I’m here for you – it’s world mental health day, you’re not on your own

You might be bombarded with Mental Health posts today and if you’re wondering why, it’s because it’s World Mental Health Day.

You might be completely fine, or you might be going through a rough patch, I know today might be hard for some of us. For many, all the different posts on social media might trigger past hard times and if that’s you today, you’re not on your own.

“What’s mental health?!?!”

When I first had Alopecia, at 12, I had no psychological support whatsoever. Sure friends and family were there for me, but I felt terribly alone and DIFFERENT from everyone else. Mental health understanding, awareness and support was pretty much non-existent, so I’m happy to know that instead now in Italy, the dermatologists strongly recommend psychological support as part of the treatment for Alopecia!

Finding someone like you

So if you still feel alone and you have a condition that not many around you have, what has really helped me was finding people LIKE ME. Once I did and I started talking with them about common problems and solutions, a whole world opened up for me. The best things about Support Groups, are that you can then IN TURN support others when you’re in a better place and someone turns up at the meeting in tears. 

I chose life

When my first Alopecia patches started to be not as manageable, I can’t even remember how I gathered my courage to drag myself to school. But I did show up and in all honesty, going to school and going out with friends, or going to parties with Alopecia has probably been the worse torture for a teenager, in a sea of beautiful girls turning into women, while I saw femininty being taken away from me, hair by hair.

I was the only girl in the 60,000 something people town I lived in who had Alopecia. There was another boy and sadly we never bonded over this – that awkward phase of your life when girls stick with girls and boys stick with boys. 

But I had heard of another girl who, after being diagnosed, decided not to go out again.

As I learned about suicide and tried to compute Kurt Cobain’s, I imagined there were other girls or boys out there who had probably taken their life because of Alopecia.

As much as I spent hours and hours locked in my room crying, I always made the conscious decision to LIVE. Luckily I persisted and believed in a (luckily not so) remote possibility that one day, when school would be over, I too would be able to have a happy life. And surely that was the case!

But it was hard, there were so many days I literally wanted to disappear.

Then I met Shehnaaz

This email is already a bit too long, so I am not going to continue with my boring life story BUT let’s just fast forward to all the consequences Alopecia has had on me and on many others I speak to – Confidence issues, anxiety issues… you name them!

Thanks to CBT therapy, Confidence is something I am still working on, but with Anxiety I think I have made HUGE progress.

But when lockdown hit, I was thrown once again under a heightened anxiety state – because I have medical phobia, I was genuinely convinced I would get Covid, be really ill and die.

But then I met Shehnaaz, my now friend and a dōTERRA wellness advocate and 2 years after the start of the Pandemic, here’s part of the poem I wrote for her for her 50th: