Many daily habits go unnoticed!
These are actually silent signs that the mind is seeking help.
We carry ghosts from our past.
I went to college overseas and worked there for a few years before returning home with a bag of unprocessed memories and unarticulated fears.
The ghost was me. I need to come to terms with many confusions and anxieties.

I am twenty and this has evolved into a full-blown challenge as soon as I start any new job. I once didn’t go into work for a whole week, so depressed I couldn’t get out of bed, but I told my boss I had flu.
It never crossed my mind that it was anything else until one of my friends, a psychologist, told me “This isn’t laziness, bro. It’s executive dysfunction.” She was right. I just didn’t care; I was working to protect myself from drowning, in survival mode.
I wake up thinking if I ever bother someone for help, they would hate me.
How many of us think the same?

I role-play entire arguments in front of the mirror, pacing around the room at times or using hand gestures like I was some TED Speaker. When I share this with friends, they laugh. I just thought I was quirky.
One day I shared this behaviour with my mother. In a deadpan face she said: I used to do that. But I stopped after one day I heard a voice inside. I suppose it’s in the genes.
A classmate in the same boat confessed to me that she used to think about death. She said: I am in class and think that I’ll write this essay, or … I’ll just not be alive tomorrow.
These are not typical. We laugh them off as moodiness, shy, quirky, too sensitive, lazy, a perfectionist.
What we are really doing is surviving without help.

Tensions in the mind do not always yell. Most times they just whisper.
They whisper when we cancel plans because we feel tense to be with people. It whispers when we redraft a text several times because we think it will annoy the receiver. It whispers when we put everyone else’s needs ahead of our own.
We see it in people who do not clean their rooms, but can create multiple spreadsheets with little effort.
Mental stress isn’t just about depression, or anxiety, or bipolar disorder. They are the many adjustments we make to fit into a world that does not consider making space to simply let us be ourselves.