Raised in the United States, Hira started working in the TV industry at a very young age. We remember her as a child artist from Nickelodeon’s TV show Victorious and later from a number of commercials like Pizza Hut, Urban Clap, and being the face of Filtercopy with her multiple appearances on our news feed full of positivity & charm. Hira Ashar is best known for her web series 'College Romance' by The Timeliners where she plays Raveena. The show received huge appreciation and her character was loved by millions of viewers.
However, this is just the tip of the iceberg because she is a lot more than an actor famous for a particular role she played. Hira is a graduate in medicine from UCLA. Yes, the rare combination of beauty and (a lot of!) brains with a positive winning approach is how you define Hira Ashar. Hira also served as a counselor for autistic children The Autism Community in Action (TACA).
Every day we see influencers worldwide doing their bit through their social media profiles, fashion bloggers suggesting your ‘outfit of the day’ or the fitness bloggers teaching you the right way to live by eating healthy, it’s a huge platform for each of them to be used in their own unique way. While some use social media to make new trends and follow the existing ones, Hira used it for something that has been quite a topic of concern for us millennials, mental health. Having a lot on your plate can be overwhelming at times, Hira is not an exception to this, although she got the better of her anxiety by channelizing it in the right direction and constantly challenging herself to achieve more.
With the same mindset, she launched 'Full Circle', a beautiful concept about reinventing oneself and coming out stronger. She believes that anxiety can be good if you know how to stay and live in the present, to start the day on a positive note, and give yourself time to heal & introspect. It can be tough for many of us to seek professional help to deal with our anxieties even when it is extremely needed, this is why we require initiatives like Full-Circle which make it a lot easier to get some help digitally, eliminating multiple barriers and hesitations.
Although, we have similar initiatives coming up every now and then which is a positive sign, Full-Circle is an initiative by an Influencer and a celebrity which not only helps in reaching out to a bigger set of people who need it but also sends out a message that ‘It’s okay to feel unstable. It’s okay to disassociate. It’s okay to hide from the world. It’s okay to need help. It’s okay not to be okay. Your mental illness is not a personal failure.“At the age of 12, I lost my grandmother. She died because of breast cancer. My family and I were in the United States when all of this happened. She was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer and this restricted our options. As a kid, I wasn’t sure of what death entitled and losing the most precious person brought out a tsunami of emotions within me.
It wasn’t her fault but rather the lack of awareness, hence, when I launched my YouTube channel Full-Circle I realized the one thing, if anything, I want to do is raise awareness for those stigmatized issues we ignore, those issues we refuse to talk about, those issues that might delay a diagnosis and inevitably lead us to death. Launching my YouTube channel Full-Circle is a small stepping stone on a much bigger journey. I have experienced first hand what it is like to lose someone due to limitation of resources, not having enough information, fear of what people might say, or stigma associated with the problem.”
Hira’s story about climbing the stairs of success and doing her bit for society is exactly what makes her a powerful Influencer which is essential to redefine the term influencer in itself. With the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, regular check on mental health is very important. We have never experienced a situation like this before and this not only makes us anxious but also fearful. Sitting idle at home and not doing anything productive will eventually trigger an overwhelming blast of emotions and undesirable thoughts. Keeping all these things in mind, Social Media influencers & famous celebrities have an opportunity to start mental health campaigns to help people realize that mental health is equally important as physical health.
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