killing us softly: the silent misery of the human condition
- daisy francisco benz
- Mar 10, 2020
- 4 min read
Depression.
Anxiety.
Toxic.
Trauma.
Mental health.
Suicide.
Buzzwords right now across various social platforms. Hashtags. Memes. A social media response to the shocking number of suicides and attempted suicides that flood our televisions and news feed week after week. We share the posts and nod our heads in agreement with the acknowledgment that this is an epidemic. We throw out some real quick “thoughts and prayers”, close up our laptops, and go back to zombie through our lives. Back to that soul-sucking 9 to 5 grind that is slowly killing us. But still, it continues. We are breaking ourselves. Working jobs that don’t pay us enough to live and getting useless college degrees that we will pay for until we die. Doing life the way our parents did it is becoming nothing if not impossible and, for what? To struggle through this life just long enough to die in debt after doing the exact same thing, every day of our entire lives. The human condition has become unbearable for many of us and one after another we are choosing to flip the killswitch to end the agony.
The suicide rate is skyrocketing. It has risen by 33% between 1999 and 2017 (1). Within that same time, I have lost four of my own friends to suicide. Not just acquaintances, that number would be far higher, unfortunately. These four were people I knew on a personal level and two of them were very close friends of mine, two of my favorites. Losing them derailed my own mental health for a while (and arguably, still). All four of them were white males between the ages of 18-30, one of the statistically most at-risk demographics to die by suicide (1).
There is no clear cut answer on how to resolve this rapidly growing issue. There isn't just a quick fix to this multi-faceted problem that seems almost untouchable. I really don’t have the perfect answer, but I do think that the solution lies in bringing it out of the darkness and having some real (possibly uncomfortable) conversations. Instead of hiding under hashtags and generalized well wishes, we need to be connecting to each other on a human to human level. People need to feel safe and supported to discuss the bad days, weeks, and months before it bubbles up and explodes in tragedy. We need to be sharing our experiences and feelings with each other. We need to share space with each other to discuss our scary thoughts and overwhelming feelings so we know we aren’t alone with them. The more I learn about suicide and the more I process my own experience with walking the slippery slope of suicidal ideation, the more I realize that
It’s not a choice at all, you guys.
It creeps in the back door and stays until it just starts feeling like the only logical solution for ending an excruciating emotional-suffering that just won’t quit. I’ve hung onto that edge by the very tip of my fingers and I know I’m not alone there. It’s a dark and scary place to be. And we keep a secret, in fear that someone might see the crack in our system or have us committed. Because if we are vulnerable, we are perceived as being weak instead of just being human. On the outside, we are living these perfect-ish lives in smiley selfies on all the social media platforms, but inside we are compressing all of our stress and all of our feels and all of our fears into tiny boxes and then crumbling under the sheer weight of it all. Our culture celebrates being so busy and “productive” that we can’t stop long enough to question what the fuck we are doing to ourselves. Add the baggage of our traumatic childhoods- the trauma that broke our spirits so long ago that we don’t even remember who we are- and some of us don’t even have a chance. We are damaged and exhausted at the soul level, y’all. And if we don’t change direction it’s only going to get worse.
So, that’s my why.
For the first time in my life, I feel called. By whatever energy that exists that’s bigger than me, to help the greater good. I don’t subscribe to a specific belief system or set of black and white terms to live by. I don’t know the why or the how of our existence, but what is tangible to me is the energy of our intentions. The energy of our thoughts and feelings. The energy we use to manifest our reality by putting it into whatever we believe in. There is nothing about our existence that is permanent except for the energy we leave in our wake. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change from one form to another (2). We need to heal our souls so what we leave is bright, white, and loving instead of negative, dark, and desperate.
We have to do the work. We have to release the stress and feel the feels and face the fears. We have to heal ourselves individually because look at this world we are collectively manifesting, you guys. It is not good. We are facing a global mental health crisis. We are not okay living in our little dysfunctional, trauma-fueled bubbles trying to out Insta each other. Keeping ourselves so impossibly busy that we’re forgetting to actually live. We are being programmed to self destruct.
I do not have all the answers. I don’t have any degrees that prove I memorized terminology and wrote lengthy papers. I’m a high school and three-time college dropout. I am still right in the grit of doing the work to heal myself and I invite you to come along and do the same.
If the energy I put into the content I create lights you up and resonates- if it helps you move along on your own healing path, then my efforts are justified and I’m honored to hold that space for you. Share these words with the people who need them and together-
We can light up the world.
