Mental health.
Mental hygiene.
I struggle all day with controlling my mind. Every day is a battle. Every day I get up, and I have to try to feel good. I have to try and be okay. It’s been like this every day since HS.
I want to blame my “mind issues” with the trauma of going to boarding school, but it must have started a little bit before that, right?
Anyway, when I get up, the sole purpose of my day is set up around achieving “groundedness”, feeling full, and feeling stable.
It’s very exhausting. Getting healthy is exhausting. The most draining is when I do everything in my self-care checklist and only feel marginally better.
I try to be mentally hygienic.
I watch what I look at on the web, monitor my emotions, don’t do drugs or drink(well, a tiny), and talk through my feelings and trauma at nausea.
I create safe spaces for myself, as much as I can. Yet, some days I still come up short.
Why?
It’s not that my wellness practices don’t work; they do. I feel better after. It just doesn’t last forever. There is always more work to put in.
I just hate that the requirements to live in this world continue to increase. If I take a day off of being basically perfect, I slowly feel my mental health barometer slip.
Keeping my mind hygienic takes so much work. I am tired.
I thought I put myself in the best position to be okay mentally and not have to try as much. For example, I moved to a tropical island, Im in nature, I don’t have work that drains me, I am basically vegan, I am a minimalist, everything I own fits in two bags, I have good boundaries with family, I pray, I workout, I did not go on social media for years, I treat other how I want to be treated(unless they are dicks), I have a great partner, we communicate all day, I create art, I play an instrument, I dance when I need to, I cry to release, I do it all.
But I feel that most days, I come up short. Maybe the world is too dark and too heavy. Perhaps I can’t insulate myself from the world’s disfunction. Maybe no one can run from how off-kilter the world is.
I know I have a lot to be grateful for, but mentally I feel cursed to be born during this time. (Okay, well being born during the transatlantic slave era could be worse)
We technically have so much as a society; we have all this “wealth”, technology, material goods, and access, but in truth, we are all very sick in the head (and heart).
I feel guilty at times acknowledging what I struggle with because I know some people have it worst in other ways, but my pain feels horrible, too.
I don’t mind having bad days… Okay, I lied. I do mind having bad days. Like, why do I even have to have bad days? Why cant the world be perfect? I feel like I signed a contract birth but did not read the fine print.
Liosuelo 