Are you someone who worked on much talked-mental-health, only to reach nowhere? Are you someone who is struggling to find harmony in life? Are you caught up with the Western approach to mental health? Are you struggling with mental health and beating yourself up for not reaching much-needed peace? If you also thought you are the problem behind it. Maybe not!
I’m here to question some aspects of it given by our mental health gurus.
The talk about mental health also made me work on mine and initially, it did help. When I started working on it, I was enthusiastic, I did yoga, meditation, and journaling, brought colouring books and candles, read affirmations and placed boundaries; Only to find that it isn’t sustaining the test of time. As much as these techniques are wonderful and they work, there are some long-term issues with them. I feel like I need a certain lifestyle and money for it to sustain and here is why?
- Financial crunch
I’m a middle-class Indian female, currently living with my parents. I share my room with my siblings. Now, I wanna wake up early and to make that process easier I wanna keep the window open, so when it sunrises, I naturally wake up. I wake up as the lights get through the window but I have to close it immediately so that my sister’s sleep doesn’t get affected. I can’t keep the lights on for the same reason and I can’t do yoga in the same room because I need the goddamn light.
There are just many incidents like this which make me think that I need my own house to keep my mental health in check. And not just any house, a good one, with a great balcony and garden. I wanna eat home-cooked healthy food but don’t always have time and space to cook, so a full-time maid or a chief is needed. Which is very financially constraining for an average-earning person. All this is big talk for many.
- Not everyone lives in an urban area
I belong to a town which doesn’t have cafes, parks, libraries or any female-friendly dining place or any place to socialise for that matter. How do you expect my mental health to work efficiently? Any town in India has very less resources. For the available ones, we have to take our brother or any family member with us because they aren’t female-friendly. There are not many recreational activities so unwinding becomes very difficult.
This isn’t just my story, my friend who got posted as a govt banker in a small town of Punjab, sings the same song. We can’t even find a Psychotherapist and a good gym and yoga classes. Females are living in social isolation in rural areas.
So understandably I’m wondering do we have to shift to any urban place to have good mental health?
- Toxic work culture
Just for the sake of saying, let’s imagine I earn a shit load of money and live in an urban area, but how will I buy the time? With our 12 hrs a day working culture, do we even have time to take care of mental health? I have a friend who is working in one of the top MNCs in Banglore and there are days when even after coming home, she stays up till 1–2 in the morning to work. When she doesn’t even have time to eat one meal in peace, how can she give time and space to any thoughts? We are living on a weekend basis and have 52 days in a year to work on everything else, mental health, physical health, our hobbies, reading writing and the list is not ending. Indians are among the most overworked workers across the world and earn the lowest minimum statutory wage in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Bangladesh, according to a report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). If we aren’t able to work minimum hours on a maximum pay scale then how we’ll get the space for our beloved mental health?
- Trips and retreats
Wellness retreats are another way to harmony. Which requires, time, money and no responsibility. Especially for a parent, leaving their children to attend a retreat is a far cry. I have been planning to go to Vipassana for quite some time now. But committing to not just leaving physically but also to be not available on the phone for 10 days is a luxury that isn’t available to me. Even making a plan for a trip with friends or alone does come with difficulty and extensive planning. One of my friends wanted to attend an ayurvedic retreat for a month because of some health issues, which took her not just money, but tweaking in their system to allow them to work from the retreat. The retreat was good but in the end, it became an uncontrollable mess for her and she found herself wondering if this helped her or gave her more stress. Isn’t that the system designed for us to fail?
And this was just a story of someone in her late 20s, there are many age groups with their own problems.
Though working on aspects of our mental health is important and t is also important to understand the various dimensions of it. Understanding that we live in a certain cultural and social environment that will eventually impact us and changing that environment isn’t one person’s job. Understanding that it takes a certain environment and certain resources and the combination of all of this will make for good health. Understanding that it isn’t just us and our laziness that is becoming a barrier to good health but it is also the system that is failing us. It is not that you have less willpower to control the scrolling and being watching but the best brains in the world work with vast resources to make it addictive. It is an already defeated battle.
Understanding that not everyone has the means to make it work and it’s okay! Healed isn’t a term. Unfortunately, it will always be a work in progress. It will always be about using the cards that are given to us and playing our best game with them.
So the next time you beat yourself up, take a pause and realise, Is this you or the uncontrollable factors? Then take a deep breath and dance a little in the rain.
