Darkness to Dialogue: Living Well With Mental Illness

  Estimated read time: 5 minutes Summary Burnout is not just a personal failure or a lack of self-care, especially for BIPOC communities. It's often the cumulative result of navigating: historical trauma generational expectations systemic oppression This post explores how internalized productivity culture disproportionately affects BIPOC mental health and how reclaiming rest is a radical act of resistance and healing. Unlearning the Need to Be Twice as Good For much of my life, rest didn’t feel like an option. It felt like a weakness. Growing up, I learned, directly and indirectly,  that to survive, I had to keep going. There was no room for pause, softness, or asking for help.  There were times when I truly believed I had to earn my worth by staying busy, performing twice as hard, and never letting anyone see me struggle. I grew up thinking that constant motion was the norm,  that rest was something you did only at the end of the day, once everything else was d...

Summary Healing doesn’t follow a timeline. For those living with mental illness, recovery often brings unresolved emotions to the surface long after the trauma occurred. In this post, we explore why time feels distorted during mental health recovery and how to release the pressure to “catch up.” Estimated Read Time: 🕒 5 minutes When Time Doesn’t Feel Linear 🕰️ I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately, not in the way most people do, but in the way trauma can bend it.  There are moments I look at my life and feel like I’m somehow behind. I’m in my 40s now and only just beginning to unpack some of the trauma from my 30s. Not because I ignored it, but because I didn’t yet have: the language the safety the support to begin I didn’t know what mental health recovery looked like. I didn’t know I was even allowed to name what happened to me. And now that I am doing the work, it feels like I’m sorting through emotional boxes that should’ve been unpacked years ago. Some memorie...

🕒 Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes Article Summary: What happens when you’re the first in your family or culture to name trauma , seek therapy, or talk about mental health out loud? This post explores the: emotional labor isolation resilience of being a cycle-breaker, especially for those living with mental illness  In honor of Minority Mental Health Awareness Month , we also look at how cultural stigma adds weight to the healing journey, and how healing anyway is a radical act. I didn’t realize I was “going first.” I just knew I couldn’t keep going like this. When I first started confronting my mental health struggles, I felt like I was betraying something sacred. My family never talked about emotions, at least, not the hard ones. We swallowed grief and masked pain with strength. Therapy was something “other people” did. I didn’t have the words for what I was carrying, but I knew I couldn’t keep carrying it silently. At first, I felt proud. I was choosing healing, choosing ...

"The Untold Side" 2025 Summer/Quarterly Edition “The workplace often rewards the very behaviors that hide our suffering.” This investigative feature focuses on burnout and high-functioning depression in the workplace, a topic that aligns closely with The Untold Side's mission . These experiences are often: misunderstood minimized completely overlooked This can occur in professional environments where external productivity can mask deep internal struggles.  High-functioning depression doesn’t always “look like” depression, which makes it easier for both individuals and systems to ignore it, and harder for people to ask for help. By exploring how the pressure to perform can silence mental health challenges, especially among survivors and those in recovery, this feature highlights the critical gaps in how workplaces respond to emotional well-being . It asks difficult questions about what we reward, what we miss, and who gets left behind in conversations about wellness. Thes...

Read Time:  6-7 Minutes Summary: Healing from trauma often pressures people to build emotional armor, but true recovery invites us back into emotional nuance :  being soft and strong loving and discerning open and protective, all without apology This post explores how reclaiming softness can deepen resilience and self-trust for those living with mental illness. Healing in the Gray: The Power of Complex Emotions As early as childhood, I was told I was “too sensitive.” Being soft was equated with being weak, overly emotional, or vulnerable in ways that made me unsafe. I pushed down my feelings, built walls, and tried to become harder to protect myself. But over time, I realized this hard shell wasn’t healing; it was a survival strategy that came at a cost. Now, I’m learning what it means to be soft without apology. It means embracing emotional complexity: feeling deeply without shame setting boundaries without guilt loving without losing myself It means I don’t have to shrink or...

Summary Emotional alexithymia, a difficulty identifying and describing emotions, is a lesser-known but critical factor in men’s mental health , especially among those living with trauma and mental illness.  This post unpacks the science behind emotional alexithymia, its connection to trauma and socialization, and how healing begins with learning to recognize and name emotions. My Own Struggle to Name What I Feel For much of my life, I felt like I was swimming in emotional fog. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. When people asked me how I felt: I often answered with vague words like “fine” or “okay,” even when my insides churned with something more complicated.  I thought maybe I was just closed off or didn’t care enough, but over time, I realized it was harder than that.  It was as if my mind had lost the words to name my feelings. So, what does this have to do with men's mental health? Well, watching men around me, family, frie...