There are days I wonder if I have mental health struggles or if they have me. When PTSD rewinds, OCD loops, anxiety narrates, and depression withdraws, I cannot tell if I am having a bad day or if I am the bad day.
World Mental Health Day is observed on October 10th every year, with the overall objective of raising awareness of mental health issues around the world and mobilizing efforts in support of mental health.
To know (of) me is to know I am big on all things mental health, so to mark this year’s World Mental Health Day, I decided to explore the question: How do you separate your identity from your mental health struggles?
It is exhausting trying to separate who I am from what I live with (PTSD, OCD, anxiety and, occasionally, depression) when they all take turns convincing me they are the main character. There is something casually cruel about living in a body that remembers everything and a mind that will not stop replaying it. Sometimes my mind feels like a crowded room — PTSD pacing, OCD rearranging, anxiety panicking, depression sighing in the corner — and I am just trying to find a chair with my name on it.
Oftentimes I am somewhere in the middle of all the chaos trying to recall the version of me that existed before my three anxiety disorders started calling themselves my personality. How do you tell which voice is yours when they all sound like you?
Which makes me wonder, is mental health something we have or something we are? And if you have ever spent years navigating stress, anxiety or depression (pick your poison), you know exactly what I mean. There is a point where your struggles stop being something that happen to you and start feeling like who you are.
I used to think naming my struggles gave me power. But lately, it feels like they have started answering to my name too. My words now arrive preloaded with disclaimers. I am not “sad,” I am “depressive.” I am not “worried,” I am “anxious.” I am not “particular,” I am “OCD.”
See the problem? The language gives it away. Somewhere along the line, my mind stopped being something I have and became something I am.
And my brain — bless its dramatic little heart — is always ready to pile on. It will say, “No, no, you’re not calm, you’re just late to your daily panic.” “You’re not overthinking. In fact, here are 87 other things you forgot to worry about.” Thanks, brain. You’re doing amazing, sweetie.
But it is so easy to fall into that trap, right? Especially when your struggles have been around longer than your adult friendships and it becomes easier to explain yourself through labels than through language. You forget that sometimes a missed text is just a missed text, not proof you are a terrible friend. That forgetting to fold laundry does not mean you are falling apart again. That a to-do list that does not get done is not a cry for help, it is just Tuesday. You forget what it is like to just be you without the mental illness filter on every experience. Because somewhere between the jokes and the justifications, the line blurs. The humour stops being funny and starts sounding like resignation.
I did not notice it happening, the sneaky way your mental health starts writing your biography without permission. Suddenly your story is not about what you love or dream of or build; it is about what you survive. And survival, while noble, was never meant to be a full-time identity.
So where does self-awareness end and self-definition begin? Is it the same place where I end and where my mental health begins? I wish I knew.
What I do know is mirrors can be tricky things. They can show you everything except the parts you actually need to see. One morning I looked in a mirror and was startled to see I had started mistaking my coping mechanisms for my character. I had stopped saying what I liked and started saying what I survived. Somewhere, my hobbies turned into self-preservation habits, and my routines became rituals of control. It is a strange way to live, always translating your personality through the lens of recovery. It makes me wonder who I would be if my healing finally turned into healed.
Because who am I without my mental health struggles? And, scarier still: would I even like her? When what causes you pain has been in your life for so long to the extent it becomes part of your identity, it gives you a reason for why you are the way you are. It becomes your constant, and losing it feels like losing a part of yourself. Yet underneath all that pain is a person who wants to be known. Not as symptoms. Not as survival. Just as someone trying her best to come home to herself.
But then there are the small, quiet moments. The kind where you catch yourself laughing, a real laugh, and you realise it has been days since your brain bullied you. Or you finish something you have been avoiding and think, “Oh. Maybe I can actually do things.”
They are small, but they are proof. Proof that you exist outside of your mental health struggles. Proof that the “you” beneath all the noise in your mind still lives here. These small wins do not cancel out the hard stuff. Instead, they show that identity is not erased by mental health, but revealed through it.
You are not your worst thoughts. You are not your hardest days. You are not the diagnosis that tries to claim your name. You are a flawed, resilient work in progress. And progress does not always look like peace. Sometimes it looks like persistence: showing up, trying again, keeping faith.
So, how do you separate your identity from your mental health? Maybe you do not slice it cleanly. Maybe you just remember that you contain multitudes and learn to hold both, gently. Maybe you just learn to coexist and say:
I am not my thoughts.
I can hold both joy and anxiety in the same breath.
I am not my diagnosis. I can have a diagnosis and still have a personality.
I am a person who has mental health struggles, not a mental health struggle pretending to be a person.
Some days, coexistence looks like therapy. Other days, it is a nap. Or journaling. Or crying. Whatever it is that teaches you peace is more important than being perceived. Because maybe the separation between where you end and where your mental health begins is not about pushing your struggles away. In fact, maybe separation is not the point after all. Maybe softness is.
So yes, sometimes my mental illnesses still RSVP to the party uninvited. I cannot always separate the two — the me and the mess — but I am learning to choose who gets to lead the dance.
Lwile the Leo 