Talk it out!
As you all know, I’m an advocate of looking after your mental health, especially when it comes to managing one’s own self-esteem, and levels of stress. These things are generally okay if you’ve learned your life lessons already, or if you’ve got enough confidence and positive experience to draw upon to get you through.
Not everybody’s been able to get to the stage of getting help, though, whether that help is formal or informal. A very important first step in healing yourself is not just admitting to yourself that you need a little bit of assistance, but also reaching out to somebody for support. When you’re deep in the clutches of anxiety/depression, though, it becomes so very easy to avoid talking about your issues: you feel unworthy, you feel your issues are unimportant, you feel that to raise your issues with someone else is to waste their time.
This is why I see yesterday’s “time to talk” day, organised by the Time To Change group, as being a good thing. It’s a good chance to help make people aware of the difficulties encountered by people with mental illnesses, and by encouraging a dialogue hopefully will remove a significant chunk of the stigma associated with it. What would be best, of course, is if we adopted a culture of mutual ‘watching-out’; it’s not always easy to see what’s causing you problems from your own perspective, and when you ARE feeling the pressure, rather than releasing all of it in one go in the form of a destructive panic attack, talking to somebody about how you’re feeling can act as a kind of safety valve, a slow-release of pressure.
As the Time To Change website states, there’s no shame in talking about your mental health. If you need the help, you’ll be surprised at how much your friends will be willing to support you in managing your own issues. If you’re a friend of somebody who’s obviously suffering, step in and offer a sounding board, somebody to interact with and discuss the situation non-judgementally.
I’m not afraid to let people know of my history with anxiety and depression. I won’t say I’m completely over it, and I certainly don’t parade around with the fact emblazoned on my shirt. But if it comes up, I’ll tell my side of the story as accuralty as possible. Of course, at work this is a calculated risk – some people will, inevitably, react differently and treat you like a liability. That is a falsehood. People with mental illnesses are more than capable of performing just as well – But your understanding would be appreciated!
So make sure your friends and family are doing okay, guys! And remember this also; if it turns out that they have no mental health problems, it’s always good to chat anyway!
M.
I might be wrong but I don’t think high heels lend themselves well to parkour especially when jumping across roof tops.
Not if you enjoy a challenge! And broken ankles 😛
I was on the track team. Twenty something years ago… I could probably outrun a mushroom if it was chasing me with a knife right about now, unless we were going downhill, in a hurricane. Wheelchairs are much faster with a good wind at your back!
An innocently curious search for ‘wheelchair sails’ brings up a lot of sites selling yachts that’ve been specially adapted so that wheelchair users can operate them.
While that’s friggin’ awesome, I think we both know that that’s not what I was looking for. I hereby challenge you to break your old track records, through judicious mastery of the forces of nature and the copious application of ENGINEERING AWESOMENESS! … A suit of armour like your avatar is wearing is probably advisable for such an endeavour.
Can I just count my adapted bike instead? I know for a fact that it will go really fast (let’s just say I’ve had a few spectacular wipe-outs in my time)!
You have an adapted bike? Bad. Ass. Once upon a time, I wanted to learn how to ride, but I can barely deal with driving a car, so I’m not massively sure I’d do any better riding an engine on wheels 😛 I do love the aesthetics of bikes, though – That Extra art I did of SKO on her bike a while back was based on a Kawasaki Ninja, which I quite like.