Hi there! Did you miss me? Sorry! I've been, you know, living the dream and all... Uh, you know, working, taking care of the kids, pretending to keep up on housework.
So, I have all these thoughts tangled up in my brain and that usually means it's time to type them out so that the voices will stop shouting at me to be heard! Yes, that's right, I hear voices. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm not scared of them, they are just loud and sometimes make my head hurt, but they are just voices. Sometimes they tell me to do bad things, but I have what some people would call "will power" so, you know, I move on from that. And that is pretty much why I felt the need to sit down and type this out, because sometimes the voices in my head say horrible things and in today's society we just don't know what to do with that.
Now, this is going to be my opinion, I did not research facts, I am not claiming to be knowledgeable about other people or their lifestyle or whatever, this is me, thinking, listening to the voices in my head, looking back on years and years of people watching... So here we go...
We have a serious problem with mental health in today's society. I don't have any suggestions for cures or ways to help, and that makes me feel helpless for others. Why is it so much more of a problem now than it was when my parents were young? When my grandparents were young? How did we get here?
Years ago, I had a boss that I had an amazing relationship with. I believe that she was brought into my life exactly when I was in the most need of what she could teach me. She taught me to stand up for myself in a way that I had never seen a woman do, and she told me stories of her childhood that really stuck with me and pave a pretty little path to the beginning of my mental health ideas. You see, she was a first born Irish-American. Actually, in America, you can't actually have a dual citizenship, so really, she is a first born American of Irish immigrants, just in case you prefer the clarification. She lived on the East Coast and went to Catholic schools her whole life and spent many summers in Ireland. She told me amazing stories of the wars and making pipe bombs, hitchhiking and about the differences in what things are called; I still use the term skip lorry as much as I can! The thing that stood out to me was that she said as a culture, the Irish never speak of illness, death or dying. When a person dies, you just refer to it that they moved on. Is that really so different from the American culture at the time my grandparents were growing up? I mean, we just don't talk about those negative things, right? We push them down, push them away, you don't really have to deal with them, you just move on, right?
Fast forward to my parents generation... They are being raised by this generation of "push it down and move on" types, right? Well, we had this crazy hippy movement; peace, love and all that... People started saying "Hey, we shouldn't be pushing down these feelings, we should be turning it into something positive." We came to a point in time when we stopped just ignoring things and started saying stuff like "it could be worse", "look what we learned from that", "it'll get better". We were telling ourselves to look for the "happy" in the worst of situations because that was the real goal, right? Love, life and happiness? But they weren't finding happy. Because all that crap that they ignored before was the yucky, angry, hurtful stuff that we don't want to deal with, how do you make death and illness "happy"? So they turned to drugs and alcohol because if they couldn't find happy, they could at least find numb.
Then I was born. No wonder the world is a mess. Raised to believe that I needed to be happy, make things happy, make others happy, see the world happy even when it's not. Did you know that by the time I was eight I had started thinking about ways to die? I don't talk about that much. You see, it's not part of the make up of what is happy. I pushed it down, I ignored it, I made myself happy. I learned to be funny because people were already laughing at me. I was too white, too fat, to strange. I was beaten verbally and physically by people who claimed to be my friends and more by those that didn't. That was okay. I ignored it, I made myself happy, there was always something worse. In Junior High, my parents got divorced, we moved and we got back into a religious routine. At 13, the only thing that my brain was hearing was "REPENT, THE END IS NEAR!" I've come a long way, I don't blame the church like I used to, but I was pretty pissed that the end was not as near as they promised. You see, as a teenager, the voices started getting louder, telling me that it would be interesting to jump out of moving cars, to walk in front of traffic, to find a bottle of pills. But I would push it down, I would make myself happy, I would be extra funny and people would laugh and it didn't matter if they laugh at me or near me, I would make the voices quiet down.
I never walked in front of traffic, never tried to jump out of a moving car, never looked for that bottle of pills, those voices could not control me. I never wanted to murder those people that did or said things to me, that hurt me in the ways that so many of us have been hurt. I am bigger than that, I am better than that, and if I keep telling myself that, eventually I will believe it.
So this is what I was thinking today, what I have been thinking a lot about over the last few years when acts of violence happen and society rushes off to place some blame. We are raising generations to really "feel" their feelings, but what are we teaching them to do with it? Don't tell them to be happy, it doesn't work, there is no happy. You can be miserable and still be a functioning member of society, I'm proof of that. So what do we do? Here's my advise: Do what generation after generation have done! Deal with your crap and move on. The voices, they still tell me to do things, I just know that I am stronger than all that. Teach your kids to talk it out, write it out, get creative. Buy them a drum set, some paint and a canvas! Stop filling their heads with this nonsense that they are entitled to things in life, because they are not, they need to earn things to appreciate them. Teach them to read and encourage a love of reading. Put down your phone and your tablet and talk to your kids! Be involved!!! My parents, they made mistakes, but they were there on a level that I needed, it reminded me that there are happy things in life, even if there's no way to achieve "happy" in your life.
It takes a village to raise a child. Yes, it very much does, but it takes a hands-on village, not a cyber-judging group of entitled whiny-babies! Get off your duff and do something! It's okay to move on, it's actually more healthy than you could believe. Find your happy, and know that it will change, it will be harder to find some days than others. Pass along the hippy vibe and be good to each other for no reason other than to just be good. What you put out is what you will get back, life is a wheel.
Alright, I think I'm done for now. I've given you a lot to think about. Don't worry about me, I'm looking forward to growing old with these voices in my head, eventually they will be keeping me company when I forget who I am. Just so you know, not all the voices are bad ones. I often hear my grandfathers, I hear the voices of the people that I love, I hear the voices of those that have passed on, reminding me how precious life truly is, they give me strength when those other voices try to bring me down.
Peace out!
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