Today is world mental health day.
Today is Thursday too. I think.
Today is also National Angel Food Cake Day, National Cake Decorating Day, National Handbag Day, National Walk to a Park Day, and National Metric Day.
We can all celebrate not being depressed by eating a giant piece of Angel Food cake while walking to a park, but only if you track it in your health app using the kilometer setting.
Then let’s all go max out our credit cards and buy new Birkin Bags. Oh, wait. They won’t let us into the Hermes store because we haven’t spent the requisite $50,000 on Hermes keychains, phone covers and umbrellas in order to be considered worthy to possibly purchase one.
Shit, now I’m depressed.
Think I will just scroll Tik Tok or Instagram here at my desk in my cube now that I am forced to go back into the office.
It will take my mind off the fact I have a pile of meaningless work stacking up on my desk to grind through and that I am dreading the drive home on the beltway. It’s like driving through a scene of Mad Max Beyond the ThunderDome. I have to survive post apocalyptic chaos now five days a week.
Thank God for gummies.
This is often how it starts, or at least in some similar shape or form. Or perhaps it is earlier in life…
FOMO as you obsess with the shared location of your friends on SnapChat. Why is everyone at Elaine’s?
I didn’t even know she was having a thing. I saw her after school at Starbucks and she said NOTHING!
Or perhaps the sick feeling you have lying awake Wednesday night at 1:30am when scrolling the comments from your Insta photo you posted with your best friend. Why did I only get 35 likes? Then you stop.
The world dissolves and your knees get weak as you read “OMG you are such a fat cow. Why would you even post something this ugly? Are you just STUPID? If I looked that bad, I’d kill myself. Take the clue, cow.” And the comment got almost as many likes as your original photo.
Or maybe it’s a totally different experience.
You wake up to a ‘THUMP’ off in the distance. Like someone hitting a pillow with a baseball bat. Then another and another. The soft thumps growing sharper, more angular and cruel. Other sounds now chiming in. Crunching. Whistling. Popping.
Rockets landing and exploding, marching every closer to your apartment, one by one.
Beirut has always been dry tinder as long as you can remember across your 35 years. This time feels different though.
The thump turns into a WHUMP and your bedroom window cracks, hit by nearby debris. You jump up, grab your wife’s hand, now shaking with fear and run to grab the kids and dash to the basement’s shelter. No time to get dressed or to find your youngest’s favorite stuffed animal.
This is the 12th day in a row of this insanity and it is getting worse. Your head swims and you feel sick to your stomach as you sit quietly in the dark basement, next to a dozen of your neighbors, holding and trying to comfort your youngest child.
A wave of anxiety comes over you. You doubt there will be any work today. Again. You work for a small family run company who makes soap. They haven’t been able to pay you now for, what? Nearly a month? Yes. A month. Leaving your children today would not be wise. You can feel the terror and trauma welling in them to near overflowing. No school today either.
Instead, you will gather a small amount of money from upstairs and go try to buy food with your oldest. Both are nearly gone. The food in the pantry and the money. The banks have a hold on cash large cash with drawls. It doesn’t really matter though. Your savings is almost worthless, with inflation being over 200% and the currency having been devalued by over 90% with another devaluation coming.
Your wife and youngest will go through the motions of normality straightening the apartment while you are gone.
Maybe if things calm down and there is no damage, you will take everyone to the park that is five blocks over. If it is still there that is.
The darkness that has settled over you, the one you valiantly fight back each day just grew s a little tighter. In between the panic attacks and anxiety is a brand new feeling…one you can’t name. It is just dark and empty.
There, in the dark, holding your child you can no longer hold back the tears of frustration which stream down your face.
You name the new feeling.
Hopelessness.
I could go on. School shootings, which now claim the lives of children here in the U.S. once every two weeks. Yes, every two weeks.
We are animals that over hundreds of millennia which have evolved to respond to Flight, Freeze or Flight responses. Spikes in situational experience that triggers a biochemical response. Norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine, and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which are all neurotransmitters that play a significant role in this process. We are also social creatures.
We are not designed for a sustained main-line feed of Cortisol and the other neuro-chemical triggers flushing our system today. And, as social creatures, we should not be tearing each other apart. Yet, for some reason today, we do just that.
We as a race, not just a society, are spinning into a mosaic of wide ranging personal crisises. Evoking trauma and damage to our mental and physical health that some experts say is unprecedented.
Worse, is the fact that all of it is seemingly unending and unrelenting.
War. Global warming-driven natural disasters of unprecedented scale and ferocity destroying lives. The intrusive and addictive mistruths of social media; no different than the free speck of crack cocaine the corner dealer comps the 15 year old trying just to grow up but now unwittingly and hopelessly hooked.
Today is world mental health day.
Anxiety can be a gateway drug. Emotions are not ours. Anxiety is the canary in the coal mine. Hello! Something is wrong! PAY ATTENTION!
We are meant to experience emotions and then let them go, not horde and bury them inside. Hanging onto negative emotions (anger, fear, jealousy, rage, a grudge, sadness, frustration, and the like) all create inside of us a toxic sludge, that over time solidifies into stone.
It creates a heaviness we carry, which seems to grow a little each day. Sinking us a little more as we struggle mightily to stay afloat, alone in the tumultuous sea. Suffering in silence. Never calling out for help.
We have grown selfish. Most of us anyway. We want what we want. And we want it right fucking now. We will cut in line, we will lie, we will manipulate, we will ignore the needs for others, as long as we get what we want.
Politicians lie for their own gains. They each provoke war with the terrible certainty that they alone hold the moral, religious or some other high ground. The other is de-humanized. The enemy. Business leaders and tech titans play monopoly with human lives each, seeing them only as numbers not people. The algorithms are a monetizing machine. People are the product. The end justifies the means.
Drivers ignoring each other. Turn signal. No fucking way. You are NOT getting in front of me. Press the gaps, ignore them and close gap. Find somewhere else to cut in chump. I am in a rush to nothing but you don’t know that.
A curated post on social designed to create the belief of a life that isn’t real, presented to people you don’t know. Not to make yourself feel better, but to make others feel worse.
You know (or you hope) the lie (and that’s what it is if it’s manufactured) you just posted will do that, and that makes you feel better.
Really? I mean, what the fuck. Really?
Today is World Mental Health Day.
Put your phone down. Log off of social. Smile. Have a little patience. Do something nice. Resist putting on something with a massive brand emblem on it. Hell, don’t buy it. If you are hurting, ask a friend to meet for coffee and ask for help or to just listen. If they can’t or won’t, they are not your friend. Tell the truth. Let you emotions go, bad and good. You rent them, you don’t own them.
Above all…to everyone: Stop being so Goddamned selfish. Stop behaving like a Narcissist. We are all in this together and Karma is real.
Be kind to yourself and to each other. Tell the truth. Be of service in some way, no matter how small. Be nice. Smile. Ask for help when you need it. I did. It works.
Peace out.