[0:00]So self-esteem and insecurity is something that I think generation heavily struggles with. I really, really hated myself. I felt weak. I think that's the keyword, I felt like a burden. Some of the new challenges I see for this generation is finding an identity. I was starting to look at myself from everybody else's eyes and then I started to believe in that. I hated how I looked when I saw myself in the mirror. One of the things I think today's youth struggle with the most is isolation and disconnect. For some reason I just felt so alone. So I just felt like I was so weird, like, no one wants to be your friend, really. It was horrible. I felt, I felt sad. I was lonely. I was so lonely. I was always taught that, you know, you men don't like, the cliche, men don't cry, men don't express your emotion like you don't express your emotions, you, you, you deal with it and you, you move on. Nobody understands the level of pressure that I'm under. I felt that I was the only one in the entire world that felt like this and that there was no cure. I didn't talk to that many people about it either because I was embarrassed, just a lot in my own head. Not very happy. Because you're just carrying this very visceral emotion that eats away. What do I need to do to get someone to realize that I'm not okay? Lonely, broken, isolated, ashamed, sad. And when I confronted to the counselor, hey, I'm actually suicidal, the word suicidal came out of my mouth and I'm like, oh.
[1:37]My toughest challenge in life has been to come to terms with my back story. a build up of going through eating disorders, trying to create this identity for who Nazia was. I've been struggling with my gender identity for a really long time. So managing like my depression and anxiety. The anxiety around finances as a young person. Perfectionism and overcoming unrealistic pressure. I couldn't speak up or say my opinion. Loving myself in a society that's very um, against my existence, yeah. I think it would it would be navigating alcoholism at home, navigating a lack of visibility in terms of career when I was younger. When I sat in class and I was like watching the teacher talk, even though I tried my very hardest, sometimes I just couldn't pick up a word of what the teacher was saying. I think just not depend on everybody else's happiness, I think has been my toughest challenge.
[2:50]Back then 30 years ago, people didn't have a phone in their hands, a gadget constantly that they had access to social media. And managing the social media is tends to be very difficult because what we have found is that social media is not only addicting, but too much social media exposure can lower personal self-esteem. She's boring, she's not good, she's, she's weak.
[3:19]Yeah, I had so many bad and negative words about myself. I had this amazing physique and looked in the mirror and I was like, I still hate myself. I still think I'm fat. I still don't think I'm worthy or I deserve what I need to get in life. You know, you're so dumb, you're such a failure. It's such a simple job, how could you make a mistake like that? Oh, you're a bad dancer, oh, you have a butt ugly body, or you're not pretty, and, and I started to like fix my clothes in front of people and I'm like, no, I can't, no, and then I try something else and be like, yeah, I'm confident, and then I was like, no, I'm fat, no, I'm ugly, no, I, this doesn't look good on me. All these things like having fair skin and um like a slim nose and um straight hair that was long and flowy, those were and like blue eyes, those were the beautiful aspects of being a girl. Because when you're not happy with yourself, it's so much easier to just project it outwards, making it into something bigger outside of yourself. Just standing on the stage, making people laugh, like, I did enjoy that still, because I didn't have to be myself. And a product of that is is because when we look at social media, we're looking at people's best version of themselves. I was like, I can't let these people see that this already is a broken mess and that this time I'm 14. You still have this little voice that says, hey, maybe, you know, you're still not good enough. That's tough to understand because we're not all living the best version of ourselves 100% of the time. Our mind will make us believe that this other individuals are and it'll make us question ourselves. So these are all the things that we take in thinking this is what is acceptable, thinking this is what makes you successful. They say that a person like this is good and I tried to be like that and it didn't work, I was disappointed. I was more emotionally reactive to things. Comments that were made, you know, hit me a lot harder. I was struggling a little bit with my weight at the time, so I was a little bit more sensitive to that. I didn't think that I was good enough, kind of, but I can walk around like pretending that I didn't care if I was good enough. I always tried to be what people expected and I always tried to be what everybody want wanted me to be. You got to have flawless skin, flawless hair, that's the way you build yourself up to go up in the world somehow, okay? I don't need to look good, but then I can speak like I'm, I'm strong and I try to be something I didn't believe that I was. It's just the biggest like sorrow of not being yourself and if you're not being true to yourself, you, you don't feel great, you feel like you're not living your life. Young people jump on social media and they see people who that have all figured out. The world is so catered towards recognition of super stardom, of massive success, of huge productivity. And you look around and you're seeing everybody working, having fun with their life and all I was doing was waking up, going to the gym, wasting my time. It was definitely making myself worth deteriorate because I was now starting to see myself only based on my achievements. So it wasn't just a job for me. It wasn't just a career opportunity. It was livelihoods that were at stake. So when things didn't work out for me, it wasn't just a rejection. It was me one step away from providing for myself and for my family. Anytime where anything about me did not match up or line up to that, it was detrimental to my self-esteem and my self-worth. And it really caused a lot of instability in the way I saw myself because I didn't see myself as firstly a human being who has value regardless of what I achieve or what I do, and secondly also a human being who makes mistakes, who is imperfect. I think people can get lost in that mix and they can feel worthless and they can feel like they don't have a a purpose in this world. I think I was scared a lot because I didn't know where my place in this planet was. What my purpose was. What was I doing? I just want to be me, but what does it mean to be me? It was this feeling like I didn't belong, I didn't fit, and that it was really difficult to just talk to someone about it. In today's society, there's so much information coming in all the time, so much information being assimilated by our brain and our mind, trying to figure out what's real, what does fit our belief systems, what doesn't. But I think it was more like I was scared of not being good enough than actually believing it. And I started to overthink, and I started to make stories and also stories about myself. He thinks that I'm this, yes, and then I started to believe that negative thoughts. This type of information constantly coming in is an overload to the brain and this can create intense symptoms of anxiety. I started like shaking. I was just really nervous. I haven't been out of the house for two weeks. I was just really like, okay, and everything in my body was just like, just get back in the house, Aaron, just lock yourself in the room, lock yourself in the room. You're safe there. Like no one can affect you. Lock yourself in the room.
[8:50]They didn't want to like get out of bed and that caused uh major rift with my mom. I never looked forward to going to school either or doing anything. I couldn't see myself live till I was 20 and I, I didn't want to look myself in the mirror. I didn't want to go out. I didn't want to like face reality because it sucked pretty much. But that depression at the time was the most painful part of my life. I was drowning, I think, and I didn't know how to speak about it. Same thing as my eating disorder. I felt like this was it for me. I was going to live a lonely life. I was going to live a sad life where I couldn't like connect with anyone.
[10:33]If you feel pain, frustration, if you feel worthless, if you feel forgotten, if you feel unnecessary, I know exactly. I know exactly how you feel. And I know how it feels to stand on the outside and look in and feel like there is no solution to what you're feeling. You're not alone. There's billions of people in this world and every single one of us go through some kind of turmoil in our life. So not feeling alone makes it a bit easier, right? So you can heal from other people talking is, is just so powerful, man. It's like the biggest thing that we can do. And it's so basic. We talk every day, but I realized I was just sinking deeper and deeper and deeper into something and I wasn't going to be able to get out of it by myself. There was no way that I could do I could do it by myself. So I started talking to my friends and God bless them. They, you know, they seemed really uncomfortable with the stuff I was telling them. I was sat with someone that cared and wanted to help me. I don't think it was anything special, it was just him being there and him being constantly available to me. That was just I had a helpline. He was like a 24/7 helpline to me over that period, which, you know, was a relief in the end because I didn't have anyone to talk to at the time. Mentors and, and, and sponsors that I've met have allowed me to express my, my feelings without judgment. And it's more from a place of how can we help you as opposed to me just sharing it for the sake of sharing it. They didn't want to hear from a perfect me. They actually really learned the most from me when I exposed my scars, my vulnerabilities, my insecurities. We, we came together and I realized I was no longer the only one talking. I was no longer the only one sharing. I was no longer the only one who was getting a sense of strength and innate power from overcoming. young people, they express their mental health difficulties in creative ways through art, through music. And I would advise any young person who is creative or that way inclined to do that. Any way that you can talk to someone else about how you feel in a productive way is going to help with that general sense of of mental health difficulties. So I would advise anybody to be creative in their expression of how they feel and to communicate with others. I would use my art more to um you know try and write and express myself. So I wrote that song uh and I recorded it and I I just expressed how I felt in that moment, like how I needed a break. And so I wrote a blog post called why are you not speaking? I had no idea that there was so many people with selective mutism in in Norway, in America, in the Netherlands, and in Denmark and everywhere and people were so desperate to talk to someone that everyone reached out from everywhere. So surprising to me the response, I I never expected it. The real change came is talking to myself in the mirror and I had affirmations and I remember this is sounds so silly, right? But it worked so beautifully, I had a book written with everything I wanted to become, everything I wanted to be. Those thoughts that was like you're ugly, had to change. You're beautiful. So I wrote a note, I wrote, you're beautiful. And I'm strong, I am powerful, I am amazing. You can do it. Those affirmations literally recreated something in my head and I started being grateful for things. I felt I was growing. And I got hormone replacement therapy and I remember it was so cool. Every day when I wake up and I go through uh past the mirror, I just have to look in like, hey, that's cool. Now that I can walk around, you know, with an afro and be so proud of it is just like such a self-achievement because I really had to work like physically to love my hair and be able to manage it. And if there is periods that I feel so down and I cry, then I will allow myself to cry, and then I will get over it because you have to cry to grow. You can't go to work with a certain hair color or dress like this and that. So corporates are not for me. So let me try to find spaces where they'll allow me to be who I am. A lot of my like small struggles in life has been answered kind of when I got the, uh, ADHD diagnosis. And then I started reading more about selective mutism and then like I said, I got more the feeling of this is something that I had, not something that I am. I like myself now and that's it's it's a very great feeling. It's a very good feeling. Yeah. If you find yourself in any of these dark places, there are a few things that I would recommend. Number one, you need to lighten up. How do you lighten up? Forgive. We find it easier to forgive those who betrayed us than we find it easy to forgive ourselves. I struggled with self-forgiveness. We talk about self-care, we talk about self-love, you can't do it if you're keeping yourself on a hook. You have to accept what's in front of you and you have to love it. Learn to become your own best friend. I accepted that I didn't, there was no way I could have known what to do. I, I accepted that and I was able to forgive myself. You have to be brave and that's the scariest part is taking that first step to be brave and to acknowledge that there is a problem. The second thing I would advise anyone is talk. One of the biggest mistakes I made was not speak about what I was going through and that made it hard because the internal dialogue I had with myself wasn't healthy. I put all my trust in hoping that someone was going to ask me if I was okay. And out of my 50 friends and along with the 20 other members of my family, I only had one person that asked me if I was okay, and I was extremely lucky that they did ask me. Speak, open up. It's really, really difficult to be vulnerable, whether you're a man or a woman. But what I do know is that vulnerability is the birthplace of the greatest strength. Every single person has help at some point and that you don't have to go through this by yourself and that it's probably the worst way to try and go through it is to keep it bottled up and to try and deal with it by yourself. How are you going to understand yourself? For me it was writing. Writing your thoughts, writing your feelings, writing your dreams, uh, writing what you see happening one day. Tell yourself that I love you. Tell yourself that you're beautiful and strong and independent. I always needed a person telling me that I was enough, but you're enough and you're the only one that should see that, because you're enough, you always are, you always will be. You do deserve to be loved. You have a space in this world and uh even if there aren't people around you right now, uh that love you, it's really corny to say, but there are going to be people who love you later. You were created with value and with purpose and nothing that you do or don't do can ever change that. That's the most single thing I wished I had learned when I was growing up. And I was able to build in the best success that I've ever had. And that success is not any business that I own. It's not any talent that I have. That success is knowing that I can actually wake up every day and look at myself in the mirror and say, I like that guy and I like who he's become. And then you're in a much better place to overcome the problem.
[18:55]I wish you the best of luck. This is, you know, it's an ongoing problem for myself. It's a part of everyday life and there's millions of us that struggle with mental health problems every single day. Someone is going to listen, read, watch, engage with your story and they're going to say, wow, because of you, I didn't give up. And I want you to understand that, the first thing you should do, as soon as you finish watching this video, is get yourself in front of a mirror and start the conversation that you find the most difficult to have. Difficult discussions are the best thing ever. The moment you can have a difficult discussion yourself, you do what I call disarming your demons. If you disarm your demons, nobody can hold anything against you.
