Seek and Restore 

It’s an overwhelming sense of doom that lies dormant inside your chest. While it remains still, the world is yours, but when it decides to stir, it can reduce you to a mere speck of yourself. It labors your breathing as the palpable sense of paranoia creeps in along side. It jacks your heart rate like cocaine, while it makes the walls feel like they are getting closer and closer. It puts you in a place devoid of all hope. And before you know it, you think that you’re looking death straight in it’s hideous face. You are forced to begin a process of rationalizing with your own psyche, as you attempt to regain control of your mind and body. At this point your pupils are dilated, you’re sweating, you’re afraid, and most of all you’re completely at the will of this beast called anxiety. 

For a lack of better words, anxiety is a mother fucker. It reduces you to your most feeble and vulnerable state at the drop of a hat. And the only thing more terrifying than actually sticking out episode after episode, is simply asking for help. Those that suffer from anxiety tend to characterize a need for help as a sign of weakness, or may feel that no one is able to empathize with the chaos in their minds, no matter how present or willing someone may be to do so for them. It’s an ultimately humbling experience,
 having to tell someone you know that (to a certain extent) you’re not in control of your own emotions. It feels like you’re admitting defeat towards the slightest adversities of daily life. It feels like saying “I just fucking suck at living”, and that’s a dangerous feeling to have. Because from there you start to compare yourself with all of your counterparts, who seem to flawlessly execute day to day life without these draining little episodes chipping away at their inner stability. The embarrassment that comes along with uttering the phrase “I need help”, is such a deep and painful kick in the pride, that it’s no wonder people continue to just “ride the lightning” and deal with this state of mental deterioration on their own terms and in secret.

The term “ride the lightning” comes from the sense of dealing with something so profoundly difficult or ridiculous, that you have no choice but to just hang on for the ride. And in some aspects it’s a good little mantra to live by, in the way that it reminds you that somethings in this life are just out of your control. It’s imperative to that understand that some situations that you encounter must be faced with a lackluster attitude of “fuck it”, and should be quickly laid to rest, so that you don’t become a slave to your past misfortunes. However, some of the shit that happens to us can reach far beyond the scope of our own fortitudes and understandings. The nature of this life is not a delicate one, and that can be made clearly evident in the blink of an eye. Anxiety does not announce when it’s coming towards you, it appears expeditiously and aggressively. Once it has found you, it can rip you to shreds on the inside before you’ve even had the chance to process what the fuck just happened. Anxiety can find an opening and burrow it’s way deep into whatever wounds have been left open, the ones we were too afraid to express to others. And this is where the real dangers of an untreated or repressed mental condition can begin to take shape. 

Once more, and a little bit louder for the people in the back, anxiety is a fucking mental condition. It is not a feeling that can be turned on and off like a switch. It’s not just a bad mood. It’s a chemical imbalance that has an incredibly unfortunate stigma of weakness and blatant misunderstandings attached to it. Those without anxiety seem to have a difficult time empathizing with those who do because from the outside looking in, it’s like watching someone you love get caught up in a tornado while they do nothing to save themselves. When someone has an anxiety disorder they can quickly go from being the happy go lucky loved one you that you know so well, to being unbearably irritable, carelessly self-destructive, abruptly distant, and completely fucking irrational. This combination of behaviors and mood swings causes a misunderstanding, that subsequently causes a severely damaging way of treating anxiety. See, the person without anxiety can’t understand the intricacies of the one that has it, because most of the time the one suffering is too afraid to open up and show someone else these demons that they carry within, so they bury those mother fuckers deep down inside of themselves. From there, they normally hop on one of two paths; a path of self medication, via drugs or alcohol, or a path of loneliness so that  they don’t have to burden anyone else with their struggles. But nine times out of ten, these paths are going to converge at a similar point, and it’s hardly ever inside of a therapists office or with an introspective epiphany. Instead it seems that when loneliness and self medication come to a head after years of denial and repression, they tend to show up when the person is surrounded by nothing more than the thoughts in their head. Thoughts of dread, worry, pain, sadness, anger, regret. The thoughts get more boisterous and over powering every day and as a result, the self medicating gets heavier and heavier in attempt to suppress the noise inside of their heads. The walls that they have constructed, in order to remain in isolation, have grow taller and taller. Then one day when the thoughts have become too powerful to run away from and the walls are just too much to get through, a glimmer of relief creeps in and presents to them a resolution. It seems frightening and painful at first, but any reprieve from this current state of life is welcomed at this point. They sit there in a moment of contemplation, with the sharp edge of a knife held to their wrist or the cold steel of a gun barrel pressed against the roof of their mouth and in a moment of desperation and irrationality, they free themselves from their tortured lives.  

According to a study by the National Center for Biotechnology Information there is a correlation between anxiety/panic disorders and suicide attempts. And statistically speaking, roughly 123 Americans take their lives everyday, averaging about 44,965 suicides a year according to the Center for Disease Control. Those numbers increase every single year without fail, and will continue to do so until we get a fucking grip on how to handle mental health issues in this country. 

Before we go any further, I want you to know that I am very aware that there are many more mental disorders than just anxiety. There is a plethora of disorders that are mislabeled and left untreated, that can also lead to suicide. But I needed somewhere to break the silence and start the conversation on mental health, so I chose the one that I know all too well. For years I was petrified to open up to anyone about my anxiety, because I had succumbed to the idea that even just having these waves of fucked up emotions that I was engulfed in, or God forbid sharing these feelings with someone, would somehow make me less of a man. And thank God, I have a support system of friends and family that assured me that is not the case. But not everyone who suffers is always fortunate enough to be afforded that avenue. It’s time to change that once and for all.

The fact that having a disorder or asking for help is still demonized in this day and  age is so ass backwards, it makes my head spin. The progressive need for hyper-sensitivity towards everything and everyone, seems to be oozing out of every facet of today’s society besides mental health. We have come leaps and bounds in the realm of psychology and psychiatric treatments, but for the most part we still act like cavemen when it comes to helping our fellow man in times of need. When we can’t get through to someone with any kind of disorder we resort to telling them to “act normal” or “fucking get it together”, instead of “I love you” or “I’m here for you, even though I do don’t understand you.” And sometimes we just jump right into the good old American approach of sedation through medication. This mistreatment of mental health is the greatest problem we face in the United States. Larger than the devastating suicide rates. Larger than the growing rates of violent crimes. And even worse than the rampant opioid crisis. Because our deplorable handlings of those with mental conditions, is the roots from which all of the others stem.  

Look I’m not a one man army with a mission to make the world a perfect place, where there’s a total absence of suicides, violence, and drugs. All I’m trying to do is break through the static and get people to start talking about how to handle the root problem, to a multitude of other issues so that we might see some actual resolution. We’ve exercised all of our methods to try and “fix” the people, everything from legislative disasters, prescribing heroin disguised as medicine, institutionalization, but nothing has caused any reformation and we are worse off than ever. The only thing we haven’t tried, is addressing the big embarrassing elephant in the room, and that’s the fact that we’re all a little fucked up. And that’s ok, as long as we make it ok to talk about. So please if you are suffering from any kind of disorder, or someone you know is, then please, please, please reach out to someone and reach out quickly. In these circumstances, time is of the essence and a simple gesture of kindness towards someone in pain can create an entirely different outcome, one that doesn’t involve someone you love becoming another statistic to a failed system. 

The Suicide Hotline: 1-800-273-8255

The Crisis Text Line: Text CONNECT to 741741 

An Unprecedented Waste of Time 

Social media is something of a double edged sword for me. On one hand, I am very active on Facebook and Instagram, not just to promote this blog, but I am also very guilty of using said apps to burn time at work, by watching trending videos and tagging my best friend in memes. However, more often than not I find myself tumbling down these weird rabbit holes of unending ignorance. For example, if you have read any previous articles of mine, then you may have stumbled across my piece called, “The Earth is Round and Other Lies”. It’s not a Pulitzer Prize winner by the furthest stretch of anyone’s imagination, but it’s worth a read. It’s about a time that I was afforded the opportunity of gaining some “insight” from some flat earth believing folks, who insist on shoving their heads up their own assholes, rather than into a book or near a telescope. Nonetheless, I learned from this experience just how prolific of a platform social media has become for lunatic conspiracy theorists. 

It used to be, that if you believed in nonsense like the moon landing being fake  or the existence of big foot, you would be forced to interject your parasitic, waste of time ideas onto others in real life. And that’s difficult when you have the social skills of a six year old and the outward appeal of a dumpster behind a Chili’s. You might have to rally in a local park with a couple of other weirdos and someone would throw food at you all, eventually you would slither back into your respective basements, and hopefully get real fucking jobs, so that your family would stop being disappointed in you. Those were the Golden days. Then along came the internet, and just like all good revolutionaries it gave a voice to the voiceless. The conspiracy theorists were now given an unlimited space to spew forth whatever crazy shit they could come up with, while they smoked weed and listened to techno mashups of Wiz-Khalifa and Miley Cyrus. And the coup de gras of Internet nonsense that took over the minds of so many impressionable youth, was the thousands apon thousands of theories regarding the Illuminati. 

The Illuminati is a plethora of things, theoretically. Yet it is nothing in actuality. If you’re unaware, it’s basically just a stab in the dark at the idea of a one world government. Now I for one am a sceptic, and I dig the idea of certain conspiracy theories, especially those that may lead to a government cover up or some big juicy story. That being said, the idea of a one world government definitely peaks my conspiring interests, but the keyboard warriors on the internet have gone far too deep into left field for me to get on board with their theories of an autocracy across the globe. In an attempt to prove that the government is out to get us, they have delved way too deep inside of their cynicism towards politicians and leaders, and have successfully driven themselves mad. They believe in absurdities such as, all of the leaders across the world are Satan worshipping meat puppets, President Barack Obama was the Muslim Anti-Christ (go ahead and read that last one twice), and my personal favorite, Beyoncé and Jay Z are part of the one world government, who are using entertainment to brainwash the population into worshiping the Devil. And that’s just the tip of the bullshit iceberg, that these ass clowns have developed over many years of not reading books. For Christ’s sake do these people even read what they believe in? These ideas are so outlandish that even Alex Jones couldn’t get off to some of this shit. Look, I’m not too sure of a whole lot in this fucked up world of ours, but I can guarantee a couple of things. Just as sure as I am that the sun will continue to rise in the east and set in the west, I am just as certain in the fact that Jay Z, the Jigga man himself, the self-proclaimed best rapper alive is in no way, shape, or form a puppet master in the seedy under belly of world wide politics. 

While the Illuminati may have been real at one point in time, they are dead, gone, and nothing to concern yourselves with any longer. See, during the 1700’s they were basically a group of scientists who saw themselves as “enlightened”, and were presenting ideas that challenged some of the principles of the Catholic Church. The Bible Bangers didn’t like that very much, labeled them as heretics, and the rest of the the world moved on. That was until the 1960’s, when two assholes named Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson wrote a trilogy of books entitled, “The Illuminatus!” The books came at a time of a deep lack of trust in the government, and sparked a counter culture of desperate people who believed the dribble written inside of these books. That culture was forced to lurk in the shadows for decades. Mainly because of it’s “difficulties”, surrounding human interactions that were addressed earlier in this article. But then their scope and reach was expanded a million fold by the internet’s keen ability to give a voice to the opinionated introvert, and now we’ve come full circle.

This world is a complete and total mess, a melting pot of hardship, sadness, senseless violence, unreasonable leadership, and downright absurdity. So to a degree, I can understand why some people look for answers in the realm of “make believe”, to try and make some sense of it all. It’s much easier than facing reality, but it doesn’t make it right. Because when you choose to believe something that’s so off the wall, that in your heart of hearts, you know it is just an annoying way of grasping for attention, then you’re not only being ignorant, you’re being willfully ignorant. And we don’t have any time for that shit in today’s already morally deprecated society. If you want to challenge your government and expose truth and injustices alike, well then more power to you. Question everything and develop your world view. But I implore you to do so within the parameters of sanity. Stop wasting your time on these bullshit theories of a new world order, and leave rappers and other entertainers out of your list of world leaders to begrudge. Look around at all the real conspiracies happening every single day, most of which still beg an answer. For example; Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi scandal. President Donald Trump (the leader of the free world) was under investigation for two fucking years for possible collusion with Russia. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is under investigation for possibly embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars through her campaign. The manufactures of OxyContin were found guilty of knowing full well the dangers of the drug and its resounding overdoses. China is literally grading their people on a “Social Credit Structure”, in an effort to determine what kind of life a Chinese citizen is allowed to have, based on what they do for the country. That’s not even remotely close to all of the mind-boggling shit going on in the world today. But some of you would still rather send hate filled comments about the symbolism relating to world power on the back of a dollar bill, then address any one of the number of topics that were just touched on. And if that’s you, then you need to grow the fuck up, get out of your YouTube dungeon, and start developing some worthwhile convictions that could actually make a difference in the world. And if you can’t do that, well then for the love of God, just please don’t reproduce. Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.