I've read an extreme amount of articles on addiction and depression and mental illness. All of which appear sometimes to be three different things and others they appear to be looked at as the same thing but with different names.
People keep pointing out that if you are starting to feel sad or depressed you should reach out to someone and talk, the national suicide line phone number has now become a constant post that appears on every post about Robin's death.
And while I believe that is great to bring awareness, I also think that we are all missing one big point here which I mentioned on my last post, and that is that we are all living in a world that fosters feelings of depression.
We live in a society where we are bombarded by sad news, depressing news all the time, what makes it to the news are the guy who stabbed his whole family because he says that was his destiny, the woman who threw her newborn down a cliff, the war that is going on between two countries (a war that has been going on for many many years), the beheading of children because they are of a different religion. How can someone not get depressed when we are constantly reading or hearing stuff like this.
Then you add the ideals that society has set as standards for living a full and happy life. Standards like you must have a house, you must buy a nice car, you must get an education, you must get married, you must make this kind of money, you must have good health, you must keep a certain amount of money in the bank, you are only successful when you keep moving up the corporate ladder, etc etc... A society that has the standard that says: everyone has to be the same but at the same time everyone must be different.
Have you ever stopped and think about how fucking hard that is? You have to follow certain guidelines which, as society says, will bring you happiness, and we go on and work on dreams that other people have had, we work so hard to get to that next step, to have the money in the bank, to have the family, to buy the house and yet when we get all of it we are still unhappy because the reality is that that was not really what we wanted to do in the first place. We put so much work and we stress out over the things we have not yet achieved and that society says we should have achieved by a certain age that we forget about what we really want.
We listen to what our parents and peers have to say on how they've lived their life and we think because it worked for them (even when we see that they are not really happy) that it will work for us. We forget about what we want and we give more importance to the voices of other people rather than our own, and when we finally realize this it is either too late or we end up feeling alone in the world because we decide to do things differently and everyone else has decided to judge us.
We are also living on a society who has been completely disconnected from human relationships, human contact, we no longer know how to read someone's body language because we are not around anyone to actually practice reading that. Our instincts that once would tell us that someone was in trouble or in pain are not being used anymore and therefore we are losing the capacity to go and help someone before they actually come to us and ask for help.
Think about this... I don't know if it is true but reports state that Robin Williams wife left the house without seeing him that morning because she thought he was still sleeping, on a different room nonetheless. I keep wondering what would have happened if she would have walked in his room before leaving the house and actually checked up on him, not that I am blaming her because it's not her fault but what would have happened if we were more connected with each other rather than with devices?
We live in a society that has stopped listening because we are too busy reading and thinking that we can have 20 different conversations at the same time, we ignore the people we are surrounded by and that are right in front of us because others are trying to catch our attention. We decide that we will go ahead and use a text message to speak to someone we care about while we are also working or doing other stuff that does not allow us to actually stop for one moment grab the phone and talk. Basically we live in a society that gives less importance to people and more importance to things.
So how can we be so astounded when we see that the rates of depression and suicide among Americans are rapidly rising through the years, we have done this, we have created this! How many of you actually put your phones away or actually listen to someone talk anymore... I get irritated because most of my friends now find it easier to text than they do to talk and it always feels when a conversation is not continuous (because that is what happens when you are texting, you get distracted and stop the subject and then try to pick it up later) like it is not important for any of them to actually take the time and stop to talk, yet here we all are asking everyone to speak up when we don't even want to give the time needed to listen.
This society has also been teaching us that we must be strong, that we must get over things, especially things that society has classified as silly, even though things affect people in different ways, we expect everyone to react in the same manner to the same situation. The most ridiculous thing that I have yet to experience, not everyone is the same and while we hear that over and over we still expect everyone to be. And while it is true that you cannot help someone who does not want to be helped, it is also true that you cannot tell someone who is seeking help that they are seeking help for something that to you is silly because to them it is not.
We live in a world that judges us for the emotions we feel and that we show and yet that same world that laughs at us for what it believes is a silly thing our minds have created is now calling out for us to speak up and tell it when we don't feel right. That same world that has become a playground where everyone plays on their own and where everyone ignores everyone is now telling us that we need to speak up because it is ready to listen.
The worst part of all of this is that this great awareness that has been created over the suicide of someone who lived to make others laugh but was apparently very sad inside will start to fade out in the next few days, and suddenly everyone will go back to their old lives and keep running towards things that will not matter when you die. They will continue to ignore and will continue make things a priority. They will go back to being unhappy and pretending that they are, they will go back to making fun of others' emotions until once again someone that touched so many lives will do the same and then the talk will be reopen, but it will all just be talk because not many will actually change their ways.
I truly wish we could all sit back and accept how different we are from one another, how our differences is what makes this world so perfect, I wish we could all realize that the set standards that society has given us will not make everyone happy, it might make some happy but not all. I wish we had the courage to go after our dreams and not after someone else's, following our dreams and our hearts will always fill us with light. I wish people wouldn't judge others and cut their wings when they decide that they are going to take a leap of faith and follow that dream that everyone said would be really hard to achieve. I wish we could all fill our void not with worry but with faith, and most of all I wish we paid more attention to the people in our lives rather than the devices that surround us. Maybe if we did that, we would find less people depressed and more people happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment