My brain will eventually empty all my thoughts into pieces of paper. In the meantime, I will use this space to express my thoughts.
Today I want to discuss a delicate subject that affects us directly, indirectly, and in all possible directions. It is the emotional state in humans that is natural. However, we need to talk about it more. It's far from what we should discuss because it was a synonym for weakness for many generations. I have been affected by it for years. It has affected my family; I know many people who have been and will be involved.
Hello, Welcome to my blog, "Kitchen and Letters."
I started writing a blog to open up about topics I have been curious to write about for a long time. Therefore I started writing about food. Food and poetry were the first topics I was interested in from a young age. Later came research, and with that, it opened a lot of possibilities. Even when it has taken me a long time, or what seemed a long time to return, I am here now with no plans to let it go.
Today I will start writing with an intention; I might continue writing like this; I want to give more to it than to "simply" share my thoughts and conclusions. I want to provide a reason for "why?"
My intention for this blog entry is: to have the strength and freedom to say ME TOO!
All organs in our body are vital, some more than others, but they all have an essential function to keep us alive. To keep us moving and to keep us here. I am intrigued especially by two, and they are two that maybe most people are fascinated by the heart and the mind. From these two, the heart, I understand its function and importance, but the mind, Oh my god, the mind, is the mind. The queen and king of who we are. It is the superior power. I recently thought about it this way. I have seen its power throughout my life. The mind can dictate and change how we see, feel, and communicate what we perceive in the world with the rest of our bodies. We see, feel, understand, and can change our reality thanks to the brain. We need to spend more time digging into our brains to understand them. We feed it whatever we feel, and then we complain about it.
This is a perfect time to add a disclaimer: I do intend to share my thoughts with others. Suppose you are new here, welcome. If you read my blogs, often you will know that I share all positively and intend to view life more clearly. I do not have any sort of training as a psychologist. I am a Sociologist, and in this topic, I have personal experience and have read only a hand full of books. If you suffer from mental health imbalance, DO REACH OUT to professional help.
Mental health always gets a negative connotation. For the first time, I see it as an overall idea of health. Mental health, think about the overall health of our minds. How come when we think of body health, it is positive, and when we think of the mind is negative? When both are so powerful.
When the pandemic started, my first thought was: forget my body; I know how my body is and how my body will react to most of the outside threats. I understand more my physical body. I was terrified about how my mind would be affected by the nonsense of staying away from people. I kept telling myself; WE ARE SOCIAL beings! We are people and need society for good or bad, but we are social beings. At that time, I was going through one of the most challenging times of my life. I was depressed, genuinely depressed, and I had been for a while. Years before the pandemic, I moved to the Dominican Republic, and the reasons and the story of D.R. are not the main focus today.
Nonetheless, the story is suitable for a whole book! One of the triggers was my depression, the depression that I was trying to disguise with other things such as: working super hard, keeping myself busy, you name it, and you know it. It suddenly struck me on my face. It hit me so hard that I reached out. I was dating a well-known neurosurgeon. I thought if there is a perfect time to talk about this is now, I'm in the ideal place to reach out for help. He knows about a troubled mind, about connection. I could not be more wrong. Yes, he did know about a troubled mind, so troubled that his wife was diagnosed with onset Alzheimer's. That is why he could date. She was not really here. Her Alzheimer's was very advanced. I remember it was yesterday when I told him I was depressed. He did not even look at me. He did not say anything.
One of the many problems we have with an imbalance in mental health is that, in my personal experience, it triggers vicious decisions based on a mental state that is not right. Those decisions take us further into the darkness that we are already experiencing. The desisions could be as simple as staying home or as tormented as allowing someone to continue to hurt us. We lose control of our responsibility, who we are intended to be, and what we want to achieve. We continue to move further away from who we are. We try to find ourselves by testing, stretching, and looking at what we have lost.
The experience in D.R. moved deep feelings and curiosity within me. I wanted to know more about it for the first time. How can an imbalance like that exist? What triggers it? If the mind is so powerful and can control our minds with a lot of work, what can we do about it, and what are we making decisions?
After D.R., I came back to Mexico. Here we had a lot of family situations that we were dealing with with the depression that I was trying to control from the D.R. experience. These family situations did not help at all. Therefore when the pandemic started, I was in a delicate state of mind. You can see now why I was so terrified to be in lockdown! And I could see the bigger picture of being isolated. Isolation does not do good to anybody. Voluntary isolation is one of many signs of depression and imbalanced mental health.
We all deal with our mental health every day. We are constantly in survival mode. We need to feed and provide shelter for ourselves. We have to deal with daily life experiences and take responsibility for them. But how can we deal with them with an imbalanced mind? We know there is not something that will go away. Part of being human, part of being alive, is to learn to deal and work with this sort of situation, but if society sees depression as a wrong thing and we are unable to talk about it freely, if we are pointed out for talking about it, for trying to understand how our mind works. To take one step back, to sit still for a while.
We know that depression is the most threaded feeling and is as silent and diverse in symptoms as the weather. Despite this, we have to live with this.
Nowadays, we have so many distractors. So many places where we can hide. As much as I love technology, phones are there in our way to of put a blind eye and hide from our issues. ,
How do I deal with it? I accept it. I embrace it. I talk about it. I am not ashamed of it. I understand that they will be more challenging days, some easier. I see how I feel when I am good. I know they will pass. I read about it, and I ask for help. I eat better. I watch t.v I walk my dogs. I am writing about it.
How do I help others? By listening to listen, to understand. Sometimes we only need that; some others, we need professional help.
Let's help normalize mental health by discussing it, changing its connotation, and embracing it.
There is a lot more to write about mental health. Today I felt the need to talk about it, to get it out. For anybody and everybody. To be free to answer, "Is ok, me too."
In my opinion, we have not even started to grasp the consequences of the mental health of lockdown during the pandemic.
Writing to you today has been a powerful exercise for me. Writing has always been the tool that I use to heal, let go, understand, and have a truthful and intimate conversation with myself, but today, it has helped me to believe that with daily acts of kindness, we can change how we understand mental health.
In good mental health,
Iliana