(Ep 18) Mental Health Awareness Month: The Madness That’s Making Us Crazy

Warning: This is a bit of a RANT. It’s my own mental health awareness month melting pot of everything from feeling enraged, sadness, disgust, hysterical: So many feelings swirling within me – Madness within due to the madness of our circumstances.

We’ve always been a screwed up society. Humans are flawed. Our mental health is not healthy. And we seem to have come to a point that we’ve embraced a notion that we can only change ourselves – which I believe – but we’ve taken it to a misunderstood level of “I’m only going to do what’s good for me,” with no regard to consequences or our impact to anyone else around. THAT is not self-care. It’s being selfish to a level that may cause harm to ourselves and to others.

Yes! Put your oxygen mask on first, take care of you – great mental health advice – BUT not to the detriment of everyone and everything else outside of you.  

Don’t miss listening in to this episode. Key takeaways and full transcript below.

 

 

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Key Takeaways:

• Listen to that spark inside of you, your purpose, yes, care for yourself, but don’t lose sight of whatever it is you say or do, whatever it is you are, don’t lose sight of the impact that has on the rest of the world. Make a concerted effort during Mental Health Awareness Month.

 

• What in the world is happening during this time when, yeah, we all have differences of opinions, but how could we get to the point where a difference of an opinion means that I can threaten you and your family or I can take a gun and shoot you just because I assume you’re doing wrongdoings. Mental Health Awareness Month is time for a reality check.

 

• I totally get that we’ve always been a screwed up society. We humans are flawed. Our mental health is suffering and showing that it is. I am struggling over what people not only are assuming or believing for whatever reasons, but that there’s this notion of I can put anything out there without any consideration of consequences, none whatsoever. And that it’s allowed, that it’s okay. I mean, if that isn’t a risk to our mental health and if that isn’t a certain type of madness, I don’t know what is.

 

• We have come to a point where we have embraced this notion that you can only change yourself, which I do believe is great for one’s mental health, but we’ve taken it to this misunderstood level, I believe, of “I am only going to do what’s good for me and that you’ll be better because of it,” without really thinking through what that really means. Mental Health Awareness Month is taking care of you and others.

 

• “No single snowflake thinks it’s responsible for the avalanche,” from this site.

 

• There has to be a balance and there has to be an openness and a level of selfishness that isn’t selfish.

 

• …if you don’t realize how you connect to others, how you impact the rest of the world and you’re just putting things out there without any consideration other than yourself. That’s madness. That is madness.

 

• How can we get back to being true to ourselves, to being good to ourselves, but with the lens of how it impacts the greater good?

 

Transcript:

Hi and welcome to madness to magic and my podcast. I’m with crazy: A love story. I’m your host Paolina Milana, author of The S Word. This show is for those of us who find ourselves surrounded by madness and wanting to find the magic within. We’re going to come together here as caregivers to those who have been diagnosed with a mental illness. Maybe it’s someone in the family we’ve been born into. Maybe it’s someone we love. Maybe it’s someone we work with, maybe even it’s ourselves, whether we’ve been thrust into this caregiver role or taking it on by choice. This podcast is where we’re going to share our stories and learn to realize the magic in all the madness we may have been experiencing. I promise you it can be done, so let’s get to it.

Hey there everybody. This is Paolina from Madness To Magic and my podcast: “I’m with Crazy: A Love Story”. You’re going to be hearing probably birds in the background, wind chimes. I decided to just sit in a corner of my beloved Blueberry Hill Cottage and do this little podcast.

This month is Mental Health Awareness month. And given that my mother and my sister both were diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, this month has significance to me.

I have several online platforms and recently I put out some information on mental health, on feelings, and I have been posting every day. Those little feelings came off of a magnet that was given to me and my little sister during one of her hospital stays and basically, I’m sure you’ve all seen it, it’s a little magnet. It has a whole bunch of different little kind of character cartoon faces, each one with a different facial expression. So there’s, you know, discussed or sad or I’m happy, whatever those feelings are. I’ve been taking them and kind of just writing a little something posting every day on that site.

I encountered someone who made a statement that mental illness basically isn’t real, that schizophrenia, it’s something that’s learned from the government or schools or the media.
And I responded to this and asked what this person’s experience or expertise was to make such a claim. And basically there was a back and forth. Her responding that I’m being defensive, that I was making assumptions about her and at every turn, not only was I not, but I was giving her an opportunity to share whatever supports her claims. I was opening a door for possibly her to teach others something and maybe for her to learn. 

The fact that someone is so convinced of whatever their belief is, in this case, so convinced that mental illness doesn’t exist, so convinced that it’s part of the conspiracy theory of the government and schools and the media trying to alter your mind…Being so convinced and not being open to even the conversation or not even being willing to back what they believe. Wow! That just set something off in me. I almost feel like I need a different kind of one of those little faces with some new emotion because what is brewing within me is this melting pot of everything from sadness to being enraged, to being disgusted, to finding it hysterically funny to, to really, I don’t even know.

Just so much is swirling within me because this is just one person, one voice, one little social media, no big deal conversation, right? And yet what it has risen in me with myself with my own kind of level of anger over somebody I don’t even know and what they’ve said. So there’s that piece of this little puzzle of madness and then there’s the bigger picture, right?

So that prompted me to post on my personal site. Just a question like what is going on? What in the world is happening during this time when, yeah, we all have differences of opinions, but how could we get to the point where a difference of an opinion means that I can threaten you and your family or I can take a gun and shoot you just because I assume you’re doing wrongdoings.

I totally get that we’ve always been a screwed up society. We have, humans are flawed. But I am so struggling over what people not only are assuming or believing for whatever reasons, but that there’s this notion of I can put anything out there without any consideration of consequences, none whatsoever. And that it’s allowed, that it’s okay. I mean, if that isn’t a certain type of madness, I don’t know what is.

We have come to a point where we have embraced this notion that you can only change yourself, which I do believe, but we’ve taken it to this misunderstood level, I believe, of “I am only going to do what’s good for me and that you’ll be better because of it,” without really thinking through what that really means.

I will share a story. There was an individual who had shared with us he had just had a baby. He had shared with us that the mother of the child needed him to take over watching the baby. And the individual made a comment about how if he could just go away and meditate for a couple of hours, then he would come back and watch the baby and he’d be better for it. This has always stuck with me. Maybe isolated example. But I don’t have children, but I’m pretty sure that if a baby needs to be cared for, a baby’s not going to wait a couple of hours. And I’m doubly sure that if a mom is asking for help, that maybe she’s at the point where she can’t wait a couple of hours. 

This little tiny example that’s always stuck with me, it’s indicative of a bigger problem. It’s the – yes! – you have to put on your oxygen mask first. I am all about that. Totally get it. I nearly ended up in a very dark six feet under kind of place when I didn’t, but, there’s a level of it. And by that I mean, yes, you take care of yourself first, but not to the detriment of everything else and everyone else outside of you.

There has to be a balance and there has to be an openness and a level of selfishness that isn’t selfish.

I really am struggling with how in the world, from individuals to a society, to the world – I really don’t understand where we’re at right now. And even more challenging, I am not certain of what it is that can be done to even help. Yes. It’s mental health awareness month. Yes, there’s a lot of information out there. Yes, you don’t have to be clinically diagnosed to have poor mental health, but, if you’re not willing to even acknowledge, read, try to give a moment of consideration to what information is out there. If you’re not willing to consider the source, do your research, do some fact checking and just go ahead and further misinform or further fanning the flames of doubt and fear and just things that are not beneficial and that only serve to destroy trust and any semblance of, I don’t know, of dare I say it – civilization. To what end? What are we doing?

My brother had sent me this little meme, a little kind of do-dad, whatever it was, but it’s Edward R. Murrow, and he is quoted as saying “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves”. And that is very true. I totally get it. But here’s the challenge. There are so many convincing voices out there who almost on purpose cast doubt and seem to want to inject a fear-based kind of way of living with your neighbor, and a way of dealing with everything. I’m a bit of a skeptic at heart, so, I’m all for asking the questions: Where is all this stuff coming from? Who’s putting it out there? Who, what responsibility do we each have to ourselves and to others?

I honestly am discouraged on several levels in terms of where we are, why we’re here. I know that all through history, similar situations have happened. I often speak about my parents who were born and raised in Sicily during the time of Hitler, Mussolini, and the Mafia. I think back at what they said about specifically Hitler and Mussolini and how it all started with Mussolini telling Italy that he was going to restore it to the garden of paradise that it was and make it great again. People were feeling so oppressed, my father had said, and they were wonderful words and they believed it and went along, not realizing what they were stepping into. And to further it, the propaganda of the day, no, they didn’t have social media, but whatever means they used, they put out messages that were singing from the same song sheet. People digested it, believed it. And I see what is going on now and I see how messages of confusion, messages of, honestly, “me first” and messages of hate that cast out on everything. That’s I think is the challenge, right?

You can find a kernel of truth or of falseness in a lot. I have said that there’s, you know, Dr. Phil, one of my guilty pleasures at times has said, “No matter how flat you make a pancake, it still has two sides”. Yeah, that’s true. My phrase is there’s always three sides to a story. There’s yours, there’s mine. And then there’s the one that actually happened, right? Because we all bring baggage to whatever is going on. We all see things from a different lens that’s understandable. But what is happening now is the actual use of communication means to really have nothing be of value or nothing be right or good — and that is true madness.

I do try to think to myself of the beauty that does exist regardless of what is going on. I do think that even now during this time when people have seriously seemed to have lost any kind of – as my shrink says — any kind of moral compass or sense of goodness, despite all that I do know there are good people. We’re just the silent majority. And the more that we stand back and just let crazy loose, so to speak, the more we’re spiraling downward.

There is a saying, I do not remember who said it: “For evil to exist, good men need do nothing”. I feel as if we are somehow at this point. I feel as if the ones who perhaps have come up with whatever beliefs they have, like this person on the Facebook page, I feel as if those voices just are louder and louder and louder and people are jumping on the madness bandwagon and really doing some damage on so many different levels. And when it comes to speaking about magic, when it comes to finding the balance, when it comes to being the best that a human can be, we seem to be going in the opposite direction, and I don’t have any answers.

This episode of this podcast is really one almost helping me to think through the madness of our times and the madness, as I said, that is residing in me in response to the madness that has come to me. It’s an episode of really confusion, chaos and maybe maybe one that has others scratching their own heads and thinking through what we each bring to the table, both good and maybe not so good and how we might in the second half of this month that’s all about mental health awareness and the care and keeping of our own minds as well as the care and keeping of those around us of this world. Not in a “me first” kind of way, “screw you”, but in a, “I am going to self care but not to the level where I’m going to neglect or harm you in doing so.”

I hope with the next few weeks in this mental health month and beyond, obviously that really, you know, as I said in my personal posts, whether or not you’re religious, whether or not you believe in Jesus, when I think of that phrase, you know, What Would Jesus Do? that a lot of Christians kind of spout, and then they’ll turn around and threaten someone or just not behave according to that WWJD kind of concept. I just think to myself, when Jesus Christ walked this earth from every story that you read, He modeled the behavior. He definitely, in my opinion, did not do “what was best for Him”. I can’t imagine anybody assuming that willingly going to a cross and being crucified is something that anybody would, you know, rejoice in doing. He even prayed to have that be taken away from Him. So He wasn’t doing it because it was for Him. He was doing it because of the bigger picture, what it meant. And I feel as if we have completely lost any sense of our brothers, our sisters, the people who are outside of ourselves.

How can we get back to being true to ourselves, to being good to ourselves, but with the lens of how it impacts the greater good? This notion of “I’m just going to do what’s good for me. And by doing that, the rest of the world will benefit from it”: That’ss not the whole story, right? It’s just not, it’s not the whole story.

Yes. Do what you’re called to do. Yes. Listen to that, that spark inside of you, your purpose, yes, care for yourself, totally get it, but don’t lose sight of whatever it is you say or do, whatever it is you are, don’t lose sight of the impact that has on the rest of the world. You, we all are, just a drop in the water and that ripple effect, if you don’t realize how you connect to others, how you impact the rest of the world and you’re just putting things out there without any consideration other than yourself. That’s madness. That is madness.

One of those posters, I’m sure you’ve all seen, like the Successories, and they’re just like kind of sayings, very uplifting, inspirational. There’s another company called despair.com that always makes me laugh. And despair.com has one kind of poster. It’s of an avalanche, you know, so it’s a big snow scene avalanche coming down and it says something like, “No single snowflake thinks it’s responsible for the avalanche,” and when you really think about it, okay, that’s kind of how we’re living now. Everybody’s sorta like, well, no, it’s because of him or her or it, so I’m going to do what’s right for me. No, I’m going to get mine. I’m going to, me, me, me. This concept, it’s just not sustainable. We need to take our cues from this very earth and all of the nature and how it responds. One to the other. I remember during the trip in Africa, we were in one of the countries that we had toured, we went and toured five of them. And I want to say it was perhaps the Serengeti, but, when we were on tour, the guide had kind of pointed out to us how all of the animals, even though they’re different species, each one aided the other when danger was around. I don’t know the specifics on which animals, but, certain animals have better hearing. So the minute that they hear something they will take off, but they will let out a call to alert other species that danger is near or there was another, use a bird that kind of flies overhead and sort of, when it calls out that means danger’s around and everybody’s on alert. It’s as if, as much as we are supposed to be, you know, top bananas, the highest level of species. It seems like the rest of the world, its nature “other than humans” actually work hand-in-hand and consider one another much more so than we who are supposed to know better. It’s daunting.

And so I have rambled on now for a good 30 minutes during this Mental Health Awareness Month, background noise and even truck coming up our Hill. I am watching one of my little cats sleep They’re just adorable. We have a new family of little squirrels that were just born outside and there are wreaking havoc in our flower beds. I also shared this, I have a bird that maybe, I don’t know, several months ago, if not a year ago, broke his foot where it was just dangling and he couldn’t balance on anything. It was a struggle for him to eat, to drink, and he flew around and I really thought that he was kind of doomed and worried about him and put out some bird feed on the ground hoping that would help him. Well, we are pretty much, yeah, almost a year I’d say out and he’s still around and he has learned how to balance, Even though he still drags that foot, he is thriving.

So all I can think is that these are signs for me to know that there is magic despite all of the madness. And as a friend says, this too shall pass, like a kidney stone, maybe, but it will. So anyway, thanks for listening, and I welcome your comments on how you’re feeling during this time. Hop on over to the Facebook page if you’re interested in those emotions. Each day for the month of May.

And I do hope that we all practice a little more of the What Would Jesus Do? regardless of religion. Especially during Mental Health Awareness Month: Put on your oxygen mask first, yes, but not to the detriment of others. Be well. 

 

Key Takeaways:

• Listen to that spark inside of you, your purpose, yes, care for yourself, but don’t lose sight of whatever it is you say or do, whatever it is you are, don’t lose sight of the impact that has on the rest of the world. Make a concerted effort during Mental Health Awareness Month.

 

• What in the world is happening during this time when, yeah, we all have differences of opinions, but how could we get to the point where a difference of an opinion means that I can threaten you and your family or I can take a gun and shoot you just because I assume you’re doing wrongdoings. Mental Health Awareness Month is time for a reality check.

 

• I totally get that we’ve always been a screwed up society. We humans are flawed. Our mental health is suffering and showing that it is. I am struggling over what people not only are assuming or believing for whatever reasons, but that there’s this notion of I can put anything out there without any consideration of consequences, none whatsoever. And that it’s allowed, that it’s okay. I mean, if that isn’t a risk to our mental health and if that isn’t a certain type of madness, I don’t know what is.

 

• We have come to a point where we have embraced this notion that you can only change yourself, which I do believe is great for one’s mental health, but we’ve taken it to this misunderstood level, I believe, of “I am only going to do what’s good for me and that you’ll be better because of it,” without really thinking through what that really means. Mental Health Awareness Month is taking care of you and others.

 

• “No single snowflake thinks it’s responsible for the avalanche,” from this site.

 

• There has to be a balance and there has to be an openness and a level of selfishness that isn’t selfish.

 

• …if you don’t realize how you connect to others, how you impact the rest of the world and you’re just putting things out there without any consideration other than yourself. That’s madness. That is madness.

 

• How can we get back to being true to ourselves, to being good to ourselves, but with the lens of how it impacts the greater good?

 

Transcript:

Hi and welcome to madness to magic and my podcast. I’m with crazy: A love story. I’m your host Paolina Milana, author of The S Word. This show is for those of us who find ourselves surrounded by madness and wanting to find the magic within. We’re going to come together here as caregivers to those who have been diagnosed with a mental illness. Maybe it’s someone in the family we’ve been born into. Maybe it’s someone we love. Maybe it’s someone we work with, maybe even it’s ourselves, whether we’ve been thrust into this caregiver role or taking it on by choice. This podcast is where we’re going to share our stories and learn to realize the magic in all the madness we may have been experiencing. I promise you it can be done, so let’s get to it.

Hey there everybody. This is Paolina from Madness To Magic and my podcast: “I’m with Crazy: A Love Story”. You’re going to be hearing probably birds in the background, wind chimes. I decided to just sit in a corner of my beloved Blueberry Hill Cottage and do this little podcast.

This month is Mental Health Awareness month. And given that my mother and my sister both were diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, this month has significance to me.

I have several online platforms and recently I put out some information on mental health, on feelings, and I have been posting every day. Those little feelings came off of a magnet that was given to me and my little sister during one of her hospital stays and basically, I’m sure you’ve all seen it, it’s a little magnet. It has a whole bunch of different little kind of character cartoon faces, each one with a different facial expression. So there’s, you know, discussed or sad or I’m happy, whatever those feelings are. I’ve been taking them and kind of just writing a little something posting every day on that site.

I encountered someone who made a statement that mental illness basically isn’t real, that schizophrenia, it’s something that’s learned from the government or schools or the media.
And I responded to this and asked what this person’s experience or expertise was to make such a claim. And basically there was a back and forth. Her responding that I’m being defensive, that I was making assumptions about her and at every turn, not only was I not, but I was giving her an opportunity to share whatever supports her claims. I was opening a door for possibly her to teach others something and maybe for her to learn. 

The fact that someone is so convinced of whatever their belief is, in this case, so convinced that mental illness doesn’t exist, so convinced that it’s part of the conspiracy theory of the government and schools and the media trying to alter your mind…Being so convinced and not being open to even the conversation or not even being willing to back what they believe. Wow! That just set something off in me. I almost feel like I need a different kind of one of those little faces with some new emotion because what is brewing within me is this melting pot of everything from sadness to being enraged, to being disgusted, to finding it hysterically funny to, to really, I don’t even know.

Just so much is swirling within me because this is just one person, one voice, one little social media, no big deal conversation, right? And yet what it has risen in me with myself with my own kind of level of anger over somebody I don’t even know and what they’ve said. So there’s that piece of this little puzzle of madness and then there’s the bigger picture, right?

So that prompted me to post on my personal site. Just a question like what is going on? What in the world is happening during this time when, yeah, we all have differences of opinions, but how could we get to the point where a difference of an opinion means that I can threaten you and your family or I can take a gun and shoot you just because I assume you’re doing wrongdoings.

I totally get that we’ve always been a screwed up society. We have, humans are flawed. But I am so struggling over what people not only are assuming or believing for whatever reasons, but that there’s this notion of I can put anything out there without any consideration of consequences, none whatsoever. And that it’s allowed, that it’s okay. I mean, if that isn’t a certain type of madness, I don’t know what is.

We have come to a point where we have embraced this notion that you can only change yourself, which I do believe, but we’ve taken it to this misunderstood level, I believe, of “I am only going to do what’s good for me and that you’ll be better because of it,” without really thinking through what that really means.

I will share a story. There was an individual who had shared with us he had just had a baby. He had shared with us that the mother of the child needed him to take over watching the baby. And the individual made a comment about how if he could just go away and meditate for a couple of hours, then he would come back and watch the baby and he’d be better for it. This has always stuck with me. Maybe isolated example. But I don’t have children, but I’m pretty sure that if a baby needs to be cared for, a baby’s not going to wait a couple of hours. And I’m doubly sure that if a mom is asking for help, that maybe she’s at the point where she can’t wait a couple of hours. 

This little tiny example that’s always stuck with me, it’s indicative of a bigger problem. It’s the – yes! – you have to put on your oxygen mask first. I am all about that. Totally get it. I nearly ended up in a very dark six feet under kind of place when I didn’t, but, there’s a level of it. And by that I mean, yes, you take care of yourself first, but not to the detriment of everything else and everyone else outside of you.

There has to be a balance and there has to be an openness and a level of selfishness that isn’t selfish.

I really am struggling with how in the world, from individuals to a society, to the world – I really don’t understand where we’re at right now. And even more challenging, I am not certain of what it is that can be done to even help. Yes. It’s mental health awareness month. Yes, there’s a lot of information out there. Yes, you don’t have to be clinically diagnosed to have poor mental health, but, if you’re not willing to even acknowledge, read, try to give a moment of consideration to what information is out there. If you’re not willing to consider the source, do your research, do some fact checking and just go ahead and further misinform or further fanning the flames of doubt and fear and just things that are not beneficial and that only serve to destroy trust and any semblance of, I don’t know, of dare I say it – civilization. To what end? What are we doing?

My brother had sent me this little meme, a little kind of do-dad, whatever it was, but it’s Edward R. Murrow, and he is quoted as saying “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves”. And that is very true. I totally get it. But here’s the challenge. There are so many convincing voices out there who almost on purpose cast doubt and seem to want to inject a fear-based kind of way of living with your neighbor, and a way of dealing with everything. I’m a bit of a skeptic at heart, so, I’m all for asking the questions: Where is all this stuff coming from? Who’s putting it out there? Who, what responsibility do we each have to ourselves and to others?

I honestly am discouraged on several levels in terms of where we are, why we’re here. I know that all through history, similar situations have happened. I often speak about my parents who were born and raised in Sicily during the time of Hitler, Mussolini, and the Mafia. I think back at what they said about specifically Hitler and Mussolini and how it all started with Mussolini telling Italy that he was going to restore it to the garden of paradise that it was and make it great again. People were feeling so oppressed, my father had said, and they were wonderful words and they believed it and went along, not realizing what they were stepping into. And to further it, the propaganda of the day, no, they didn’t have social media, but whatever means they used, they put out messages that were singing from the same song sheet. People digested it, believed it. And I see what is going on now and I see how messages of confusion, messages of, honestly, “me first” and messages of hate that cast out on everything. That’s I think is the challenge, right?

You can find a kernel of truth or of falseness in a lot. I have said that there’s, you know, Dr. Phil, one of my guilty pleasures at times has said, “No matter how flat you make a pancake, it still has two sides”. Yeah, that’s true. My phrase is there’s always three sides to a story. There’s yours, there’s mine. And then there’s the one that actually happened, right? Because we all bring baggage to whatever is going on. We all see things from a different lens that’s understandable. But what is happening now is the actual use of communication means to really have nothing be of value or nothing be right or good — and that is true madness.

I do try to think to myself of the beauty that does exist regardless of what is going on. I do think that even now during this time when people have seriously seemed to have lost any kind of – as my shrink says — any kind of moral compass or sense of goodness, despite all that I do know there are good people. We’re just the silent majority. And the more that we stand back and just let crazy loose, so to speak, the more we’re spiraling downward.

There is a saying, I do not remember who said it: “For evil to exist, good men need do nothing”. I feel as if we are somehow at this point. I feel as if the ones who perhaps have come up with whatever beliefs they have, like this person on the Facebook page, I feel as if those voices just are louder and louder and louder and people are jumping on the madness bandwagon and really doing some damage on so many different levels. And when it comes to speaking about magic, when it comes to finding the balance, when it comes to being the best that a human can be, we seem to be going in the opposite direction, and I don’t have any answers.

This episode of this podcast is really one almost helping me to think through the madness of our times and the madness, as I said, that is residing in me in response to the madness that has come to me. It’s an episode of really confusion, chaos and maybe maybe one that has others scratching their own heads and thinking through what we each bring to the table, both good and maybe not so good and how we might in the second half of this month that’s all about mental health awareness and the care and keeping of our own minds as well as the care and keeping of those around us of this world. Not in a “me first” kind of way, “screw you”, but in a, “I am going to self care but not to the level where I’m going to neglect or harm you in doing so.”

I hope with the next few weeks in this mental health month and beyond, obviously that really, you know, as I said in my personal posts, whether or not you’re religious, whether or not you believe in Jesus, when I think of that phrase, you know, What Would Jesus Do? that a lot of Christians kind of spout, and then they’ll turn around and threaten someone or just not behave according to that WWJD kind of concept. I just think to myself, when Jesus Christ walked this earth from every story that you read, He modeled the behavior. He definitely, in my opinion, did not do “what was best for Him”. I can’t imagine anybody assuming that willingly going to a cross and being crucified is something that anybody would, you know, rejoice in doing. He even prayed to have that be taken away from Him. So He wasn’t doing it because it was for Him. He was doing it because of the bigger picture, what it meant. And I feel as if we have completely lost any sense of our brothers, our sisters, the people who are outside of ourselves.

How can we get back to being true to ourselves, to being good to ourselves, but with the lens of how it impacts the greater good? This notion of “I’m just going to do what’s good for me. And by doing that, the rest of the world will benefit from it”: That’ss not the whole story, right? It’s just not, it’s not the whole story.

Yes. Do what you’re called to do. Yes. Listen to that, that spark inside of you, your purpose, yes, care for yourself, totally get it, but don’t lose sight of whatever it is you say or do, whatever it is you are, don’t lose sight of the impact that has on the rest of the world. You, we all are, just a drop in the water and that ripple effect, if you don’t realize how you connect to others, how you impact the rest of the world and you’re just putting things out there without any consideration other than yourself. That’s madness. That is madness.

One of those posters, I’m sure you’ve all seen, like the Successories, and they’re just like kind of sayings, very uplifting, inspirational. There’s another company called despair.com that always makes me laugh. And despair.com has one kind of poster. It’s of an avalanche, you know, so it’s a big snow scene avalanche coming down and it says something like, “No single snowflake thinks it’s responsible for the avalanche,” and when you really think about it, okay, that’s kind of how we’re living now. Everybody’s sorta like, well, no, it’s because of him or her or it, so I’m going to do what’s right for me. No, I’m going to get mine. I’m going to, me, me, me. This concept, it’s just not sustainable. We need to take our cues from this very earth and all of the nature and how it responds. One to the other. I remember during the trip in Africa, we were in one of the countries that we had toured, we went and toured five of them. And I want to say it was perhaps the Serengeti, but, when we were on tour, the guide had kind of pointed out to us how all of the animals, even though they’re different species, each one aided the other when danger was around. I don’t know the specifics on which animals, but, certain animals have better hearing. So the minute that they hear something they will take off, but they will let out a call to alert other species that danger is near or there was another, use a bird that kind of flies overhead and sort of, when it calls out that means danger’s around and everybody’s on alert. It’s as if, as much as we are supposed to be, you know, top bananas, the highest level of species. It seems like the rest of the world, its nature “other than humans” actually work hand-in-hand and consider one another much more so than we who are supposed to know better. It’s daunting.

And so I have rambled on now for a good 30 minutes during this Mental Health Awareness Month, background noise and even truck coming up our Hill. I am watching one of my little cats sleep They’re just adorable. We have a new family of little squirrels that were just born outside and there are wreaking havoc in our flower beds. I also shared this, I have a bird that maybe, I don’t know, several months ago, if not a year ago, broke his foot where it was just dangling and he couldn’t balance on anything. It was a struggle for him to eat, to drink, and he flew around and I really thought that he was kind of doomed and worried about him and put out some bird feed on the ground hoping that would help him. Well, we are pretty much, yeah, almost a year I’d say out and he’s still around and he has learned how to balance, Even though he still drags that foot, he is thriving.

So all I can think is that these are signs for me to know that there is magic despite all of the madness. And as a friend says, this too shall pass, like a kidney stone, maybe, but it will. So anyway, thanks for listening, and I welcome your comments on how you’re feeling during this time. Hop on over to the Facebook page if you’re interested in those emotions. Each day for the month of May.

And I do hope that we all practice a little more of the What Would Jesus Do? regardless of religion. Especially during Mental Health Awareness Month: Put on your oxygen mask first, yes, but not to the detriment of others. Be well.