If I'm honest, I wasn't really sure what to write about this year on World Mental Health Day. My post last year was all about why we celebrate it, celebrate being the key word there, and I don't feel like I have anything to add to that a year later.
A lot can change in a year. Last year on World Mental Health Day I'd made it to fourteen days clean of self harming. As you can see above, however, I've made it to 147. I'm in a different place with different people and it's made all the difference. I'm happy.
Of course, things do still get hard. It's my opinion that you never truly recover from a mental illness, but the way you deal with it changes and the way you see it changes. This time last year I would have described it as a hurricane that kept crashing in and out and I couldn't control it or stop it or rebuild my life in any way because whenever I tried, the storm would just come and destroy everything again. But now, it's in a box. There's a box inside my head that contains depression and every now and then it starts coming out of it's box but the difference is that I can put it back. Sometimes it takes a bit more effort to get it back in it's box, and sometimes I need other people's help with putting it back into it's box, but I can do it and I can control it. Having control over your mental illness feels good. But it takes time and it takes recovering and it takes being able to accept help from people. I still struggle getting help but there are always people who will be willing to help you and they are waiting there to help.
So, this World Mental Health Day, I want you to know that it is okay to ask for help. It's okay to let other people in. It's okay to accept that you maybe can't get your mental illness back in it's box by itself and you won't look weak if you can't. You can't be strong all the time. I also want you to remember that so far, you have survived 100% of your worst days. I don't know who said that, but whoever came up with that quote is a genius because it's true. Up until today, you have had awful days but you've survived them all and you can survive more. And if your mental illness is still a wave, every storm does calm down and turns into a gentle rain shower and then the sun comes out again. Whichever metaphor you want to use to describe it, it will not last forever.
There is a miracle in your existence. The birth of everyone is a miracle. I read this great article on Huffington Post by Dr. Ali Binazir, and in it he calculates the rough probability of your birth. He concludes that the probability of you being born is roughly equivalent to the probability of 2.5 million people getting together and playing a game of dice with a trillion sided dice, and all coming up with the same number. I don't know how on earth he calculated this, but isn't that just crazy. He defines a miracle as an event which is so unlikely as to be almost impossible. You are literally a miracle. You exist on this world for a reason, you are here for a purpose and even if you don't know what that purpose is yet, it will become clear and you've got to feel like a miracle because you are one and there is no telling me otherwise.
I'm going to leave you with a link to my other blog where I publish a bit of my writing, which I posted a poem on a while back which I think ties in quite nicely, and I'm going to also leave you with a Rupi Kaur quote which is one of the best things I personally have ever heard.
"and here you are living, despite it all"
You're here, you're living, you're a miracle, you're worth every bit of happiness you can get and you can survive the next storm.
Em xx
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