Be Awake.

I plan for you to be exposed to these words over and over, and I hope it spreads like wildfire.

Wake up. Be awake. Pay attention.

Be skeptical. Ask questions.

Always wonder who benefits. Always ask, “How do I benefit? How does this help me?”

It’s great to help others. It is a wonderful and beautiful thing to be a philanthropist, a social worker, a helper, O yes, boys and girls, it is. But helpers get something out of helping, too. They get a sense of purpose, satisfaction from passing on knowledge and experience, self-esteem, looking good in the eyes of others, feeling good inside of themselves, righting a wrong, trying to fix a broken system, trying to help people in a new way when old ways have failed, personal accomplishment, living with passion, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda… even with the best and most altruistic intentions, even the helpers are getting something back – if they weren’t, they’d burn out and fade away.

I already told my secret, in post number one, Hello World.

I wanna be an activist.

I want to catch you guys (if you’re under 30, I might call you a “kid”, honestly) before you get trapped in the mental hospital system. I want to brainstorm with you, help you find out who you are, what you’re passionate about, and give you some practical ideas for working around the personality traits or quirks or whathaveyou, that might help you stay out of mental health treatment facilities. Or at least help you not make staying in such facilities a major component to your life. There are workarounds. A lot of people just need the right kind of support. And yeah, there’s a point where you have to make it work on your own, sure there is, but I think a lot of people (most?) of average intelligence can get there. I really do.

And a lot of you (again, most?) aren’t “average” – a lot of you are exceptional. You know you are. And that’s WHY the world hurts you so much. You see very clearly the many ways our world is wrong, and it paralyzes you. Your clarity makes it hard to get out of bed. It’s so much more pleasant to function in dreamtime, or video game world, or art world, or cyberspace, or musicland, or moviespace, or skatepark. It really is. It doesn’t make you sick, or mentally ill.

It means the world wounds you.

And so often when you try to dig your way out, when you try to function in the “real world” they way everybody keeps telling you to, you meet people who wear masks and tell lies and pretend to be something they aren’t, and sometimes they even betray you. And you get even more wounded, for having trusted, for having been fooled or made a fool of, and so you crawl back into your safe place, your fantasy land, because that’s how you cope. You need to think and dream and rest and heal and write and draw and listen to music that soothes you.

You withdraw to gather energy.

And from the outside, from mainstream culture, it looks suspiciously like depression, and when you scar yourself as a reminder, it looks like a suicide attempt.

And sometimes, without  understanding what you even did wrong, you find yourself in a hospital, diagnosed with something frightening and potentially life-altering such as schizophrenia or a personality disorder, and being given scheduled medications and PRNs. And if you refuse them, or demand to leave the hospital, there can be court dates looming and community-based living for a period of months because they’ve used your individuality against you and you’ve been civilly committed as mentally ill.

When all you needed was a little time to be alone, to regroup, to heal.

Because you’re wounded, not sick.