I didn’t understand what mental health was until a few years ago.
That might sound surprising coming from someone who has spent most of their life silently struggling, but that’s exactly why. I lived with the symptoms without knowing the name. I lived with the weight of emotions I couldn’t explain. I was hurting long before I had the language for depression, anxiety, or grief. Long before I knew that losing a parent, especially a mother, at a young age was a trauma that didn’t just affect my heart, but my mind, my behavior, and how I learned to survive.
My mother had cancer. And as a child, I didn’t fully understand what was happening. I just knew that something was wrong. Something that made the air heavy, the house quieter, the grownups more tired. I knew there were hospital visits, whispered conversations, and moments where I was told to be strong, to be good, to behave. But I didn’t know how to do any of that. I only knew how to feel. And feel deeply.
Once she died, when I did express myself, whether it was crying, withdrawing, or acting out. I wasn’t met with comfort or understanding. I was met with frustration, discipline, or silence. I was labeled as a “bad” kid. My pain was mistaken for rebellion. My sadness was misunderstood as disobedience. No one realized that I wasn’t being difficult, I was grieving. I was confused, overwhelmed, and scared. And no one had the tools to guide me through it.
Losing my mother is a loss I still haven’t fully recovered from. But what hurt just as much was growing up without the emotional support I needed to heal. My mental health was shaped in those early years, not just by the trauma of her illness and death, but by the absence of acknowledgment that it was trauma. No one talked to me about how it would affect me. About how grief sits in the body. About how silence can be just as damaging as the loss itself.
It wasn’t until I became an adult that I began to look back and see the pattern: the numbness, the self-doubt, the emotional outbursts, the chronic fatigue, the sense that something was always off inside me, things I still feel to this day. I had been depressed for years. Anxious. Lonely. But I had learned to carry it quietly, because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do. That’s what I saw growing up. You just keep going. You don’t ask for help. You don’t fall apart.
But cancer doesn’t just affect the person who is sick, it affects everyone who loves them. It reshapes families. It creates emotional shockwaves that ripple through generations. And when mental health isn’t part of the conversation, those shockwaves can turn into emotional wounds that never fully close.
I now understand that mental health and cancer are deeply connected, not because I had cancer, but because I lived in its shadow. I watched it take my mother. I watched it change the people around me. I watched it teach me, too early, how to live with uncertainty and loss. But no one taught me how to grieve. No one told me that what I was feeling wasn’t bad behavior—it was sorrow. Fear. Love that had nowhere to go.
Children like me, those who grow up around serious illness. Often end up emotionally displaced. We become adults who struggle to connect, to trust, to feel safe. We carry the belief that our emotions are burdens, that asking for help is weakness, that vulnerability is dangerous. And until we unlearn those beliefs, we stay stuck in survival mode. That’s what happened to me. I survived, but I didn’t heal.
Only recently did I begin the work of healing. Of sitting with my past. Of acknowledging that my inner world was shaped by experiences I didn’t choose and emotions I wasn’t allowed to express. I’ve learned that mental health isn’t something separate from grief, or trauma, or love, it’s all woven together. It’s the lens through which we see ourselves. It’s the way we talk to ourselves. And it’s the foundation for how we care for others, too.
Cancer may have taken my mother, but it also left me with a silent legacy, a complicated emotional inheritance that I’m just now beginning to unpack. I’ve had to learn how to mother myself. How to be gentle with my pain. How to speak the words that were never spoken to me.
I share this not for sympathy, but for connection. Because there are so many others like me, people who grew up in the shadows of illness and loss, people who were told to be strong before they even knew what it meant to feel weak. People who are just now learning what mental health really is.
If that’s you, I want you to know: your emotions were never too much. You were never bad for hurting. You were just human. And it’s never too late to learn how to care for that human heart.
