normative

The technique and structure with which I've learned to manage my mental health is not so outlandish. Strategies that support healthier eating habits, fitness routines, and striving to be an active member of community; these are things lots of people struggle with. Or in many cases, would struggle with, if they were so inclined. These things make a huge difference for anyone, but most pretend it wouldn't matter as a means of coping with the reality that it absolutely would.

Lots of people do not strike me as particularly happy. They spend their lives engaged in routines of not thinking about it, and not doing anything about it. They become addicts and couch potatoes, they treat others like garbage because they're too overwhelmed and stressed out to have any good will to spare. They have terrible life strategies with terrible outcomes, but I'm supposed to envy them for being functional members of society.

At what cost? People spend their lives in a world of delusion, escapism, and rationalization, not even for their own well being, not as the cost for living a fulfilling life, but because it's what this broken society expects and demands. Others are apparently motivated for functionality, even at the expense of their well being. 

Maybe this is often necessary, but that is beside the point. Mental health isn't just when we're malfunctioning. We should all be as mindful of our mental health as for our physical health. We should be realistic about the consequences of the harms we inflict on ourselves and others. Our priorities should line up with those realities, not some fantasy of a transcendent self that can overcome it all. How much damage is done because people believe we can all just suck it up and move on? Then when they're miserable, they have no idea why. Must be a chemical imbalance. Maybe we're all neurodivergent.

I go on about my strategies as if it's necessitated by pathology, but maybe the real difference is just that I think about it a lot more. I believe that I can do better than this, even as my life keeps getting worse. In the US, homelessness keeps going up, suicides keep going up, deaths of despair, overdoses and addiction, poverty, obesity, and preventable medical deaths - and ten times as many people teetering just this side of not falling into any of those categories quite yet. 

Clearly, I'm not alone in my suffering. I'm far from alone in being plagued by mental health problems. This is all intertwined with issues of mental illness. I'm alone because of the way I think about it. The way I experience it.