WORLD MENTAL HEALTH DAY 2025: LET’S FLOURISH!
I’ve struggled with my mental health silently for so many years. For a long time, I fought with myself and fought with the world. I was burdened with this sense of injustice and inequality.
It was this never-ending cycle of fighting, feeling exhausted and depleted, shutting out the world and trying to get by, and stepping back into the fighting ring when I could rally my energy together enough.
I swung between feelings of deep depression, and feelings of manic anxiety… sometimes oscillating between them within moments. I remember going to bed always hoping that tomorrow would be a good day.
Everything felt out of my control, and simply up to chance.
My Mental Health, and My Queer Identity
My mental health struggle obviously had a huge impact on my presence, my energy levels, my ability to connect with others and form meaningful relationships, my capability to lead and do great work, and my sense of purpose in the world.
It blocked me from feeling whole as a person.
What I never knew was that mental health is so intrinsically linked to identity for LGBTQ+ people.
It was not because I was queer that my mental health was suffering.
I was suffering because I was negotiating identity, belonging and safety as a queer person- and my mental health was compensating for it.
This created a self-fulling prophecy loop:
I inherited the belief and self-narrative that gay people and queer people will end up alone and unhappy (insert your own version of this).
I never saw proof of happiness and fulfilment for queer people (grateful for growing up queer in Singapore).
I tried my hardest and best to fit in and mold myself to be someone acceptable in the eyes of my family, friends, and society.
I grew further and further away from myself.
I feel less and less joy, more and more unhappiness.
Loopy doopy.
There was also an insidious false belief that underpinned this whole cycle: I believed that my mental health was going to right itself once the things in my life went right.
This could not be more false.
The truth is that when I right my mental health through doing right by me, everything in my life started to respond and right itself slowly and accordingly.
Be Intentional, Be Inspired: Find Your Queer Joy
This World Mental Health Day, be brave: be yourself in every space, in every place.
While our work at Authentic Leaders is not explicitly centered on LGBTQ+ mental health, we are intentional about and inspired by the mental health thriving of LGBTQ+ leaders as they embrace authenticity in who and how they are.
We’ve learned from our own and our community’s lived experiences that a pathway to flourishing mental health for LGBTQ+ people is informed by the following:
Dissolving unhelpful internal narratives about who we are so that we interrupt the loop and bring ourselves to baseline,
Creating a strong sense of internal psychological safety so that we are buffered in life,
cultivating a supportive community that can see and affirm who we are and can offer care, and
Embracing our authenticity and queerness bravely (however that is for us) so that queer joy can emerge.
Feeling safe is not even close to enough for our mental health.
Mental health flourishing calls us to be brave: to choose ourselves and to be ourselves in every sphere of our life.
Happy Mental Health Day 2025, my queer and non-queer darlings.
I wish you a flourishing glow as you grow and flow through this season of life - may you be brave to choose you and the people around you, over and over again.
All my love,
Ian
