10/10/2024
World Mental Health Day
Times can be hard.
No-one gets to tell you what your version of hard is.
No-one has walked a mile in your shoes.
If your hardest times came when you were a child and adolescent, you’ll find their effects will linger the longest.
Perhaps you dealt with them and the necessities of life by suppressing them.
Perhaps you managed or continue to manage them with self-medication.
For some of you they may rarely rear their ugly head, but when they do, they leave you shellshocked.
For others they may linger just below the surface all the time.
Undoubtedly, it’s OK to not be OK.
Unfortunately, the world can be cruel and relentless and, currently at least, isn’t set up well to allow people room for this to be true.
You may find accepting that the things that make you not OK will never be OK the most effective way to move forward.
The most powerful question I was asked in my own therapy was:
“What makes you feel content?”
I’ll always remember and appreciate Lisa for that question.
It was so profound because I didn’t know the answer.
What I have realised since, particularly amongst a wellness movement which so often seems to chase “happiness”, is that contentment, and what makes YOU feel content, is the most important thing for anyone to find out.
Chasing happiness is foolhardy. Will you be happy if a loved one is sick? Or worse, when you lose them? Can you be happy when people close to you are suffering? Of course you won’t, and that’s OK and, actually, that’s healthy.
It’s not only OK to feel sad or stressed or depressed sometimes, it’s completely normal and should be expected.
The power of contentment is that you can feel happy or sad and still have a throughline of contentment grounding you.
Most of us are dealing with something.
For everyone who is and is getting on in the face of it, I salute you.
Do not suffer alone.
Do include as much as you can in your life to enable you to be the best you can be, constantly seek your own version of improvement and growth and know that you always retain the power to have your best days ahead of you.
Most of all, though, ask yourself that same question; What makes you feel content?
Once you work it out, build as much of your life around enabling that and you will be better for it, no matter what you have been through, I promise.
