I am more out about my queerness than I am about my mental health conditions. A lot of my cis-het friends know that I am queer but only few of them know about my suffering with depression, anxiety and OCD over the past two years. This is not for lack of want. In fact I rather wish I could tell them about it; it would save me a lot of time and effort than making excuses about my absence or infallibilities. It would also make it easier for me to seek support and company. But unfortunately, I can’t do that. There are a lot of reasons that make me, and honestly many other people, wary and shy to talk about it. The deeply rooted stigma towards bad mental health, in the society as well as in the individual psyche, is a major one. For me though, I’d say that one of the reasons is my queerness.

There’s this deeply internalized stigma in my own mind that poor mental health conditions allude to ‘weakness and incapability’. Even so, I know this understanding is deeply flawed and ableist; having grown up in an environment where your worth is only measured on the scale of productivity and performance, it is still a conscious and constant process for me to reject these internalizations and look beyond the lens of worthiness. The easiest way for me to do so, has been to treat myself as someone else. I’ve always found, at least for myself, that it is easier to be kind to people other than my own self.

This stigma also gets emboldened by the common mind-body dualism idea where the mind is perceived to be controlling the body, and hence is much more in our control. Added to the mix are the ideals of stoicism that essentially ascribes one’s inability to control their mind to meet the neurotypical ‘normality’ to a personality flaw (Editor’s Remark: Sounds a lot like a personality disorder diagnosis, doesn’t it?). This is where my queerness and mental health woes intersect. I feel this unsaid responsibility over myself to present as ‘normal’ as I can to establish the legitimacy of my queerness. Underlining it is obviously the internalization that queerness is something I’m doing or being, and that I have to be deserving of being able to live as a queer person. I acknowledge the fallacy of this line. Queerness is not a choice, and anyway, no-one has to be deserving or anything to be accepted as ‘cis-het’, so why should it be that way with us?

However, despite knowing and understanding it, I can’t shake this fear that if people get to know how bad I’m doing mentally, they are going to blame it on my queerness. I know people from the community are always more in need of help and support as they generally have lots of trauma and hardships from just surviving in the society; the society that is very much designed to marginalize us. But I doubt that everyone would see it this way.

Much of the fear also stems from the belief that my queerness is a choice. I don’t know if it’s true or not i.e., if I’m choosing to be this way or whether I was born queer. I understand I shouldn’t have to know it.  Whether by choice or trauma or birth, one’s queerness shouldn’t be questioned. But growing up in a space where choice remains a luxury and is seen as a privilege afforded by only very few, it feels like, by ‘choosing to be’ queer, I’m exercising a privilege and a ‘bad mental health’ is the price I knew I had to pay while choosing it, hence I shouldn’t be complaining. Or at the least I should be able to deal with it ‘stably’. So, there comes an extra layer of insecurity while telling my cis-het friends that I’m not doing fine mental health-wise, as I worry about them judging it based on my queerness?

Apart from these insecurities, I also experience a lot of grief on the account that I can’t talk about my anxiety disorders to my family. This grief hit me last month when I was staying at home and had a really bad nightmare of me having multiple breakdowns. A scene I still clearly remember from the nightmare was of me breaking down in front of my mother while telling her about how badly I had been suffering with my mental health for past two years.

That scene still brings me to tears, as I’m very close to my mother emotionally. She is the one person in whose presence, I’ve never felt ‘oversensitive’ and till date she treats me the most tenderly. But the cultural difference is such that I cannot tell her how hard the past two years have been as it is in the context of my mental health. This makes me ache. This was especially poignant as I had run out of my anxiety meds while at home and I could not access them there, which made my condition worse. Ironically, I felt getting the typhoid fever at the same time was my saving grace, for then I had an excuse for why I can’t get out of bed.

Besides the cultural difference, the major thing I fear with my family with regards to mental health is the same as that with friends. What if down the line, they find out I’m queer and blame all of my difficulties on my queerness; except the repercussions would be more severe with family. They might want to or try to ‘cure’ my queerness and force on me ‘conversion therapy’ to get my mind to ‘work right’. So, I tread very consciously to present as mentally ‘normal’ as I can.

I don’t know how much easier it would have been to seek support and resources for my mental health if it wasn’t for my queerness, but the latter does makes it harder. Since I first started seeking treatment and help, I’ve had some really bad experiences with particular psychiatrists and therapists. I’ve also have had long gaps in treatment due to financial and other challenges. What I do know is that support from my family and people around me would have definitely made my experience easier. I wouldn’t be still struggling with the internalization of guilt, shame, and self-loathing for not being ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’.

So yes, in my experience the intersection of queerness and mental illnesses does present some unique and amplified challenges. But I also want to acknowledge that the community also helps. Some of the most helpful support I’ve found is amongst queer support groups, queer peer counselors and from the queer people around me. They have helped me emotionally, financially and also affirmatively in validating my experiences and challenges. Or maybe it’s the shared trauma of the community that manifests in our connectedness to each other, wherein we find some healing. Or maybe it’s just me trying to constantly convince others, but mostly myself, that my mental health wouldn’t have been better if I was not queer. All I know is that I am queer, I am mentally ill, and I’m still left wondering if it gets any better.