By Namakula Sumayah

Content note: This piece discusses depression, emotional mistreatment and suicidal thoughts. If you are struggling, consider speaking with someone you trust or seeking support from a qualified mental health professional. If you are in immediate danger, contact local emergency services or go to the nearest emergency department.

Sometimes, emotional suffering is not immediately visible. It develops through repeated criticism, invalidation, isolation and the pressure to hide pain from people who may not understand. In “It Is Never Fear,” Namakula Sumayah explores how relationships and social expectations can affect mental well-being, leaving individuals struggling to explain what they are experiencing.

Through an intimate and unfiltered narrative, the piece confronts depression, suicidal thoughts and the silence surrounding psychological distress. Above all, it calls for compassion, understanding and the recognition that emotional pain deserves to be heard.

It was never fear. It was never anxiety the way society explains it. It was the people we live with.

They force you to walk beneath their wings. They force you to smile when they smile, to laugh when they laugh, to shrink when they need space. A world where you battle emotionally every day with people who do not understand mental health.

All they care about is themselves. Their feelings. Their moods. They are used to their disorder; now it is your turn to carry it, to call it normal.

Your brain says it is normal. That you are overreacting. That you are too much.

The hunter makes you a victim through words. Words that cut slowly. Words they forget after minutes, after eating. So they think your brain did, too. They think you forgot.

That is why it hurts. Your body tries to swallow pain by telling you that you are overreacting, that you are dramatic. Yet your mind and subconscious fight it.

They fight inside one head.

One says, swallow.

The other says, scream.

Your eyes are tired of crying, but they still do.

You cannot talk to anyone. Not because no one exists, but because you fear they will not understand.

They nod and say, “Be strong.”

They say, “Pray.”

They say, “Others have it worse.”

So you learn to cry quietly, without sound, when the lights are off.

Depression

No one can fully explain what it feels like for another person. It can hurt more deeply than anyone around you realises.

It does not always arrive loudly. Sometimes it comes like a slow program installing itself in your head.

Funny how the body begins to think it is part of life. It tells you this heaviness is just life.

But suffering should never have to become your definition of living.

Worst of all, even on days when you smile, your mind may not feel at peace.

You smile in a photo and later stare at that smile and ask, “Who is she?”

You overthink small things until overthinking becomes normal. Then it exhausts your mind and soul.

You are tired but cannot sleep.

You sleep but wake up tired.

Surrounded, but alone.

You forget how you laughed.

You apologise for things you did not do.

Suicide

This is not simply a spirit, as some people say.

This is not drama.

Sometimes suicidal thoughts emerge from overwhelming emotional pain, when a person feels that their ability to cope has been exhausted.

The cup feels full.

The room feels as though it has no air.

The mind can begin to present a dangerous false conclusion: that there is no future and no other way out.

It can make tomorrow seem unreachable.

It can whisper that ending everything is the only way to find rest.

But that message is not the truth.

Pain can narrow what a person is able to imagine, even when other possibilities and sources of help still exist.

A memory may return.

A mother’s laughter.

A song once loved.

A dream held at ten.

A reminder that life has contained moments beyond the present suffering.

Those moments do not erase the pain, but they can become reasons to reach for another person, to ask for help and to remain.

I write not because I have answers.

I write because my eyes were tired of crying, and I had no one to talk to.

I learned that swallowing pain does not make it disappear.

It makes it live inside you.

If you read this and your brain says you are overreacting, remember that your pain deserves attention.

You are not weak for being affected by what has hurt you.

You are a person who has carried too much for too long and is still here.

That is not overreacting.

That is surviving.

And surviving deserves to be heard, not hidden beneath wings.

You deserve the sky.