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Summary

I shared about a difficult period during the pandemic when professional and personal pressures converged and I noticed I wasn't well. There was a heaviness I hadn't experienced before, and a strong wish to disappear somewhere and start again. Looking back, it was depression, though at the time I didn't have the language for it. I was studying in the US and was able to access mental health support through the university: a mix of practical work on managing emotions and one-to-one talking therapy. Slowly, it opened something important: the recognition that the values, habits, and automatic reactions I'd grown up with didn't have to dictate how I went through life.

Some of the conversation turned to growing up in Romania in the years just after communism ended, and what it was like to leave home at 19 and encounter a much wider world. Some of it turned to an experience many people share, perhaps especially in competitive, high-expectation environments: working hard, ticking the boxes, and still feeling that something isn't quite landing. We talked about the loop where disappointment turns into self-criticism, and self-criticism into a low-grade frustration at the world, and how slow, careful work in therapy can interrupt that loop and make space for both compassion and ambition to sit alongside each other.

We also touched on what can be harder to talk about. Men in particular often grow up with a script that frames asking for help, or even noticing one's own feelings, as weakness. The cost of that, to the person, and often to those around them, is one of the reasons I think this work matters.

Towards the end, the hosts asked what I'd say to someone considering therapy. I think mental health is more like physical health than people sometimes assume: a continuum rather than a binary of "fine" or "broken." Most of us can become a little healthier, a little more at peace, a little more in touch with what we actually want. And the real point of therapy, to me, isn't to be fixed; it's to live with more agency, to be the driver of your own life rather than the passenger.