Mental Health Awareness v2.0.21
By: August Oppenheimer
Tags: Mental Health Awareness, Awareness, Human Behavior, Mental Health

2020 left a lot of lessons on the table. We’ll learn them in due time, as we make space for the events that unfurled and their relevance to us as individuals.

Image from a GQ article. It’s accurate enough.

For me, one such study that stands out is an effort in recognizing the cognitive and emotional distance between myself and many others. Before and through last year, I’d held the opinion that everyone was dealing with baggage. That part seems to be true; it appears that life necessarily comes with scars. A few ideas spurred off of this central hypothesis:

Everyone is dealing with the same heft of emotional baggage. Put another way, though everyone has different shit any two specific people likely have the same amount of shit.

Others’ methods of dealing with their shit is inadequate if I can identify it as escapism. Subsequent to this is that the only true method of dealing with shit is understanding (likely via introspection).

Others’ refusal to deal with my shit as I have is a sign of a fundamental failing of our world to prioritize mental health and wellbeing.

I’m wrong. Enough. On all accounts.

The first lemma is perhaps hardest to disprove. The baggage isn’t tangible and measuring it means engaging in the subjective. Almost immediately, I have no hopes of affirming my idea that any two individuals (even assuming the same age) have accumulated the same amount of cognitive and/or emotional baggage that they’d be processing at any given moment. All the same, the idea is also pretty immediately ludicrous based on our knowledge of life and variability.

Foremost, two living individuals necessarily cannot have the same starting conditions. As far as I know, such an experiment would require really advanced cloning technology, successful double blind experimental procedures, and relatively amoral surroundings so as to not bias the process. Even in a deterministic setting (which is technically arguable for this world), different starting conditions necessarily lend to different trajectories through an experiential field. This is to say nothing of the highly dimensional nature of our particularly human experiential field. Every scrape, insult, gift, or privilege we are born with or acquire lends a certain weight to our trajectory through life. Since genuine indifference and nothingness is (probably) difficult to achieve, there’s always some heft to our interactions with others and the world around us. That’s how I arrived at the idea in the first place. Living is impossibly experiential and “everything matters” whether or not we can register it at the moment.

The fundamental failing here is a lack of consideration to scale and frequency.

Growing up in a single parent household is not the same as getting called a ‘fat fuck’ regularly in school. Wetting yourself in public as a teenager is not the same as seeing a stranger gunned down by the police in front of you. Trauma, and complex trauma, don’t have accurate comparisons between them because they are fundamentally very different in action but also they happen to very different people. The human experience is so complex and prone to so much noise that extricating specifics is understandably still much more art than science. As much as I frustrate in my own processes against the state of affairs in psychology and psychiatry it remains inarguable that these fields are still incredibly nascent. There’s an undeniable anachronistic sense of grief I feel as I try desperately to navigate my own mental health with what feels like the equivalent of pocket lint and paper clips.

“Make it work” feels like a common mantra as we stumble through modern psychology.

I say this mostly for myself. As a defensive maneuver I have frequently demanded that I am ‘normal,’ or rather that other people must also be dealing with the same heft of emotional baggage. Assuredly some have; definitely others have had more on their plate than I have, even if we are not eating the same food.

I have consistently struggled to commune therapeutically with others surrounding my emotional baggage given that it seems the majority of others don’t have the depression and suicidal ideation that I do. And if their mind isn’t reminding them often of how easy it is to kill themselves, I don’t know that we can have an equitable conversation about motivation, purpose, or direction.

I’m working on it.

This lends to the second idea; that not every method of processing our emotional baggage is equally effective. This is much simpler to unpack because it’s partly true but also largely worthless. Certainly there are a variety of ways of handling the trauma we unwillingly hoard in our lives. My preferred method is introspection; I unpack as much detail as I can to gain a semblance of understanding of the trauma and my position within it. The hope is that by deconstructing the particulars and abstracting principles from any specific event, I can better address future similar trauma as well as come to terms with the acute effects of the given event.

Introspection has served me pretty well, but it’s cognitively intense and somewhat emotionally detached at times. It’s a skill I had to practice and I have met many people who avoid it for any number of reasons. In lieu of introspection, they indulge in more physical or emotional activities. They pour themselves into hobbies like fitness, games, linguistics, or romance. They might opt to become temporary nomads in search of themselves anew.

To date, I have struggled to appreciate these methods because I think of them as escapes from the issue. So often, it has felt to me like these others are choosing to turn from the trauma and simply engage elsewhere whereas I have chosen to stare straight at the beast and weather all the wounds until I know it well enough to tame it.

This definitely isn’t introspection, but hey — a guy can dream.

I say this for myself. Introspection is also an escape. The cognitive mind is an abstract haven squirreled away from the physical (and often emotional) ramifications of trauma. Moreover, introspection is not a soothing tactic for processing. While I work on understanding the full depth of my baggage I have to hope I can hold my breath long enough in deep waters.

There is a key difference between self-soothing and self-care. I do think most of us rely too heavily on self-soothing, but we also live in a world in which self-care has been made incredibly inaccessible. I really want you to go to therapy.

I also know good therapy is hard to find. I get it.

With this in mind, the third point ends up as more of a symptom than a root problem itself. I have my baggage, and you have yours. I have done a lot of work on my baggage, and you may have well done a lot on yours. It’s not really mine to decide whether or not you’ve processed your trauma; it’s a practice for me to take you as you are and hope the effort is reciprocated.

I’ve thought so much about killing myself, and I’ve thought about thinking about it and what it all means. I’ve tried to take it apart so many ways to understand my role and appreciate what feels like the ‘worst’ part of me.

I think I’ve done a pretty good job, too. Genuinely, my suicidal ideation has been a tough topic to process cognitively since it’s often a very visceral sensation. Well over a decade into processing it, the best I feel I’ve found is “I want this for myself because I value my agency in this universe as a form of self-love.” I want to talk more about the ups and downs of that process throughout this month. For now, as it pertains to this story I have to indict myself a little. I have spent more than a decade coping with thoughts of ending my life on a daily basis.

I’m beginning to appreciate how different that makes me.

Surely every penguin longs for the warm embrace of orca mouth.

And before, I’ve done this thing where I essentially present my findings to those who care about me. To say “I love you and this is the deepest truth I have. You still love me, right?”

Everyone says “yes, but…” And in the follow-up I find every reason that our world has let us down. What a world we live in that we can’t cope with the immediate mortality of someone we care about. I’m getting closer to a place where I appreciate the human animal as it is. I don’t often find myself overlapping with it, but I am also a human animal and I know that grief and loss are animal sensations. The ‘but…’ is so much more than reasonable, and I’m allowed to be frustrated that the response is often so adamant and inherently selfish. All the same, there’s no impetus for change.

When I kill myself, people will miss me. The grief will be unavoidable and animal.

As I drift away from that epiphany, I can see a need to fundamentally change my stance. When I told my family in 2018 that I intended to kill myself, I was clear that my intent was to move home first to help them begin a grieving process pre-mortem.

What can I say, I’m a control freak.

I can’t control your grief — when it happens or how. I can advocate for mental health awareness though. I can bring awareness to the difference between self-soothing and self-care, and the extremely inadequate resources we’ve been given to the latter. I can provide references and further resources to expand public knowledge about cognitive and emotional health and well being such that as a collective we can begin to feel more competent in processing our mental selves better in whatever way suits us as individuals.

I am one person. I’m not alone, but we are scarce.

As I advocate for myself and mental health awareness, I implore that you begin to advocate for it as well. Because it is yours, too. Even if you aren’t suicidal, depressed, manic, or grieving. Every day is another test of your mental wellbeing, just as it is for your physical wellbeing. I can only ask that we begin to value that part of ourselves as much as we value the more immediately concrete bone-operated meat-suit we ghost-ride around in all day.

This is all I am without my mind. Charcuterie, bones, and a loving spider.

Happy(?) September everyone.

Or whatever.