Memo at midnight: Everybody hurts

A giant leap forward for many of us who struggle to maintain good mental health may lie in simply being able to effectively express a full range of emotions, both good and bad, and be ok with it. It’s not always easy to express negative or bad feelings though. For reasons that I can understand, expressing pain or sadness can sometimes make other people uncomfortable or even upset.

Why?

When you think about it, most of us were probably not bestowed with the proper tools to deal with such feelings and emotions. When I was growing up, it was considered taboo to say that you were depressed. Unless you had a darned good reason, like someone died or something, sadness was not to be talked about. Doing so might label you as being crazy, ungrateful, a troublemaker or, at the very best, a downer.

It took a long time to untrain my mind of this. The disease of BPD is characterized by rapidly shifting emotions. One minute you may soar like a firefly or feel bulletproof. In the next you may feel completely down in the dumps and as fragile as a glass menagerie (thank you, Mr. Williams).

These days, I know that expressing negative emotions is just as important as expressing positive emotions. I don’t let anyone make me feel bad about that. Yes, sometimes a person can spend too much time dwelling on the negative and that’s not a good thing either. However, a full range of emotions were given to each of us by whatever entity created us and if they were given to us then we should learn to deal with them…

…it’s a not perfect world though, I know, and it never will be but simply accepting that it’s ok not to be ok is important to our mental health. It’s also important to teach those around us that it’s ok. Though we may be fragile in the moment, we are ultimately strong for the duration.

No, we are not perfect. We are perfectly imperfect, and that’s a great thing isn’t it?

More: Memo at Midnight archives

More: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)

Photo by Dids on Pexels.com

Advertisement