How working at a mental health company changed my life
which I never would have imagined happening a year ago.
Growing up in the Middle East is not easy, especially if you live in South Lebanon. Witnessing two wars and other turmoil in the country does not leave you without trauma somehow. I have never lived anywhere else, except for a couple of weeks when I traveled every year or two.
These couple of weeks were an escape. An escape from the country, the toxic culture (my Lebanese side has to excuse me here). But it is, haven’t we all felt that way at some point? Some just feel it more than others.
I never left school
I finished school in 2010, and guess what? I got a part-time job at a school, so technically, I never left school. I became a teacher at 18 and stayed one until 2017, teaching different subjects, but mainly English because this is what I majored in at the university. I also held a managerial position from 2017 onwards.
I always had a passion for photography and all things creative, since I was a teenager with a Kodak digital camera that my dad got from work after the 2006 war. I was the family photographer. Then I became the school photographer in 2015. I was always active on social media as well, back when MySpace and vampirefreaks were a thing, and of course, I stayed active on all the other channels that came after. How did that help me? I became the media manager at school in 2017.
What is a media manager anyway? Other than taking photos at every event, I designed posts for social media, wrote content for the yearbook, shot and edited videos, and basically did whatever came with the title.
Where did that bring me? Fast forward to 2020, I landed my first “Social Media Specialist” job at a mental health startup that was literally just starting. I was their first employee. Why did I join them despite already having a full-time job and a side hustle as an inline skating coach?
Because they were a mental health company.
If you have lived in the Middle East, a war zone with constant turmoil and a lot of stigma around mental health, you’ll know why. A financial collapse was just starting in Lebanon which exacerbated the downfall of any positivity that you could hold on to in the country. So, I thought maybe if I could help others with their mental health, I would be helping myself as well? This is what happened.
As I write this Medium post, I have been employed for almost 10 months at uMore. What has changed since then? I have been surrounded by an international team, who I have never met in real life, with different specializations but who have all decided to give up their jobs to work at a mental health startup in the middle of a pandemic.
I left school, finally
Guess what happened to my school job? I resigned after having spent 11 years working at three different schools. I finally left school. Took a bit too long, but I finally did it.
I am still working part-time at uMore, although it is financially hard to survive with less than half of what I used to make, I genuinely believe in what we are doing and believe it will be worth the wait.
But let’s get back to the main topic here. How did that change my life? I am on the growth team at uMore and my CEO, Maria de Freitas, is ex-Head of Growth at Careem (UBER), so the whole team is obsessed with growth. Not just the company’s growth, but on a personal level as well. We’ve learned to take growth seriously because It’s okay to not know everything.
Despite it sounding cliche, It is genuine. I’ll sum up my 2 cents in these 6 bullet points.
I learned that:
- It’s okay to ask for help.
- It’s okay to have a flexible work schedule.
- It’s okay to take breaks.
- It’s okay to put your family first.
- It’s okay to say that you’re not okay.
- It’s okay to have a life, aside from your job.
But the most important lesson is that “It’s okay to give up.”
I’ll write more about that next week.
