During week 10, Dr. Raper really sat down with the class and unpacked mental health, and reached into those taboo topics. One topic we covered that stood out to me was the idea of helplessness. 

I will say that the feeling of helplessness is the feeling I loathe the most. Helplessness is something I definitely felt during the pandemic. Coming from an immigrant family and being the eldest child & daughter, the responsibility of being a parent for my siblings fell on me pretty early in life. I used school and extracurriculars as a way to be independent and free. However, when this was taken away from me during the pandemic, that feeling of helplessness set on me. In a way, that helplessness turned into dependency, which again is something I despise for myself. Discussing the feeling of helplessness during class made me tap into that period of my life again, and I found myself feeling those same feelings during the lecture. 

Mental health is such a taboo topic, especially in the Somali community that I come from. Like me, many people try to get help for mental health outside their communities because their own community will dismiss their concerns or invalidate them. I remember feeling extremely helpless and borderline depressed when I discovered my graduation was canceled. I voiced these concerns to my mother, but they were dismissed, and I was told to be grateful that I was alive while many others were dying. To me, that was soul-crushing, mainly because I am first-generation, and graduating high school would’ve been a significant accomplishment. For mental health to become a stigma is terrifying because we all experience times when things get rough or might need a little help. I hope that in the future, if we are put into another situation where we need to lock down (hopefully we don’t, knock on wood), mental health will become less of a taboo and that people will receive the support they deserve.