wouldn’t be able to function properly and it has affected not just my personal life but also the work that I have to do on a daily basis.

I told her that I wasn’t sure how to bring it up with anyone because all this while, the only other person who knew about it is my wife. Not even my parents or siblings know about what I’ve been through or am going through.

I apologized for any problems that I may have caused my team or department but I just felt that I wasn’t able to handle things by myself anymore and because it was affecting my work more than ever, it was important that someone in my workspace knew and the most logical person for me was my supervisor.

She was quiet at first.

But she finally broke her silence and told me that she didn’t expect it at all, especially from me as I was always the happy-go-lucky one in the office. I was always the optimist, positive one that would be smiling and cracking jokes.

I told her that usually, the ones that seem happiest are usually the ones that have unseen problems or are actually sad like the late Robin Williams used to say.

She then told me that she was thankful that I trusted her enough to tell her. She said that she probably doesn’t fully understand what I’m actually going through but that she’s glad she now knows the truth and she can understand why I’ve been the way I’ve been over the last few months.

I felt relieved when I heard that.

She wasn’t blaming me for anything. She wasn’t blaming me for the delays in some projects that I was handling. She wasn’t blaming me for slowing my other team mates down because I took longer than I should with my portion of the work.

Instead, she was thanking me for being honest with her and for trusting her with something that is probably not an easy thing to admit to others (it’s not).

But the thing that really got to me was when she said, not to worry as she will help me to figure out ways to beat it again. She said that because I’ve had it before and managed to stay ‘clean’ for quite sometime after that, she said I could do it again and she wants to help and give me any support that I may need.

Help and support.

Those were the two keywords that I needed to hear, that anyone in a position of feeling down and hopeless, needs to hear.

I’ve had tremendous support from my wife over the years but I do feel bad for her because it is a heavy burden.

So, to have someone else willing to be my support as well, that was a much-needed thing for me to hear.

I immediately felt better. I felt like a big burden had been lifted off of me.

What was supposed to be a short 20 minutes session turned into a good 2 hours plus of just talking and listening to one another. She shared some personal stories with me and I shared more with her. We worked out plans on how to manage my workload, especially if I suffered any more panic or anxiety attacks.

By the end of the session, I felt so much better compared to when it started. To know that I wasn’t judged for the struggles that I was going through, that I wasn’t blamed for being a burden to others, that I was actually offered help and support, it was a huge relief.

And needless to say, it’s definitely helped me in terms of managing stress from work as well. I know that although I’m still expected to perform at a certain level, I’m able to not stress so much about it and am allowed to work according to my circumstances.

Having that support has so far helped in keeping the random attacks at bay. Where in the last few months I’ve had over a dozen sudden attacks, I’ve not had any since my conversation over 2 weeks ago.

It just goes to show that a good support system (or two) goes a long way in helping to cope with any mental struggles you may have.