I'm gay and I'm taking care of my mental health!<\/p>\n
I didn't grow up in the best environment and on top of that I had to hide an important part of me from both the close and less close people in my life. I had to lie, live in constant anxiety and fear of being discovered and put on the wall. I took care to keep up appearances and build my public identity around other activities in my life. I gave up that part of me primarily by taking refuge in volunteering, in other people's problems, but also in many other ways. I gave up giving and receiving affection, merging my body with the body of someone else of the same sex as me, loving and letting myself be loved. I gave up on myself. I lived two years of my life with a deep neck pain, I had begun to somatize the pain of not saying out loud who I am, for fear of being judged, socially sanctioned and most harshly rejected by others. I fell in love and decided to break the chain of self-punishment built out of fear that I would be banished to an island alone, as if that were a bad place to live...<\/p>\n
Now that I have sewn this message for myself with lemon-yellow thread on a black cloth, I have been fully imersed in a therapeutic process for a year and a half, and I feel extremely privileged and grateful for the financial and social support that allows me access to this service of personal care.<\/p>\n"},"contest_tag":[930,945,949,950],"contest_year":[492],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mentalhealthforromania.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contest-illustration\/11091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mentalhealthforromania.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contest-illustration"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mentalhealthforromania.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/contest-illustration"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mentalhealthforromania.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mentalhealthforromania.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"contest_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mentalhealthforromania.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contest_tag?post=11091"},{"taxonomy":"contest_year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mentalhealthforromania.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contest_year?post=11091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}