Dec 28, 2021
The Next Thing That Will Knock You Out of Balance
Is your mental health prepared for it?
After a major phase of minor enlightenment, I felt for about 2 years like nothing can bring me down anymore. I had figured it out — life has no meaning and there is no reason strong enough to be ever depressed about. Shit happens, cleans itself, and happens again. That is just the way things are.
It wasn’t like my years were perfect. Imperfect relationships, sometimes a sense of imperfection in work life, feeling of needing to be more — sometimes with my body and sometimes with my brain. I had all of these. Yet, I had accepted that it will be alright, and if it won't, that's ok too.
Each time when something went downhill, I had a minor episode of “Ah Fish!” and then pretty quickly came to terms with reality. Each time I came to terms with something, I wondered if my good mental health was here to stay or if there was a cause that is going to drop from the sky and knock me out.
Not even the strongest of us can withstand all the adversities life casually drops in our path and keeps walking its way. It pays to work your acceptance muscle.
Work that acceptance muscle
Right now, as I write this, I am not at the highest of my spirits. But I’m on my way back up (Work that acceptance muscle.)
In fact, I have been through a major episode of sadness that I didn’t know I was capable of feeling. A physical aversion to my surroundings and happenings that made me freeze in my skin and refuse food for days. The kind of sadness that you can feel in your body and under your skin, the coldness in your chest, and emptiness in your heart.
What happened is really not important, because years down the road, something else is going to happen, and it will feel like this all over again. Years before this, things like these have been happening to people, and worse.
At first, I suffered in silence. And then, I suffered with my family. I recruited friends. Well wishers. Strangers on the internet. All in the hope of feeling a teeny bit better. To feel like I have help, that there is an objective perspective to this whole thing which I am unable to see. Luckily for me, there was. there always is.
There always is an objective perspective to stuff that you cannot see from your place. Talk to people.
The world is a more kind and friendly place than you believe in your low moments. Go looking for that kindness.
Does it really help to talk to people?
Life often tricks you into believing that you are the worst person alive. Its own private joke. Because there have always happened worse things. The life you built around yourself with your ideals, is as real as a Stephen King movie. (Aka, it is not real, there is always another perspective you can live life from. Always.)
When you talk to others, the right people, you get a glimpse of perspective. That everyone has skeletons in their closets. That the musts and shoulds and woulds of the world are all made up, imperfect standards set by the world because everyone is trying to do their best in their own shitty way.
Will it get better?
We live in a world where mountains turn to grains of sand and goop turns into people after a billion years. Layer by layer. Year after year. Day after day. There is no better. There is no perfect life. Its the layers that happen and disappear over time. You are no different.
Things happen to you, things happen around you, and you watch, accumulating those layers. You might start off as a shiny new kid in kindergarten wanting to be the president. But the layers that you gather might tell a different story. Don’t hate that story. It is much more exciting than the one you have on mind.
Give in to your wants and needs but not enough to perish if you don't have them. There is no better. Just a large bunch of happenstance. Learn to live with them. Work that acceptance muscle.
