Being human is really fucking hard. Modern “comforts” have caused the body to soften and the mind has suffered. Our ability to cope with hardships and literally just being human is being lost. Life will always be hard for the mind. We need to keep it hard for the body to enable access to the strength to cope. Doing hard things feels good. Lifting heavy things feels good. Having a body supple and strong enough to handle anything you want to do, gives your the mental strength and plasticity to do what you want to do.
The human condition has been medicalized and pathologized because we are no longer learning how to cope with life. As life for human children get easier, they learn less about how to cope with hardships. And when the inevitable hardships arise, trauma is created if they fail in those hard times. Trauma leads to PTSD which leads to increased risk for more trauma. It gets to the point where someone standing wrong at the store or offering to help me with my bag, sends me/all of us/those of us with an unhealthy connection to a dysfunctional body/thus mental health issues, into a total melt down. Think the much maligned “Karen’s”, the videos of the people robbing shit from fast food places, me crying at Starbucks, or screaming at the check out man to get away from me over and over.
We are seeing more and more people overreact to what used to be very normal situations: see me with the gas station I’ve recently been banned from by a very prone to rage old man, and my reactions to him. Covid was the first or biggest trauma a lot of people have suffered and we are now seeing the trauma response on a wide scale. Its highlighting the failure of parenting, education, and the government in children’s lives. Cause now the first generation of people who had both parents working, are old enough to have kids and its the parents that are freaking out as much as the kids. Its the adults in the room screaming for mommy and daddy to fix everything. But they are 30 – 45 and well off, educated and parents themselves. Their kids, the trans youth, are gonna be even more fucked as their parents chose a small tech device over them in what little free time a family does get to share after having already chosen work over the child most of the time.
Having children should be a love affair. Your creation. Why would anyone leave that up to anyone else? How is anyone not painfully aware of the effect that everything in the world has on them and how their awful childhoods (no matter how perfect they seemed) caused untold damage to their present reality and experience of trauma?!
Cause like I said, this is the first time or the first big trigger, of trauma for these people. They didn’t know how badly they were handling life cause they are too busy labeling themselves with mental illnesses and identities, fighting for other peoples “rights”, while ignoring their kids, everyone in bubbles online, getting soft and fat, ever more comfortable with material goods, working long hours to pay for their families stuff to make them feel better for the holes they all feel inside them that their disconnection as a family has caused. This is the first really hard time in their cushy lives and its too late to learn all the skills and resilience one could have as a child. The only option at this point is for therapy. Fixing what is broken, in your past, in you, in your family, and working on rebuilding yourself, reparenting yourself, learning all the tools and techniques to deal with things. Then start doing the hard things every day to make it better. To soothe and heal the trauma. To strengthen the mind and the body. To practice the skills on small things, then bigger. Till the muscles are strong enough to cope with grace and ease, the realties of being human.
Its going to be hard no matter what. Being human. So fix your home before you try to weather a storm. Stop looking outward, and being distracted, and turn inwards and do the hard work. Individuals lifting themselves up (with support where needed) and taking responsibility for how their body, mind, emotions, soul, whatever, experiences the world is the way to cause a revolution. Stop letting them distract you. Stop letting them think you can’t deal with life and need Mommy and Daddy to spoon feed you. Stop letting them praise and celebrate disfunction of the body and mind. Stop letting them convince you anything other than a healthy body is healthy. And the same for food. Stop letting them think we need to rely on anyone but ourselves. Stop letting them convince you, you are a victim or a problem or an oppressor. Bring a strong body and mind to the revolution. A weak man is of no use to anyone. They will bend and break in the wind and tides. They will over react and take everything personally. They will police your words, then your minds. They are coming for our freedoms, but with a strong body they wont take a strong mind.
You will always be free if you have control over your body and mind. It is the ONLY freedom. With a free and self controlled and contained mind/body/awareness you can do anything, go anywhere, be anyone you want or need to be. It wouldn’t matter where I lived now. No law or other person could stop me living how I want. You are free to see option, possibilities, plasticity, and not fear injury over a minor fall. More resilient than ever you can leap further and experience more. Anxiety slips away with the ease of control this resilience brings. Confidence grows and understanding unfolds exponentially. Fearlessly and joyfully you can tread new paths in a dark jungle and touch climb to different heights. Your mind knows where the trauma is stored and doesn’t need to go down those paths any more, giving the mind time and space to expand in new directions, with intention. Choosing to test waters future and further out, until you no longer fear the black below but joyfully and fearlessly swimming over it and coming back calmly, no more fear, panic, anxiety, irrationality.
Its gonna be hard. But its gonna be even harder if you don’t do the work. If you don’t take control. If you decide to no longer be a victim, you can start to work on becoming human, learning to cope, accepting reality. We are all special snowflakes, but there is a universal human experience. And that is good. That is what bonds and binds us. This is why my words resonate with other people (hopefully!). We get it. We’ve seen it, dealt with it, have tools for understanding and coping with, all the elements of being human. We have survived millions of years. Loosing control of ones body and mind is not progress, progressive or helpful to our survival for a million more. We need to stop letting the youth think they are capable of reinventing the wheel, there is an optimal way for most humans to thrive. These skills and fundamental truths of the struggle and realities of being a human animal, as a universal unifier, not as a power structure of oppression, should be the foundational teaching at the core of family and education. And the governments responsibility is to make sure we have access to information and resources to live in a way that makes life easier for the human animal body and mind to run at this optimal level.