Mental Illness Isn’t Aesthetic.

I don’t know how to talk about my mental health online anymore. Not when depression is filtered through soft lighting and curated captions. Not when trauma is turned into a trend. Not when spiraling is romanticized as poetic, instead of painful.

I’ve seen posts that make breakdowns look beautiful. That turn dissociation into a vibe. That wrap panic attacks in pastel fonts and call it vulnerability. And I get it, we’re trying to make pain palatable. We’re trying to be seen. But sometimes, it makes the rest of us feel invisible.

Because my mental illness isn’t aesthetic. It’s missed appointments. It’s parenting through fog. It’s forgetting to eat. It’s crying in the shower so no one hears. It’s surviving, not performing.

It’s not a curated caption. It’s the moment I stare at a wall for twenty minutes because I can’t remember what I was doing. It’s the guilt of being unreachable. It’s the shame of being misunderstood. It’s the ache of knowing that if I shared the raw version, people might scroll past it, not repost it.

I want to talk about it. I want to name it. But I also want to be honest. Not curated. Not poetic. Just real.

Mental illness isn’t beautiful. But truth is. And I’ll keep choosing that.

I’ll keep writing from the middle of it. Not to be inspirational. Not to be palatable. But to be seen, fully, messily, and without apology.