To be lonely is the most human thing. Or so they say.
We all realize that everyone feels the same drowning breathlessness of isolation, yet we can’t connect that to public empathy. Only in private, alone on our couches watching a movie where we witness the similar stories to our own sad and quiet lives do we connect, do we weep with the stranger on screen acting out the tragedies that touch us at our core. We pang with the hurt of someone playing out our own misery.
If everyone feels grief, feels loss, feels scared, feels worthless, feels shitty, feels the dull rainbow of greys and melancholic blues, why do we have to hide it? Why can we not share it like a laugh with our friends? Like a smile with a sister? Like a toast at a party?
Because though everyone feels these things, these tragic moments of unfathomable depression and desolation... it is weakness. It is not weak to laugh. It is not impolite to smile. But loneliness? Socially improper. To burden others with the very same thing that is secretly burdening them is unbalanced. Deal with these issues in private, they say. See a professional, but not me, the person who is supposed to have a care or love you as a friend or family member or just a normal human being. Don’t make it weird. Don’t make it awkward for anyone.
We celebrate mental health in a way that has long been shadowed. We have begun to spool out this yarn of faux openness and connectivity, largely perpetrated by social media. But the internet, even with a picture and a name is still emotionally anonymous. It is a trendy filter on a bleak reality. Because those who understand and live in the dark, more than anything understand that its true form, it’s monstrous shape, isn’t truly welcome in the light.
Depression, grief, insomnia, PTSD, the list goes on, but all remain consistent with each other in their fucking consistency. The days, the years. The lifetimes. These mental and emotional issues are not a one-and-done. They are not a few sessions with a therapist. They aren’t a couple of pills. They are day after wearisome day and night after sleepless night. Our trauma is forever. Yes, we can shape and learn coping skills or adopt healthy habits to foster the good and diminish the bad, but we always be some level of unwell.
And that is what society either does not understand or has not truly welcomed. This shit is not Instagram-able. This shit is uncomfortable for people. So we are lauded for being brave and open for a single moment time, yet we are ostracized for perpetual openness. Bringing up dark thoughts and bad days too many times is then deemed unhealthy. I mean, at some point, deal with your shit, right? Don’t become this black hole sucking all the emotionally and mentally healthy people into it. Enough is enough. We become too much.
Only, to show hardened resolve and strength of character by dealing privately with these said weaknesses inevitably ends up removing the final threads connecting us to a way forward.
So, some of us drown. And not by choice, like we have elected to with all the fucking options in the world, but of fatigue, from treading for so long, the whole body and mind giving into rest from the kicking and fighting. The rest of us become islands of despair. Self-sustaining, head above the drowning waters, but surrounded on all sides. Gazing from afar at the mainland of normal life. Wondering what it is like to not be so god damn broken.