I was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to two Egyptian parents in the end of the eighties. I moved back to Cairo when I was eleven. During that time, I wasn’t really comfortable living with my family, and I decided to move out of my home and live with my aunt, who became my parent at the time.

When I was a teenager, I struggled with mental health a lot, trying to understand myself and growing up in Middle Eastern society. It was hard to talk about my mental health. Although I tried to see a therapist, I wasn’t really comfortable. Back then, I had several suicidal thoughts that led me to make some hard choices in order to feel comfortable with myself.

Now in Egypt, mental health is definitely a changing topic from when I was younger. I felt like when I was younger, mental health wasn’t that easy of a topic to understand, although, as a society we’re trying to accept it more. But still, I find it hard to find therapists or someone that will understand my story.

Moving to Australia was a very hard decision that I had to make. When I moved here, I realised how isolated I was – not having family or friends. And then the world was faced with the COVID pandemic, which added to this isolation for me.

I tried to reach out to mental health services that were offered by my university at the time. On the day of the telehealth appointment, an hour before, I got a message from the counselling team that the appointment was cancelled. That was very devastating. I felt so much more depressed and let down by the mental health service. It took me a very long time to even try again.

In my search to try and find mental health counselling in Australia, it’s been a bit of a struggle to find someone that would understand my background, culture, and the baggage that comes from migrating from a different country with different politics, different ways of living, and different societal pressures that I have to go through.

It always feels that even before starting the process to go to a mental health service I have to explain myself and talk from the beginning. I have to tell all these stories, and even just telling my story is a barrier to me. Sometimes you find good therapists, sometimes you find bad ones. I recently had a very bad experience with another one.

I have this maternal figure in my life, my Aunt, who is going through some health issues at the moment. It’s just been so hard for me being in Australia. It’s so far away from Egypt and I’m not able to be there to care for her the way that she cared for me when I was young. As I was talking about this with my therapist, he kind of slipped and said “Are you a mama’s boy?” I said “oh, what do you mean?” He said “You seem to be like really caring for your mum, and your Aunt is partly your mum.”

I thought ‘I’m not sure if there’s something, like my language or your language, but that just sounds like it’s offensive to me somehow’. And he was like, “oh, I take it back. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.” But I feel like, like, oh my God, you should know better.

Like, again and again, I keep on going to mental health services and it has just disappointed me in some way or another.

One of the main struggles that I have been facing in the past couple of months is that I lost two people in my network of friends due to suicide.

The first person was here in Australia and it was really a shock to see someone decide to go this way that was really loved, and just to show that like, he’s like a happy person. Everybody enjoyed their company. He was there for everyone. Just to see them choose to go this way was something I had to struggle with, especially attending his memorial in a place that I often go to. It was really hard to go back to this place and not to think, or not to feel, all the things I felt during his memorial.

A week after that, I lost someone else to suicide, and it happens very often in our community, but this one was in Egypt and I was here in Australia. I couldn’t attend anything and I wasn’t sure if there was going to be a memorial for him or what was happening. I felt so disconnected and I felt like I was struggling being here and going to work, and not being around people that are struggling with the same thing or being able to talk with people, but again, thanks to technology, I was able to firstly connect with friends that are struggling with having the thoughts of like, ‘why did this person have to go?’

It took me a while to just be able to smile again or just dance again. I wasn’t able to be there for the people around me or it was just a struggle to do my day-to-day life. I generally see myself as a positive person. I try to be helpful. I try to be a positive energy in the community around me and I was just feeling a bit let down, just down by all these things happening at one time and I’m here in Australia. I’m just like, “why am I here?”, “what am I doing?”

And then I think, just seeing the way people are trying to remember these people and honouring their memory, and talking about their life, and just talking about suicide generally and how it’s affecting us. There’s a thin line of people always saying, do we talk about suicide issues or not? Is it helpful or is it harmful? There’s suicidal thoughts, so when we keep mentioning them in our lives, does it encourage us more to do it or does it make us aware of this problem? And how can we deal with it and how can we talk about it? If someone around us is struggling with these thoughts, what would we help them with or what is the right way of going around it? And I’m not sure what the answer is, to be honest.

As I was saying, I try to be positive energy in the community around me. So I think one of the things that I try to do is take care of myself so I’d be able to take care of people, just to eat healthy and exercise. I like cycling a lot. I try to cycle to work and back all the time. It helps me to work out, release the energies and just hear some music. I also enjoy going out and dancing a lot. I also realised that during my time here in Australia, how important volunteering and being part of the community is to being productive.

And one of my favourite hobbies is gardening. I like both indoor plants and outdoor gardening. I always enjoy seeing new leaves and I call them my babies. Whenever there’s like a new baby growing up, I’m like, “oh, look, my baby’s growing.” I have lots of babies.

I feel like generally, I always wanted to have a family for myself. And I also struggle between like, oh, should I actually have a family and have a baby or not? Because I’m also not sure if I’m suitable to be a parent or if the world is a suitable place to have a child.

So my plants are my babies at the moment and they are my family. And I also have lots of garden space where I plant some vegetables and some fruits, and lots of herbs that help me with cooking because I enjoy cooking a lot, and all these hobbies that help me stay positive.

Growing up Muslim has always been a struggle for me, understanding how I think about faith, how I think about religion. It’s always been up and down for me to understand where I sit with all that.

And I’ve been very distant from my faith, because of the community and how Saudi has been perceived by modern Islam at the moment. But recently I have joined a group of progressive Muslims who look at Islam differently, and take from it the good qualities or just the basic things that most religions want, which is like being good to your neighbours, smile to people, help one another.

And this new group of progressive Muslims that I’ve been surrounded with have made me more comfortable to go back to my faith and not particularly focus on what the religion is. I was born a Muslim. I am a Muslim for all my life. So I’m culturally Muslim. So I just can’t take this away from my life and just pretend that it’s not happening. Having to face it and deal with it was just more comfortable for me, than just to try to think ‘oh, it’s not there’.

At the end of the day, my name is Abdurahman, which is a very Muslim name, which means like praying to the God Almighty. And there’s no way to hide from that. It’s in my identity.

This period was a struggle for me with my mental health. I had to lose two people in my network of friends to suicide. And also being far away from my family and my aunt, who was a big and important person in my life and not being able to care for her. During this time, I had to try and find counselling and try to make sure my mental health was going in a better direction. I think now I’m a bit stable, but I feel hopefully in the future I’ll be better. I’ll try to exercise more, take better care of myself, and also make sure my support system is taken care of, because they take good care of me, which is very important to me.

I feel everybody has to find their rhythm or the way that they can work on their mental health to be able to be a more productive person to themselves, be a better person to society, be able to support the people around them and just feel healthy and good about what’s going around, especially with the world going crazy.