Who is the mentally ill one?

Who isn’t sick right now?

How many parents spent yesterday wondering if they made the right choice sending their kids to school? How much stress is that?

How many kids spent yesterday wondering if they or their friends would get shot? How much stress is that?

How many people are wondering if they can get basics – food, shelter, water, heat/air conditioning, transport, medical care, work, childcare, you name it. How many people can’t afford their bills, can barely stay afloat, do things they love or enjoy, do things that support or improve quality of life? How many people are so busy trying to survive, they don’t really get to live? How many people have disconnected from the things that give them life, joy, blissed passion? How many people are losing their fucking shit right now?

How many people are actively addicted, escaping these problems, escaping this life, or trying to take care of someone who is?

How many are being abused in some form?

Aren’t the synonyms in every scenario: uneasy, sick, unhealthy, uncomfortable, stressful, traumatic, and of course, painful?

So let’s make it even shorter. How many hurt people are hurting themselves and other people right now?

How much stress is this? How much despair can any one of these cause, and how many check off one or multiple of these stressors? It’s gotta be close to if not 100% regardless of sample size. We all suffer, right?

How much trauma is anyone experiencing on any given day? The ones I’ve listed and others we all know about. How much is too much for each person? How many people are aware of these traumas? How many people have time, ability, or awareness even to help or heal themselves? How many have access, ability, or means to acquire care, help, or treatment? What’s another word for trauma? Hurt? Pain? Suffering? That’s 100%. We all have been and are. What even is dis-ease? Unease in psyche or body? Who isn’t, and why wouldn’t they be? There are a lot of things that aren’t easy or done with ease lately. So, nobody is mentally healthy, everybody is mentally ill by our own weird words and definitions.

Is it accurate to say generalized anxiety disorder? Is it really a disorder if the actual day to day life is practically nonstop stress by design? Is it disordered to be so overcome, overwhelmed by trauma and stress that it impacts your ability to function? Is it actually wrong that people are severely depressed, lonely, or isolated? That is to say, why wouldn’t people be struggling in all of these ways? A disorder implies that these things are happening inappropriately- either to such a degree it is having a negative impact on life or not in relative proportion to the stimuli.

However, isn’t it perfectly healthy and normal to be suffering negative consequences in such unhealthy environments and extremes? Are any of these so called disorders actually disorders? Or are these just symptoms of systemic issues? Are these not clear indicators that there is a problem, and the problem clearly isn’t each person? (Even if we think we are)

How can anyone not be sick in a sick environment?

Is it really a weakness to break when you’re supposed to? Is it really strength to constantly adapt to terrible circumstances? For many, it’s a matter of survival, learned instincts, this just how it is, but eventually, it just… can’t… work anymore. Don’t things just become intolerable? Everybody has a limit, and our psyche’s and bodies aren’t tolerating a lot anymore. There is dis-ease. Should they really do anything else with whay is going on right now? Shit’s crazy, man.

The numbers reported on any statistic – diagnoses, suicide, psychosis, self harm, addiction, illnesses, are always under-reported because these are always only counting the ones that are known. How many people are fine-but-not-really? And how many are having perfectly normal responses for absolutely disordered conditions? And how many feel somehow wrong for not being okay right now because it’s not okay?

Anybody knows if someone shows up to daycare, school, or office, somebody else can get sick. I can’t sneeze bipolar on you, but I can fuck your life up while I fuck mine up too, and that goes every which way regardless of the alphabets in your soup, whether or not you have a diagnosis or whatever your treatments are. But what do you do if everybody is generally sick everywhere? There’s no one disease, because it is simply hurt people are hurting people, really. It’s quite a pandemic, really.

I’m tired of hearing mental illness. It’s not like any mass shooter woke up and did that, shit happened, shit snapped, you can’t just have that much hatred and pain to give to people, it has to come from somewhere, and it’s reductive and meaningless to just say mental illness. It is a fucking meaningless phrase. Like, let’s just be honest: shit is fucked up, we’re fucked up, so we’re fucking up. I know of no easier marker of a sick society than one who is assassinating its children, and everything else. Whilst expecting everybody to just act like it’s cool, we’re cool, whatever.

There’s just no stigma to be had anymore. I am tired of the blame and shame with this because I simply don’t know how anybody can be doing well right now. It’s like if everything is a priority, nothing is: if everyone is fucked up, nobody is and that applies to the extremes. We are all hurting each other. These people don’t just create themselves, ya know? We are all human, suffering, creating so much suffering for ourselves and each other. It just does not matter what you call it or how you wanna label it. Shit is fucked, we are all in varying stages of rock bottom because enough will always become enough.

I don’t even mean to sound doom and gloom because I’m a huge fan of hitting rock bottom: it’s better than the free fall. I have ground, I can start, I can build. That’s that blessing in the curse. You’re feeling it to heal it. You’re losing your shit because shit has to go, change, whatever. Your suffering can be your blessing, your little mushrooms of awesomeness can grow in your shit, you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s the gift of awareness. You cannot change what you do not know. It’s why they say crazy people don’t know they’re crazy, because they don’t. People who don’t have a problem don’t, ignorance is bliss, and unless somebody admits they have a problem, they can’t change or fix it. Or, worse yet, do the same thing over and over expecting different results. Insanity.

Wouldn’t it be a more fair statement that insane, crazy people are making a lot of us mentally ill? That the ones of us feeling and struggling most aren’t actually the sick, broken, fucked up ones? We’re kind of normal, cause we’re just … doing what we’re supposed to be, aren’t we? And that’s not to imply better than, since we’re all fucked, just different kinds of fucked.

Show me someone perceptively heathy, and I’ll show you someone that just needs more questions to ask and probably at a minimum likes themselves and has others that like them too. Show me someone perceptively bad, evil, done terrible things, etc. and I’ll show you someone else who needs more questions, and to feel like somebody gives a shit about them because they sure as hell don’t like themselves.

Awareness and acceptance go hand in hand in this regard. Hurt people hurt people. I don’t care what the issue is, that’s the truth. More importantly, you cannot hurt yourself and not hurt others. It doesn’t matter the degree of the offense. You cannot be anything but who you are, and nothing can hurt someone or make someone crazier than trying to be what they are not. You cannot actually pick yourself up by your bootstraps. It defies physics. You cannot expect superhuman feats like this when you are barely scraping by on the human side of things. If anyone is trying to pick themselves up or fuck everyone else up, they need, at a minimum, awareness and acceptance.

It is so simple as your greatest gift to the world can be working on yourself. Solving your problems so as to not create more. Taking care of yourself. Nobody can give what they don’t have, and we are desperately short of a very important synonym of acceptance: Love. Loving the ever living fuck out of the mess you are. Who gives a shit what anybody thinks or says, nobody can fuck up quite like you, nobody can be you. In a world that wants to create so much hate, it is radical to choose love. Jesus said the same shit, look how he got treated.

Love is honesty, getting real, being yourself, being authentic, getting right with yourself so you stop hurting yourself and everyone else, taking care of yourself, being responsible for yourself, understanding yourself, having compassion, accepting yourself, forgiving yourself, being human- in everything that wants us all disempowered, these are the things within our power.

You cannot have a problem without a solution. It’s two sides of a coin. So if you can see that problem, awareness, and if you can accept yourself, – ditch useless blame and shame – to be honest, change what you can, accept what you cannot, do what you need to do, do what you want to do, be who you want to be. There are so many things that can still be in anyone’s control. If everything else is shitting on your fucking head, why not wear at least wear the hat you want?

If everyone is generally struggling in isolated hells or well decorated hells, it’s like… man, maybe I can just make a little less hell for me and you. What can I do to make anything better – somehow, anyway, what does it matter? At rock bottom, literally anything is better than nothing, or continuing the same behavior. It is the zero point, the start of infinite possibility. I think that’s why shit is so perceptively bad, it’s like the point of the nightmare where you wake up, the heart attack that gets you on a diet, the OD that gets you to sobriety. It is quite literally, every inch you raise yourself, you raise us all. And fuck man, we need some inches.

Anybody struggling, sick, hurt or hurting is the all-important canary in the coal mine. All our individual struggles are our own canaries in our own coal mines. How many lives did canaries save? And look how many fucking canaries we have right now. A canary dying in a coal mine meant shit was bad for everyone. It wasn’t a character flaw, defect, illness, chemical production issue of the bird if the canary died. The canaries didn’t need to get better or tougher. The canaries weren’t weak or sick. It was never the bird’s fault the fumes killed it or made it sick. It always serves its purpose of awareness that there is a big fucking problem.