I Am Not Okay, But That’s Okay….
Mental Illness is a minefield, you never quite know where to step as any move could potentially see it all blow up in your face, so we stay stood in the middle of the field calculating, searching, praying for a way to make it through it, desperately wishing that it would just disappear. You close your eyes and count back from ten, you open your eyes and oh wait, nope nothing has changed, you’re still right in the centre of the minefield.
I, just like many before me and alongside me, long to feel ‘normal’. That word, all of its connotations, what is ‘normal’. I’ve come to find that normal is now a particularly subjective concept, varying from person to person, because funnily enough no single person is a carbon copy of another. Even those that look identical are certainly not identical on the inside. Yet we still pine after this ideology of being ‘normal’ feeling like everyone else or at least how we assume that everyone else is feeling.
Well, my darling readers, I have some breaking news for you and that is that ‘normal’ as we picture it, doesn’t exist. Normality is entirely subjective, you will never feel exactly the same as another person because you are your own human, you feel things and view things in a way that no other person does, therefore you have your own normality.
I’ll be completely honest with you in saying that I spent so long deciding whether or not to press the publish button on this post, in fact, it has taken me weeks to finally build up the nerve to share, however that being said, I decided that actually it’s important that we have these discussions. Mental health is most definitely not a taboo topic, we need to raise awareness not only about the fact that mental health exists and is serious but also that mental illnesses deserve parity with physical illnesses/ailments. Just because you cannot see an illness doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have the power to be just as debilitating as a physical illness, so please I urge each and every one of you reading this to have a conversation, talk about mental health. Ask someone how they feel, text that friend that you know has been having a rough time, have a discussion about your own mental health with someone. It all starts with you, the more conversations we start, the more awareness we raise.
As always thank you so much for reading.
Until next time!
Beth xx
I know how you feel, i've suffered from mental illness for quite a few years now and its only recently im coming out of that neck of the woods. Yet i live in fear it'll come back at any moment. I relate to a lot of what you've said – the emotional numbess and the subjective nature of normality. For so many years i've strived for normal, only to recently realise – it doesnt exist in the way everyone thinks it does. Its great you pressed the publish button on this post, theres been so many times i've wanted to talk to my readers about my struggles, but i've kept it all bottled up to keep up this appearance of normality, only to suffer more because of it.
Whilst i know it doesnt help, i do hope you're okay, and its great that you're talking about it and encouraging others to speak up too as its only through getting our worries, our problems and our struggles out that we can figure out how to overcome them.
Great post,
Beth | http://www.quirksandqueries.com
Hi Beth,
It is SO important to be with your feelings, because fighting your Not OK feelings is the root cause of depression. The fight leads to stronger feelings and greater sadness. But breathing in the emotions and sitting with your bad feelings actually clears the energies. Amazing how we are engineered, when we are willing to be present.
Great blog. I found you via your RT train to get bloggers onboard 😉
Ryan