Matt Joseph Diaz

CN: suicide

For a long time, passing privilege made me feel like I didn’t deserve to call myself latino.

From a young age, people (especially women) are constantly taught that we’re in competition with one another. Whether it’s our grades, our social status, our economic status, or those creepy beauty pageants for 6 year olds, we’re immediately thrust into a world where we’re taught to view everyone as adversarial to a certain degree.

I've long considered myself a collector of failed relationships. From the girlfriend I asked out during a bar crawl and dated for eight days to the conservative Christian who thought her love was “saving me from a life of debauchery,” I actually gained a little pride from my list of failed love affairs. However, while these relationships were problematic, what made them “failures?”

I promise you, people living with depression are acutely aware that things probably aren’t as bad as they could be.

While every generation has its triumphs (Barack Obama, gay marriage, legalized marijuana) and missteps (Ed Hardy Shirts, Lost, making Gerard Butler famous,) millennials are actually a lot better than we get credit for. Need proof?

This week, Matt kicks off our Conversation series on coming out with his own story.

This week, we're spotlighting mental health in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month. Tune in to today's #MondayMotivation as Matt discusses his own diagnosis, and how to be kind to yourself even when a new diagnosis feels scary and hard.

This week Matt reminds us how amazing we are.

I’m about to be in the midst of a depressive episode. At times like these, I’ve learned to take a step back from social media. While I do ultimately believe social media is a force for good, a means through which we can connect to, learn more about, and inform one another, there’s a real problem with how mental illness is portrayed there.