It is incredible how everyone is ready to change the world, but people cannot run faster when transforming themselves. Growth never seems to go from comfort or complacency. Change does not usually start with a large group but with one person. Then that person builds a group of like-minded people to help raise awareness. Mental health is an excellent example of this. Typically mental health is addressed after something terrible has happened. That said, it should not take this many overdoses, shootings, and suicides to get the world’s attention, yet here we are. The scariest part is that the world may be becoming numb to it all. These deaths happen so frequently that part of me wonders if the world is getting conditioned to it. According to the Oxford, Dictionary, conditioning is “the process of training or accustoming a person or animal to behave in a certain way or to accept certain circumstances.” We should not only be terrified by that but also disgusted.

This stigma of mental health will not be broken by only doing things before a horrible occurrence. We must be proactive. Please don’t act like ignoring or arguing about this will do any good. The problem will continue without a result. Some things are not subjective, like a person’s right to live a happy life.

There is too much going on in the world. It becomes overwhelming, and the cries for help fade into the background. This overwhelming feeling is what helps create silos. What will it take to break the silos that keep us apart? We must stop digging our holes and begin to dig tunnels to connect to one big whole to fill together. It is about paying attention to someone other than yourself. Can you imagine if we really did put others before ourselves?

Hopefully, people would see others and begin to hear the cries for help. Then these cries could be answered. It never ceases to amaze me how selfish our world is. Yes, it has improved in the past, but we have a long way to go. There is much work to be done. However, we can never get to that work if we are all broken. There must be a time of healing when people realize that forgiveness & connection have always been the answer. We were never meant to war, fight, and kill one another, but that is when the love of power is greater than the power of love. Power is a tricky thing that should be earned, not freely given. You are not the power or the law. You just help guide it. If power were a wand, you would be the wizard. However, the wand contains all the magic, not you. Be fair, and let’s get to the actual work and stop mincing words. 

If this article scares or upsets you, I am sorry, but I, too, am scared and upset at our world for not stepping up and doing more. There never seem to be enough resources or people to help because too many causes are trying to do the same thing. It is not a political debate; someone ending their own or someone else’s life is never okay. Period. When will we decide to come together and work for the common good? We can do better. We must do better.