Fighting Mental Health vs Suffering From It

Here’s a difference between fighting mental health struggles and suffering from them.

To be fighting, you have to be proactive—seeking help, making changes, working through the pain. Otherwise, you’re not fighting it at all. You’re drowning in it.

For a long time, I wasn’t fighting. I was suffering.

Some people take up the fight early. Good for them. They recognize the signs, they have the right support, they take control before it gets too far.

But not everyone is that lucky. Not all of us are heard in time—or at all.

Some of us fight with whatever tiny bit of strength we have left.

And me? I’ve always been the kind of person who comes out fighting only when my back is against the wall. That’s when I find something inside me that refuses to give up, that pushes back, that won’t let me stay down.

But the problem? It never lasted.

I never had the resilience to keep fighting.

I would push forward, convince myself I was okay, and then… I’d break again.

This Time, It’s Different.

This time, I didn’t just break—I shattered.

I broke in so many ways, from so many angles, that now I know I can’t fight this alone.

This time, I don’t just need to push through.

I need to pick myself up, deal with what has to come out, and stop burying it.

And that’s the hard part.

Because when you’ve spent so long trying to survive on your own, admitting you need help, real help—that’s a whole different fight.

The Ones Who Are Never Heard

And then there are the ones who never get heard at all.

The ones who don’t have that last bit of fight left.

The ones who break, and keep breaking, and nobody notices until it’s too late.

Each failed attempt, the urge to go further gets stronger.

Each time, we’re crying louder, hoping someone hears us before it’s too late.

Because let’s be real here. Let’s not sit on the fence.

Nobody actually wants to die.

We just want to be heard.

We want to be understood.

We want help—but not all of us have it in us to ask for it.

And that’s why I’m writing this.

Because I almost wasn’t here to write it.

And if you’re reading this, maybe you need to hear it too:

You don’t have to fight alone. You don’t have to wait until you’re at the edge to fight at all. You don’t have to be another person who isn’t heard.

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This post was previously published on Raw & Unfiltered.

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