Busy in today’s race along the highway of life, we drive through the traffic, stopping briefly by the inconvenience of the traffic lights as we race to our destinations.
Stay left, give way, stop, brake, indicate, tick tock our minds are on auto pilot as we take each day for granted.
Bad things only happen to other people, you know that, hello reality, bad things happen to all of us.
We are too busy taking for granted the sand under our feet, the grass on the front lawn, the tap that we can walk over to at any given time, and drink fresh water from, the L.C.D TV, screens and our creature comforts, that we do not see how materialistic we are.
Fighting for some higher supremacy, never stopping to think where is simple? Assumption is our worst enemy, with ignorance being the grim reaper that is coming to meet all of us.
Living in 2 worlds in the transition of today, we do not remember simple, we have lost the ability to keep things in their simple form; we are now known to others by our aviators, as we interact more and more on a daily basis in a virtual parallax, a new found web of safety.
This web of safety is misguided net we have fabricated in our minds eye, a false sense of security that we have allowed our virtual selves to empower, as the virtual world becomes the dominant world that we live in.
We can never take it back to where it was simple, where mental illness was nowhere near as debilitating within the overall population as it is today. We have found a misguided alternative to reality therefore allowing ourselves to function within this parallax.
Mental health is defined as how we think, feel and act as we cope with life, we all feel the emotions of stress, anxious, worried, and frustrated but when these feelings become out of control, is the spiral of mental health.
In the 21st century 1 in five people suffer from a mental illness, from depression, anxiety, schizophrenia anti-social disorders, through to cognitive, , and beyond, effecting us in every way possible.
Acute stress disorder to adjustment disorder, conduct disorder, chronic motor or vocal tic disorder, learning disorder, impulse control disorder, mood disorder, manic episodes, Huntington’s disease, the list from A to Z is extensive when it comes to things that effect our overall wellbeing in day to day life.
Imagine life in someone else’s shoes, someone who battles border line personality disorder for example.
A brief summary of Border line personality disorder is conditions that produces extreme emotional pain, people suffering with this experience fear of rejection, and feel a deep sense of adornment. Suffering from anxiety, depression and anger, those who suffer from border line personality disorder are left in this world feeling isolated and alone.
Scared and unsure where to turn next, every relationship is upside down, and your feeling so alone, that the emptiness is now consuming.
Pissed off at the world for making you this way, you feel outcast from everyone else, you know you’re different and you cannot control any of it.
The fear of being alone and the need to isolate yourself is a constant battle within your mind.
Frantic to avoid abandonment yet pushing everybody close away, the impulsivity to get out of your own skin is immense.
Yourself image is so low you hate every part of who and what you are, and your emotional instability is making your paranoia worse, you think people are looking and talking about you whispering about what you look like and how you act, making fun of you.
You intense anger and violent outbursts make you look like the drug addict who just escaped from hell, you are your own worst nightmare, you cant remember when you felt some kind of normal in your life, you are now just a walking mess of emptiness and thoughts.
You don’t even know if your thoughts are your thoughts anymore or if they are somebody else’s thoughts that you have come to believe as being your own.
You know too well what goes along with having boarder line, as you have already lived through the drug alcohol and substance abuse side of this dark nightmare, but somehow you miss that drug induced person you could be when you got wasted.
At least when you were wasted you felt some kind of normal, the anxiety was nowhere near as bad, and you had a clearer perception of life, (at least that’s what you thought at the time) the days of chasing to score, and not being afraid to go to the pub, to socialise, to be free to an extent were those days you find yourself missing so very deeply. Fighting the urge to go back to find that person the battle inside your mind is raging, you keep telling yourself you’re not good enough, nothing but a junkie a weirdo a nut case.
Meanwhile the world continues to function around you, people in traffic going to work, people doing what they do, as you stay isolated, alone and in the safety of your personal jail.
The jail you have somehow created within your four walls, nothing can hurt you in there.
This is a brief example of how somebody with border line personality lives each day. Life through their eyes is a much darker life than the optimistic life we choose to see.
Overall there is no glory in suffering, in any way shape nor form, never be misguided into assuming that a physiological disorder or mental illness is one that is not real nor assume it is imaginary because it is a mental or physiological.
Like the flu mental and physiological health has symptoms and treatment although too often those who suffer mental and or physiological disorders are left untreated for fear of social isolation therefore suffering in silence.
The use of words such as common are often misleading when it comes to description and perception of what exactly mental health is, common does not mean its ‘normal’ common simply means prevalent, most frequent of best known of its kind. Normal simply means, adhering with the regular established type, usual or typical. The two words are often assumed by us as being something they are not.
In life there is no average, or same as, there is only individuals, who have commonalities never do we share the exact same feelings or emotions as another, nor do we share the same thoughts in the exact same manner.
We too often use again assumption and assume we know how another person may or may not be thinking and feeling.
Nobody knows the exact thoughts and feelings of another person, this is physically impossible, until you have looked at life from behind their eyes.
Life is not always a rose garden, protected behind the safety of the white picket fence, with the perfect manicured lawn that does not have a blade of green grass out of place. Sometimes that perfect rose garden is a jungle filled with vines poison ivy and obstacles that we have to physically find a way around, under, over or through to get to the other side.
The cliché each to their own, seems to ring true, as we are who we are, unlike the story told to us by the bible, we are not all created equally, nor are we all created in some perfect image that we come to believe in over our lifetimes.
We are simply who we are, nothing more nothing less.
However this is not good enough for our ignorant natures as humans have a way of making what is, into something that they want it to be, twisting it, changing it, and leaving things open ended and leaving room for presumptions to manifest into assumptions.
Looking around after the fact, and wondering how or why this is the outcome?
