Staring into the dark: My struggle with mental illness

You can see it in her face. Waringa Kamau has a deep gaze and a disarming smile. She speaks with grace and clarity, testimony to her episodes as an intern with global media outlets including CNN, Al Jazeera and Bloomberg. With a promising stint at a tech company in San Francisco, US, her career was ready for takeoff.

But Waringa (she likes to be referred to by her maiden name) at her breaking point. For close to five years, the 30-year-old fought a lonely battle with depression, anxiety attacks, drug and substance abuse that took her to the lowest depths of the abyss. Like a star that was losing its energy before plunging into a black hole, Waringa was living on the edge. Any misstep and the rest would have been history.

“I tried it several times and failed,” she said of attempts to end her life when we met last week along Lenana Road, Nairobi. Her words were muffled by the noisy spray of a washing machine at a nearby car wash. “Many people are suffering in silence. They are afraid of being judged and ridiculed. It is time we talked about mental health as a country.”

There was no one trigger to her depression, perhaps a combination of several factors. Among these was the death of her elder brother in May 2018. Waringa never made it for the funeral in Kenya as she sought to renew her immigration status in the US.

“I never mourned my brother fully, never had closure. Then I was transferred from San Francisco, a vibrant city in California, to Raleigh, North Carolina, a tough and lonely town I thought had little to offer in terms of social life. I became unhappy and started to doubt my self-worth. It is such things that had a negative influence on my mental health,” says Waringa.

The then Trump administration had brought about stringent immigration rules that affected people from low and medium-income countries such as Kenya.

Waringa’s continued stay in America depended on that country’s immigration authorities approving her status, a challenging endeavour for citizens of countries Donald Trump had described in some unflattering terms. A decision was made to transfer her to Hong Kong. That was never to be.

The move to Hong Kong was later rescinded and another decision was made, this time to bring her to Kenya and work at the company’s small office in Nairobi. “I had mixed feelings about coming to work in a country I had left when I was 16 years old to study in South Africa.”

Her parents had given her all opportunities to advance her education. As a Form Two student in Riara School, Waringa wrote a letter to the editor at The Standard Newspaper that was published, a move that elevated her among her peers.

In the letter, she had urged the government, then under retired President Mwai Kibaki, to take tough action against Mungiki adherents who had made life unbearable for families in Central Kenya and some Nairobi suburbs.

In 2011, she sat for her A-Levels at the African Leadership Academy in South Africa before proceeding to Washington and Lee University where she graduated with a degree in journalism and African studies. In May 2017, she graduated with a Master’s in journalism from the University of California, Berkely.

It is with that rich academic background that Waringa set her sights on working for a tech company in the developed world. She knew she was marking her time in Nairobi, or the last few months of 2018. Once again, though, the odds were stacked against her.

“Three months came and went and there were no signs that I would go back to America where my personal effects lay in a store. While Kenya was my home, I had no friends here and the ones I knew from my brief schooling here had moved on. Loneliness and anxiety were eating me up slowly,” she says.

Come 2019 and her mental health deteriorated further. In what she thought was a move to “calm” her nerves and smoothen the effects of depression and anxiety attacks, Waringa began a drug and substance abuse spree, sinking further into despair. In February, she moved out to live on her own and at least conceal her habits. With time, though, something had to give.

Between October and December that year, Waringa attempted to take her life several times, but failed. She would get angry at her “poor skills that only prolonged my misery.” During such periods, she ate little and remembers spending over two months lying in bed and only getting up to eat a banana.

One evening, she came up with a formula that she felt was foolproof. It almost worked. She had a habit of talking to her mother on phone every mid-morning, but failed to pick up her call the following day.

 Her mother called later that evening and still got no reply. Her mother sensed something was not right and decided to ask one of her daughter’s friends who had a key to Waringa’s house to go check on her.

“My friend found me on the floor and in bad shape, at least that is what she later told me. I woke up in a top city hospital and was disappointed with myself. ‘Why am I still here?’ I asked myself. For the first time, my parents got to know the depth of my mental health when doctors explained what almost ended my life and how long I had kept the details to myself,” she says.

Another chance in life was thrust upon her. Family and friends now knew what ailed her. What else was there to hide? Why be ashamed of one’s mental health? Besides seeking professional help, she resolved to openly talk about mental health, citing her own struggles in the hope others in a similar situation will come out.

Through her new YouTube channel, Mental Safe Space, Waringa seeks to address myths and misconceptions about mental health.

“Mental health is an illness. Nobody wakes up and decides to have a nosebleed or malaria. Nobody judges or body shames you when you break your arm or leg. Depression and anxiety are illnesses like all others. Talking about it will help family members seek help for their loved ones in that situation,” she says.

The road to recovery could be lonely and full of stigma, but Waringa is determined to let her personal journey speak to thousands whose voice has been stifled by the stereotypes. “They can be seen, felt, and understood. They can heal.”