I grew up a Superman fan. I am “grown” up now and still am a Superman fan. I was never really into the comic books, but when Christopher Reeve donned the red and blue with the “S” on the chest, I was hooked. I had a cape I would wear and run around the house like I was flying. Superman had become my favorite superhero of them all! I’ve always been mesmerized with flying ever since. Outrunning a train would be pretty cool as would leaping over a tall building. Super strength isn’t too shabby of a power as well. Heat ray and x-ray vision (I still have no idea how he controls his eyes to do one or the other😉) all completed the super hero package of powers for me. I wanted all of them. I would be happy with any one of them really (please be flying…please be flying…please be flying)! As long as he had Earth’s sun fueling him, he would never lose his powers. Well, unless some kryptonite so happened to come around and was near him, all was well in the world of Superman.
So many of us go about our mild-mannered day. We get up in the morning, eat breakfast, brush our teeth and take a shower. We get ready for work and we go to work. My job is all about driving so I drive to wherever my job takes me on that given day. Some of you report somewhere and have a desk and a spot in which to do your work. Those of you who are teachers and work within any form of the medical community, you are truly heroes already.
We go home at the end of the day and we talk to our families about how our days were and we eat dinner. Maybe catch a TV show at night and then we get ready for bed and prepare to do the mild-mannered life thing all over again the next day. We live within our Clark Kent life. We live in this life, sometimes, not knowing what we possess inside of ourselves. You can’t have Clark Kent without Superman and vise-versa.
Ok, dude, we get you like Superman and we think you still have that cape and you still fly around your house with it on, but what are you getting at here. Superman is cool and all, but let’s get on with it!😁
You and I possess our own super powers. BOOM…there it is. No we can’t fly. No we can’t outrun a train, but we possess our own super powers. We walk around through part of our life not knowing how to un-lock it. We really have no idea we have something in us to un-lock. But we do have these powers within us.
Depression and anxiety and everything else related to these two mental illnesses can begin to basically ruin your life. Your thoughts and your actions to yourself bring you down into this dark hole. We don’t always know, at first, how to get out of it. Unfortunately, not everyone figures it out and this is why I do what I do here with this blog. I do not want you to have to go through what I did, or even go through something worse than I did. I know I don’t want to relive my story and I’m sure you have your own story you may not want to relive.
We can go along, living our lives as we always have. My way of living my life was not dealing with what was troubling me. My way of dealing with it was ignoring or not allowing myself to recognize I have been dealing with depression and anxiety for longer than I even know.
I haven’t always had the tools to recognize these two things early on in my life. As I think back, I know I’ve been dealing with my mental illness for a lot of years. I write a lot about the last couple of years, specifically, as they were the absolute worst years, but I now can recognize all of this has been around much longer.
Even when I started feeling really bad and defeated. Even after I was losing hope and had lost all sight of my life’s direction, I still chose to do everything as I always have which was pretty much ignoring the problem in the first place. It will go away. It always will go away. The problem was it wasn’t going away anymore.
I was being consumed by my thoughts. My thoughts of the outside world and the thoughts about myself. I was not a nice person to myself near the end. I tore myself down. I tore myself apart. I could be doing anything, even something I’ve done a million times before without issue, and I would tear myself down. I would tell myself I wasn’t good enough. I convinced myself I couldn’t enjoy life again. I convinced myself I had lost all hope. I convinced myself that maybe this life, and the people in it, would be better off with me not being around.
So the darkness crept in and surrounded me. I felt like I was suffocating. My thoughts went more and more towards potentially ending all the torment and the guilt and the hopelessness. The fact I could no longer see myself for who I was or who I could be was when I thought about ending my life.
People are like, “why would anyone ever get to that point of killing themselves? Don’t they know their life is precious?” All of that stuff. I may have been one of those people, at one time, thinking like that. Until I was there. Oh my God, until I was there. And “there” is somewhere I will never forget and somewhere I never want to be ever again.
I have no idea what Hell is really like. Of course I don’t know. None of us really truly do know as we haven’t experienced it and come back from it. Do you know how someone gets “to that point” of doing something drastic? I’ll tell you…it’s the point you reach when you have been living in your own personal Hell. The place you get to after you have been to the lowest point of your life and there is no return. The torment and the torture you put yourself and your mind through. The torment and the torture that your mind puts you through. Yes, I believe in the chemical imbalance of it all and your mind works both the ways I’ve stated.
After a while, a human being can only take so much. I do not care what you think about the situation when someone reaches this point of their life in their mind where they think about ending their life. I do care, of course I do, but this level of darkness is almost impossible for people to really fathom. This moment is the most real and worst moment of your life. It has to be what Hell feels like, because I can’t think of anything worse than how I felt at that moment when I came to that fork in the road. I felt I was out of choices…I really did. If this is how life is going to treat me, then I don’t want to do it anymore. I HAVE TO ESCAPE…NOW!
Either I end this now or I don’t. This was the fork in the road. You either went left or you went right. These are your only choices. Or at least this is how it feels.
Thankfully we have a fork in the road, as in thankfully we do still have a choice, when we feel like we have reached the end of what we can take. This road does not turn towards just one direction.
I decided I was going to take a chance, but this chance was going to be different. I was going to flip my life on top of its head and tackle this Hell I was living in differently and in a different way.
My super power came out at that moment. All you have to do to exercise this power in you, is utter the phrase, “I need help!” Tell someone you need help. Go to the ER and ask for help. Call 911 and ask for help. Please ask for help.
Trust me, now that I am on the other side, you want to exercise the ability to unlock your super powers. Ask for help.
Asking for help was the hardest thing I have ever done. It was the best thing I could have ever done. I am still here because I asked for help. I fully believe this. Yes, the stigma had a hold on me. I thought people would think I was weak or not trying hard enough. I thought I would lose friends and maybe even family. I thought people would be able to tell I was “different” or something and want to avoid me.
I still found the courage to ask for help and the power didn’t just drip out, it came pouring out of me. I had no idea what was in store for me, but I was no longer scared of what I was capable of doing to myself. God wrapped his arms around me and said everything would be OK. Something was different and I could feel the power.
Unleash the power of asking for help. Let it wash over you. It will help you to embrace the big changes you are about to make in your life.
This power includes and is not limited to: courage, strength, bravery, happiness, sadness (but I could now tell the difference between the two and I could tell the difference between other emotions as well). You gain an open and clearer mind. With this open mind you gain newer and better techniques to begin to help yourself for right now and also for beyond. You regain a motivation you thought would never be available again. Oh my God, I felt hope! It was weird…it was foreign…my mind wanted to still tell me it was a lie…but I felt hope, guys! You can too!
There is more aspects involved with this power, I listed a few examples, but the things I just listed will begin to carry you above all the junk you are trying to leave behind. Is it all easy at first? No, it is not. Your mind will try and convince you none of this will work and you might as well go back to the old way of doing things. You have to learn to harness and control this new-life power. We aren’t masters at it at the get go, but we can learn to harness and control it and use all of these things I listed to make a much better and happier life for yourself.
We all possess this power. We don’t recognize it until we unleash it though. Unfortunately, it’s just how it works. Part of all of us knocking over the stigma that surrounds mental health is getting people to realize the power they have within, before it gets to such a bad point. You don’t have to be at the end of your rope to ask for help. You can ask for help at any time and you will gain the ability to wield this power.
It really is OK to not be OK. It really is OK to need help. It really is OK to ask for help. You are not alone in this battle you are fighting against yourself and you are worth all of the effort you put into strengthening yourself and your mental health.
Some of us, who have wielded this power before, have to be reminded from time to time we still have it. Our minds love to play games with us and hide the truth about what we can be and what we should be. For those of you who have asked for help before and have wielded the power before, it is also OK to need to ask for help again. It is OK to need to be reminded that you have the power to rise above all of this stuff that is attacking you.
It is OK to not be OK. Please ask for help. You will be surprised where the help can come from after you ask about it. I thought people would pull away from me, but thankfully, at least for my experience, it simply wasn’t true and I have been surrounded with more love than I ever thought was possible.
The power is there. You do possess it. You can unleash it. You can get yourself to where you want to be. You can be the person you want to be. Please ask for help!
You got this! I got this! We got this! Let’s keep walking this journey together.
Have a great day!
Jason
Please visit: Jason Kehl’s Basement Of Jams: Rocking Mental Health
A website I created to further my mission to spread mental health awareness. This blog and also a podcast I do, live there, as do some other ideas. Please check it out!
Rocking Mental Health: The Blog- Let's Walk Together 