“You should go see a counselor,” I told her.

“If you’re Qatari, it’s frowned upon,” she replied.

No, it’s not frowned upon only if you’re Qatari. It’s frowned upon where I come from too: Pakistan. And maybe it’s frowned upon because it’s human, and as humans, we have little compassion for ourselves or anyone else.

But what is counseling, really? Do you really need to be mentally ill to see a counselor? If that’s true, then looking down upon the idea of seeing a counselor essentially means looking down on the mentally ill.

Counseling, to me, is taking care of myself. It’s being kind to myself. It’s taking a step back from everyday hassles and listening to myself — listening to that endless berating in my head and catching myself on it.

I’m trying to recall the first time I went to see Patti Collins, the health and wellness counselor at Northwestern University in Qatar, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why I went. Maybe I was running late for my morning classes or maybe I missed a morning class. Maybe I even missed an early morning exam. I know I was agitated and wanted that agitation to go away. It wasn’t going to take a day or two to “fix” myself or tape all of my pieces together or break them all apart if necessary. I knew that. I started seeing Collins weekly.

It’s been more than a year now. I’ve learned so much. I’ve grown so much. I can trace the roots of a feeling back into my past, and I’m still constantly growing and moving forward.

I know I sometimes use my laughter to protect myself, and I did that unintentionally until Collins pointed it out.

“You laugh like that when you’re embarrassed,” she said.

That laugh says “Hahaha. I’m embarrassed, but I don’t want you to know that.”

A year ago when anyone asked me how I was, I would reply with a spontaneous “I’m perfect!” And I would mean it, too. But that wasn’t real. Nobody and nothing is ever perfect, and to say that, I was instigating a need for me to be perfect all the time.

I don’t say “I’m perfect!” anymore. I say, “In this moment, I’m happy,” instead. Sometimes, I just say “I’m OK” when I’m lazy, but I pay attention to myself now when the question’s asked. The answer’s not impulsive.

I’ve definitely eased up on the obsession with perfection. It’s an achievement for me to be able to write just now, sitting on my bed with two of my skirts lying on it waiting to be hung and tucked away in the closet and the unfolded sheets waiting to be put away in the drawer. I even spilled some salad dressing on the floor but chose to allow myself to clean it later because right now it’s more important that I write and get this column in on time and then finish my statistics assignment too.

It used to bother me that Collins linked every issue I had back to my family, every emotion I felt in my today to my yesterday. Not everything in my life was because of my family, I told her. There were other parts of my life too — happy parts — that equally affected me. There were friends, good ones and bad ones. There was teenage love with one or two teenage heartbreaks. All of these molded me.

I would sometimes get frustrated enough to punch or kick a wall, though not hard enough to cause any serious damage. This one time, however, my doctor said I gave my foot a “traumatic thump” that needed crepe bandage.

When I met Collins around a month ago, I told her this kind of frustration could be traced back to my relationship with my family.

“This time, it was you who said (family), not me,” Collins said.

There’s a box. There’s a wooden box inside me that holds all the past hurt. It sometimes morphs into a bubble, but whatever its shape, today’s hurt pokes holes into it. Sometimes that wooden box leaks and sometimes that bubble bursts. Collins said it still hurts because it hasn’t been talked about enough, and maybe one day I can talk about it and it wouldn’t hurt. Maybe.

Some of my friends don’t go to a counselor because they think it renders them weak. But do they not know how much strength it takes to raise one’s hand and say “I got a problem”? Or just to admit to hurt? Or just to stop for a while and breathe?

It takes a lot of strength to make yourself vulnerable. It takes a lot of strength to tell the world you’ve been hurt and you haven’t always been happy every minute of every day. And you don’t even have to be hurt or damaged or broken. You need to give yourself some space in time where you dump all your feelings and talk your heart out. After all, aren’t we all insane? Haven’t we all lost our minds?

Rhytha Zahid Hejaze is a sophomore studying journalism at NU-Qatar. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].