Almost anyone who struggles with a mental illness knows the feeling.

You’ve been going through a patch where you’re feeling better. Life has been good, and your mental illness hasn’t been affecting you as much recently. It’s great. You really hope that you’ll stay like this for ever.

And then it happens.

For some reason, perhaps triggered by something, perhaps not, it comes back. Life doesn’t feel as good, and your mental illness is starting to affect you again. It’s awful. You really hope that it will go away as soon as possible.

I’ve experienced this sort of thing way too many times with my anxiety and depression, and it sucks. It sucks so much. Because you’ve been in a good place, and to feel like you’ve fallen back into a bit of a bad place is really frustrating. Something that I’ve noticed is that I always feel guilty when I fall back into an anxious or sad mindset, and I guess that’s because I feel like a bit of a “failure”.

I especially feel guilty about this if I’m in a fairly good place in my life, where things are going pretty well for me, externally. For example, I may be doing well at school, or I may be having a really good time with my friends, but my anxiety can still resurface. And it sort of makes me feel like I’m stupid because “my life is good and I have nothing to worry about”. But even people with great lives, people with amazing opportunities, such as celebrities, struggle with mental illnesses, because a mental illness is something internal, and does not always relate to what is happening externally in your life.

Take celebrities like Demi Lovato, for example, who was recently hospitalised for an overdose. She’s a massively popular singer, but she still struggles with her mental health, and has relapses from time to time. And she gets back up again, and tries her best to combat it.

The truth is that having a bit of a relapse doesn’t make me a failure, it makes me human. No one can be happy all the time; it’s impossible. And my anxiety is never going to just go away, it’s always going to be there, because it is a part of me, and sometimes it will resurface a bit.

So the message of this post is – sometimes I don’t feel great, and that’s normal and okay, and I shouldn’t be mad at myself for it. And if you’re going through, or have been through, similar situations and feelings, it is completely okay for you to feel that way. You should never feel guilty for not being happy, and if anyone tells you that you should, they are wrong and are treating you badly.

I hope you all look after yourselves and have a great day.