A personal reflection from the Editor of A Lust for Life.
It was around this time two years ago that I first met with Bressie in a café in Dublin to see if we could work together on a vision we held with others to do everything in our power to pierce through decades of soul stifling stigma around the mental health conversation in our country. A stigma so deeply embedded in our collective psyche that it was silently secretly watering down the life force of too many people in Ireland. One is too many.
Two years on, as I sit here at my desk reflecting on our journey, there are these feelings welling up inside. As Editor of A Lust for Life I am not usually the one putting pen to paper, I’m the one reading, reviewing, editing, curating and having the privilege to publish so many of you special humans. But today I felt that I must reach out and say thank you, in particular I to want thank the people who have shared their personal stories on A Lust for Life. I hope you know how special you are.
These are often deeply private raw stories of pain, suffering. They are also stories of bravery and an underlying desire to live no matter what, to hope, to overcome the challenges that seemed set in each of the writer’s destinies. I have witnessed courage and a beauty that runs so deep in people’s guts that my heartbeat has sent hot thumping ripples through my body when reading these stories.
The thing is though that each story, each wave of truth, each fearless sharing of a life difficulty melts the stigma. It does. Each time someone writes the truth, and people in turn read these stories (10,000’s of you have read and shared these personal stories, thank you too), brick by brick we rip away the concrete wall. Telling the truth melts away the shame and the pain. No longer colluding with a rotten belief system that was created to keep people silent and under control melts away the shame and the pain. Standing up and saying ‘no more’, liberates us from the cages in our minds.
The more we stand up and tell the truth, the more we heal. This requires courage and action. This is not a soft gentle nicey-nice concept, don’t be fooled. There are many manipulative forces at play in our world suckling off our fear, making money from our fear, perpetuating it so that we lose our sense of individual power and agency, so that we are afraid to speak our truth. But we have a role to play here, in not allowing our power to be taken. When we stand up and name the truth, name these forces in whatever aspect of society they lie in and demand justice, we create medicine for each other and these forces seep away to nothingness, dis-membered, as we re-member who we are, and the power in us.
We are slowly holding up a mirror, it may be old and cracked but we are gazing in the glass, and finding that it is often the cracks that allow the light to get in as Leonard Cohen so beautifully put it. We are looking at ourselves as a people. And so we ask, why are so many of us so sad right now? Why are so many of our people taking their own lives? It’s our greatest horror and our greatest work to now move swiftly with power to do what needs to be done so that so many of us no longer feel so sad.
Something else that has struck me as a thread weaving its way through the narrative of each of the personal stories is the felt loneliness of these experiences. Reading through all of these stories I’m seeing that often people are understandably internalising their struggles.
It is me. There is something wrong with me. I am sick. I am the problem.
Though illness is very real, and I’m not dismissing that by any means, it feels like it is not the full story. The more I read, the more I edit, the thousands of words are seeping into me, distilling, and I’m bearing witness to something that runs deeper. To everyone suffering, hear me when I say it is not just you, remember that you are a part of the whole and together we function as a system. It is also our society, our culture that is deeply sick, it is how we operate as a whole system that is sick. The collective growing and gnawing anxiety, stress and depression is reflecting the system’s disharmony, waking the world up to it.
In some ways I see people who are sensitive to this wider societal disharmony, those who are suffering, lonely and in pain as the real truth bearers and delicate antennae of what is really happening in our system.
So many people worldwide are now mirroring this reality of societal sickness. The fact that the World Health Organisation has named depression as the leading cause of disability worldwide, and is a major contributor to the overall global burden of disease, our system is screaming at us to wake up and do something. Be it to get out and make a change in your own community, or actively demand our government fund proper 24/7 community mental health care services instead of bailing the banks out, or keep chipping away at all the dark secrets powerful institutions want to keep all to themselves, or make the phone call you know you need to make today, or just take the risk and follow your heart, or maybe it’s to stop buying so much shit advertisers are ramming down our necks everywhere we look, telling us we are not enough. Stuff we don’t need which is killing our earth and ourselves in the process.
Our planet is on track to lose two-thirds of its wild animals by 2020, a major report from the Living Planet Index warned. Our oceans are becoming acidic. Our minds are becoming acidic too. Can you see the connection? There is a quickening happening now, a rising shared sadness illustrating to us the sickening of our minds and how we collectively act and live together on this planet. Parallel to this there is also an explosion of interest in meditation, mindfulness, compassion, emotional intelligence, an awakening, which is helping us carve our way through this sickness. It’s our choice as to how this story unfolds.
I’m no expert in anything, I certainly don’t have answers, but one thing I can definitively say from reading thousands of all of your words is that it is not just you. It is us, and we are also the answer.
Nourishing our communities, speaking the truth, standing strong in unity against forces that are abusing positions of power in any shape or form, forces that do not care about our hearts, minds nor the earth and together putting the wellbeing of our people and planet as our no. 1 collective human responsibility could be the most radical loving action we could take to disrupt these old scripts and create a new story.
What can we do? What do you feel called to do? Where is your heart, your gut pulling you? Please listen and act on this. The truth in you will let you know what’s for you and what you can do to create greater harmony within and around. So many of you are already doing all that you can. So many are doing their best in their own circumstances and that is enough. Sometimes just breathing is enough. There are phenomenal people, movements and organisations in this country working their asses off day in and day out, I tip my hat to all of you.
The power of people when we come together and speak the truth is limitless. You are powerful. We are powerful. I hope we come to fully know that and act accordingly, with love.
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