Tuesday, January 23, 2018

The Black Elephant in The Room

Yesterday I wrote about the days I am lucky enough to wake with a warm sunny halo around my head...mmmm. 

But that was some days. Most days? Most days I wake up with a feeling of dread washing over me, with the thought of ‘what if today sucks’ resounding in my head? 

I’m not a pessimist at all, I just struggle with this thing called anxiety that often makes me operate in fear rather than love.

As a teenager I was very comfortable sharing the darker parts of me. I didn't see it as something to be ashamed by, it just was. I could say I was feeling depressed by wearing black nail polish before it was trendy, or write about it in an emo poem for all of Facebook or Myspace to see. 

As an adult, I no longer want to be seen that way. I want to present a highly functioning, put together persona, who is cheerful and fun to be around. No one wants to hang out with Debbie Downer. When I’m feeling blah I tend to keep that under wraps. Everything is or will be okay, is the kind of message I want to project.

But don’t we also get to acknowledge the pain? Doesn’t not talking about it give it more power than it deserves? In trying too hard not let the negative emotions define us, don’t they define us even more? The black elephant in the room no one wants to talk about only grows in our silence. 

What if it’s just casual instead of a huge deal? Depression, anxiety, mental illness, these are things we all deal with on some level. We all have features of those demons in us in some way or another. Some are more willing to acknowledge it than others. Some try to repress parts of them they don't feel are acceptable. Some are less respectful of their negative emotions than their positive. 

But we all deal with darkness, and the more we talk about it the less alone the rest of us feel.

So here’s to those days. The dark, gloomy ones. To the gray skies and rain dripping down our windows. Here’s to accepting the darkness, instead of being ashamed by it. Here’s to learning how to deal with the black elephant in a way that respects it but doesn’t feed its power. 

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