06 // A Most Delicate Instrument

If the power of the mind isn't a joke, why do we play with it so much?

You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.

 - Richard Wright, Invisible Man

 ‘Mental Health’ is the new ‘Hustle’

The phrase ‘mental health’ is overwhelmingly broad and verbose. You can use it as a blanket for anything. In fact, putting it in front of, in the middle, or  

Mental health is super important. Definitely not something to neglect.

I think these days, it’s critical that mental health comes first, for anyone with a high-stress job look after themselves.

The mental health of the  *insert well-funded entity* team is a top priority which is why we give * BIG PERK* to all our employees. We want you to not just work, but live.

If you say something enough, it begins to mean whatever you say it does. If you’re looking to try this out for yourself, here are a few test words The specific becomes subjective with unprecedented velocity.

It h has become a garnish; sprinkled across, under, and through things to soften their bite and satiate cultural correctness in large part caused by the changing dynamics of work environments. A new generation simply won’t tolerate the norm, so friction ensues. That is more a population story than a discussion about the hysteria we encounter in our lives. It’s pretty hard to care for yourself, all things considered. You don’t even have to do work to talk about how important it is; you just need to read about stress and the terrors it causes, and share about how you would never that become your life.

But for all the talking, sharing, and caping that comes with mental health, I’ve noticed the glaring and persistent gap in the discourse continues to widen; little to nothing is said daily hygiene that keeps most of us intact or, without it, shattered. PTSD is no respecter of persons or environment., yet we somehow still want proof. That’s the paradox sight; we need to see it too believe it, but we can still invent things that aren’t true to satisfy what we want to see come to life. What a time to be conflicted.

The remedy is not the prescription

My mom is a board-certified Registered Nurse, If you ask her, she will tell you that she is a “medical professional”, because it more fully encapsulates her skillset, and she does what she wants.  It’s true. She gets recertified every year in multiple states so she can continue practicing her chosen vocation. She’s been a trauma nurse, home health and hospice, pediatric, outpatient, and ICU. There are few situations she hasn’t seen, and her grasp of what you may need for what ailments persist is astounding. She really knows things.  

Yet, with all that, she will still ask me, the same question about me, every winter, any time I develop a cold:

“Have you rubbed yourself with Watkins yet?!”

If you are unfamiliar with Watkins, let me get you in the mix:

It’s the older, more oval cousin of Vicks, and sits squarely in the West Indian mom starter kit for all ailments, across from Apple Cider Vinegar (add some water, gargle twice, and swallow the third time) and right underneath prayer. A LIKKLE dash (which is an important measuring standard), is all that is required when sickness comes for you on that flight, in seat 12B, when another grown adult showcases their inability to cover their mouth when they couch all over the handrest.

Even with her training, she will prioritize remedies that are natural along with ‘modern medicine’. She is by no means an anti-vaxxer or one who shuns regular check-ups. On the contrary, she is vigilant about them. But she has somehow encoded the same amount of space for but she also knows that medicine is in the eye of the person prescribing things to you. It would offend people’s sensibilities if you have no context for where she grew up and what “care” looked like. That might be why I grew up knowing what Echinacea was before I knew that people took Tylenol. As I’ve thought about it, it may have been an exercise in centering culture while being mindful of advancements that enhance, but never cancel out remedies. It’s the reason she never let doctors overprescribe me (because the easiest way to label a child is to say they need something they don’t, you know like  Ritalin in the 90s)

We know the burnout hits differently, its just hard to discuss the what, the how, and the cost of surviving both. This time of year, everything gets exposed. There is no hiding in Q4. Only unearthing.

Counting the Unfamiliar

I spoke to a neurologist recently, who helped me reframe my entire view of illness and its relationship to our minds. Simply:  

How many steps go into making a cup of coffee? How about ordering one?

 You do not think about it normally, because it is an unconscious function. That’s the point. You only become aware of the complexity when you are forced too, either through experience or visibility. You do not know how many steps go into making a cup of coffee, until you can't remember how to do it.  Everything is simple when you do not have to realize you had to learn it to begin with. The mind works similarly. You take for granted how much processing you do, about everything and everyone, until there is a gap, and you are forced to recognize it. We speak of the brain, but its complexities still confound us. I think that’s the point. To speak of something, but not fully know it, is the height of willful ignorance.

That’s why hobbies are more important than side hustles. In all this conversation of multiple streams, somehow, we forget that there is value in just having things that give yourself room to breathe. A byproduct is how these actions steel you for the environments where you have to make difficult decisions with limited information in adverse conditions. To not cultivate things for yourself is to simple do because you enjoy them, is to slowly starve yourself and intentionally keep the most important parts of you malnourished.

In fact, that simple cultivation of a  increases your ability to apply new insights into the things that make you money. The higher the pressure of the environment, the deeper the need to step away and craft a space that doesn’t echo.

But instead, we wax poetic about multiple streams of income, and never multiple streams of rest. The latter has an exponential impact on your ability to generate whatever idea of “more” that you have for yourself. Our addiction to self-improvement doesn’t actually solve the main focus of the hyperbole; to be is to decide what you won’t be doing, because you do not have time to be anything other than what you decide.

20mg of Peace

There was a day, not too long ago, when I realized that my dog and I had the same anxiety medication. His name is Tank, and he is gluten free. My mother, the medical professional referenced above, affectionally calls him her  “grand puppy”. He is 12 years old. I have already said more than necessary about the situation.

Due to an incessant travel schedule, our family dog developed a fairly severe case of anxiety, which manifested in random bouts of peeing in the house, destroying every single bed he has ever been given, eating specific shoes of people he didn’t like, and altogether doing anything for attention to make sure we knew he was there. When my brother would return, he would be fine, then once another business trip beckoned him onto another plane, the cycle would repeat.

This particular day, I was getting ready to give him his daily water and realized that one of the bottles that his meds were in was eerily similar to the same one I had on my nightstand for most of college: 20mg of Citalopram.

Citalopram is known as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI).  Simply, it works to help restore balance to a natural substance found in your body and nervous system (serotonin). Things like cognition, memory, learning, and a bunch of other physiological processes are tied into that neurotransmitter. I know this because when you lose a part of your brain functioning as I did, you are forced to learn more about how it works than you ever thought. That’s another newsletter though. Simply, that pill bottle helped me navigate a significant portion of my undergraduate studies, in a space that was so viscerally destructive, reflecting on it gives me pause. Nothing profound there, just more space worth exploring.

My vice of choice is perfection. I just spent time calling it execution and making excuses for why building things never left me feeling better than before.  My coping mechanisms were, until very recently, staying as close to everything I mastered so as to avoid the discomfort of radical change. The most dangerous orientation for someone like me is not the pressures of work, failure, financial insecurity, or even extreme pain. It is the overwhelming feeling that I have to prove something to someone, somewhere, and that if I don’t do it, all the things I think might go wrong, will come true.