🧠 (Especially When It Comes to Mental Health)
We live in a world obsessed with personas.
👔 Professional persona
📱 Social-media persona
🙂 “I’m fine” persona
🤐 Don’t-make-others-uncomfortable persona
Society loves personas.
They’re neat. Predictable. Easy to digest.
People?
People are messy. And inconvenient.
Behind every persona there is a person– with anxiety they’ve learned to hide, depression they’ve learned to work through, trauma they’ve learned not to name, and pain they’ve learned to package so it doesn’t scare anyone.
🧠 Mental health doesn’t announce itself.
It doesn’t scream.
It doesn’t always cry.
Very often, it performs.
🎭 “But They Seem Fine” – The Most Dangerous Lie
If someone shows up on time ⏰
If they’re articulate 🗣️
If they’re competent 📊
If they’re polite 🙂
Then clearly… they’re fine, right?
❌ Wrong.
Some of the most distressed people are also the most high-functioning. They learned early that survival depends on looking okay, not being okay.
That’s not resilience.
That’s armor.
And armor gets heavy.
🧱 Personas Are Built for Survival
Nobody wakes up thinking, “I’d love to fragment myself today.”
Personas are built because the world punishes vulnerability:
🗣️ Speak up → “You’re difficult.”
♿ Ask for accommodation → “You’re unreasonable.”
🚧 Set boundaries → “You’re aggressive.”
💥 Break down → “You’re unstable.”
So people adapt.
They smile 😐
They comply 🤝
They endure 🫥
And then society has the nerve to say:
“But you didn’t look like you were struggling.”
No. Because we made sure they couldn’t afford to.
🧠 Mental Health Is Not a Performance Review
Let’s drop the corporate nonsense:
❌ Mental health struggles are not moral failures
❌ Not personality defects
❌ Not cured by slogans, yoga apps, or LinkedIn empathy posts
And no – functioning does not mean thriving.
Forcing people to prove their suffering before granting them basic dignity is not skepticism.
It’s cruelty dressed as reasonableness.
⚠️ What Happens When You Forget the Person
When you only see the persona:
🧊 Pain gets minimized
🧊 Lived experience gets dismissed
🧊 Harm gets normalized
🧊 Institutions get a free pass
This is how people fall through the cracks—not quietly, but systematically.
Not because they didn’t speak.
But because no one bothered to listen past the mask.
🕯️ One Rule (If You Can Handle It)
Before you judge.
Before you dismiss.
Before you label someone “too much.”
Remember this:
👉 Behind every persona, there is a person.
And that person may be carrying more than you will ever see.
Mental health does not need your approval.
It needs your humanity.
And if that feels inconvenient – good. It should.
