Amplify blog - Stacking your shoes
QFCC Youth Advocate Judas reflects on when they realised their mental health was different to others.
Realising that you don’t think like everybody else is like going to another person's house for the first time as a kid. It’s confusing and uncomfortable when you discover that the way your family does things is not the way everyone else does—the way that you have dinner, and clean and stack your shoes is different.
When I first started letting people close to me know how I was feeling, I found out not only do I stack my shoes differently, in the preverbal sense, but in fact I stack them dangerously, in a tottering pyramid when it should be done in neat rows. Finding out you stack your shoes wrong is easy though; learning to take down the messy pyramid you made of them and build something better is much harder.
You don’t unstack the pyramid alone. Your support system is one of your best assets in figuring out how to function in a new healthier way. It’s scary at first, and if you’re anything like me, talking about your feeling is not your strongest skill, but you only get better at things by doing it. My family and friends are amazing at helping me with practical things like remembering to book my appointments and take my meds. At the heart of it though, your loved ones most valuable skill is simply loving you. Knowing you’re not alone in what you are going through is huge in starting to make your life lighter.
Society has an unfortunate habit treating mental illness like some separate shameful thing, but its nature is in the name—it’s an illness. When you get the cold, you take some medicine, and no one asks if you made it up. Learning to think of mental illness as something you work to heal like any other thing has helped me feel a lot less shameful or scared when talking about it. No one feels ashamed for having the flu, so I won’t be ashamed to admit that I have a mental illness.
Ultimately though, you’re going to stack your shoes different than I stack mine, and so how you unstack them is going to be different too. If you do one change one thing, consider asking for help the next time you want to work on unstacking your pyramid. Chores are always easier with a friend.