Even though writing is something I've come to adore and even began to make a career out of, it feels very alien for me to sit here writing this. I mostly write about holistic health and yoga, spreading little nuggets of knowledge & insight without implicating myself personally.
Something I have come to really appreciate over the past two years is privacy.
Despite being an open person, I struggle with the fact that our modern world doesn't allow much room for privacy. Social media has given me a great deal of opportunities and for that I am grateful, but the incentive to share each detail of our lives has stolen from us our sacred moments - creating a multidimensional complex that's often difficult to navigate.
I have hesitated sharing my words for so long because I don't want 'writing a blog' to equate to me being a 'blogger' in the 21st century sense of the word.
It is as though in order to succeed today, you have to be somebody; achieved through an acquisition of followers, fans, 'likes' and public attention. So many lives have become a cycle of seeking online appraisal from friends, acquaintances and strangers - assuring through a quick hit of dopamine that they are in fact good enough, pretty enough, curvy enough, skinny enough, likeable enough, loveable enough, enough, enough, enough.
So why then, given the social complex, did I begin writing this post?
Because there's something within me that is deeply yearning to express myself - an inescapable desire that holds no attachment to an end goal or result; the call of creativity.
As somebody with an artistic viewpoint who has experienced both downward spirals and uphill battles of internal and external chaos, I feel as though my journey of self exploration has provided me with, perhaps, an important contribution and valuable insight to share. I realise now that, up until the age of about 23, I had subconsciously played my life out from a place of great fear. Closed off from who I really was, silent anxieties within my head drowned deeply beneath distractions of external validation, public praise and frantic stimuli.
To me, these are the symptoms of a sick society - searching for light, longing for truth.
So should I allow this complex continue to hold me back from what I truly seek to say or should I allow my perspective become the fuel for what might create, perhaps, even a subtle spark of change within one persons mind, thought pattern or belief?
By encouraging moments of self reflection, we increase our awareness of these fear-driven behaviours which equally decreases our 'need' to fulfil them.
By allowing ourselves to become vulnerable, we gain humility; bringing with it a gift that teaches us to be kinder not only to ourselves but also to the people around us, as we more easily recognise the motives that encourage these behaviours without bearing so much judgement.
October 10th is Mental Health Awareness Day - a subject of an odd kind of stigma, when in reality the health of our mentality is what dictates the direction of our entire society. By inspecting our values, by honouring ourselves and by shedding our engrained fears that have plagued the Irish society in particular for decades, we can begin to transform not only ourselves, but our environment and the world around us.
This blog-post is my own way to release the fears which have halted me from sharing my words that merely scratch the surface on my viewpoint. Something I have learned, however, is that by expressing more of our truest nature, we have the ability to open a dialogue - an exploration of truth, creating more safe spaces to connect in somewhat of a meaningful way.
This is one of those spaces.
Mental health isn't separate from you, it is an integral part of the human condition that gets nurtured by sharing our vulnerabilities and supporting each other. If any one of us have the power to uplift or improve the mentality of another human being but choose not to, then we would be doing the world, and ourselves, a dis-service.
In a society where it means everything to be seen, I'd rather aspire to be heard.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to subscribe to my newsletter if you'd like,
Martha x