When people in the modern world refer to “mental health” it always sounds like they just mean happiness. But since when did “health” equate to being happy? Are mental health and happiness the same thing? What if it’s healthy to be unhappy sometimes? What if the goal is to strike a balance between the light and the dark?
To me, sadness is healing. Allowing sadness to be in the forefront of your mind is not a weakness. It’s necessary to exist as a human.
Sadness is an expression of human life. When we undergo trauma, we must process it. Periods of grief and unhappiness are as important as periods of happiness and light. It should be the goal to let the light win more than the darkness, but a balance must be struck. We can’t ignore the dark side.
Ironically, when we ignore and suppress sadness, it ends up winning.
So, when we talk about the importance of “mental health” in our communities, it makes no sense to talk about it as if everyone needs to be happy all the time. Society likes it when the majority of us are functional so that we can have “progress” and a generally operational system. It scares us as a collective when a lot of us are unhappy. Our knee-jerk reaction is to call depressed people “unhealthy” and make up all kinds of ways to force them to become happy again.
The whole idea of therapy thrives on this concept. People need to be happy, and money will be spent to make sure they go back to work. They must work for the greater good and they can’t be allowed to face the darkness within — that would be counter-productive to capitalistic society.
So, society gaslights us into thinking we’re mentally ill when we’re down. And yet, the majority of us modern people are truly drowning in this thing called life.
Don’t tell anyone you’re feeling sad. Don’t reveal your mental unrest. People will start to worry. They don’t know how to handle sadness because our society has swept it under the rug — we hide people from the public who aren’t able to face life. We ignore them and present an idea to the world that being happy-go-lucky is normal.
People will think you’re not healthy if you’re sad. They’ll prescribe you pills to take away your sadness. Since nobody really seems to know how to find happiness within, they won’t spend any effort trying to teach you to find joy naturally. They will thrust lab-made concoctions on you to numb the pain. They’ll prevent you even further from finding what you’re searching for on your own.
After years of being distracted and numbed out, your sadness will become stagnant in you and it will have nowhere to go anymore. It will become a wound that doesn’t know how to heal. It will feel like it’s a part of you. You may even get attached to it.
When the sadness comes to the surface to try to be processed by your consciousness, you have to let it play itself out instead of turning from it.
Since society doesn’t understand the concept of “health”, it’s our responsibility to figure it out on our own. We have to let the sadness be what it needs to be. Feel it all the way through. On the other side, I promise there is joy again. But sometimes our paths take us through dark forests before we can emerge in the bright fields.
We must walk the path. Don’t try to detour because you’ll just be back in the same place again someday, faced with the same sadness that is trying to heal you. Better let it do so when it arrives than trying to put it off.
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