"When I was young, I always told myself, “I can’t wait to be older! I can do whatever, say whatever, be WHOEVER!” and blah, blah, blah, so on and so forth, yet I’m now older and I’ve come to realize the reality of it. It’s hard. As children, we always go for the easy path of saying to ourselves, “everything gets easier when you’re older” as if that changes how we view life later on down the line. And for those of us who haven’t quite gotten control of what it means to be genuinely “happy” or experience a sense of “contentment” is what makes us feel empty as we become older.
These moments of emptiness can stem from almost anything, whether it be your feelings for someone not being reciprocated or even being misunderstood by those around you because you just don’t feel like you’re being heard, anything can sway your emotions but the problem that we face as “adults” is facing them head on. No one will ever truly has the answers to our own problems, nor do we have the answers ourselves but being able to acknowledge those feelings and emotions give us the power to truly be an adult. Just because you’re out in the world making it financially and living a stable lifestyle doesn’t mean that you’re mature, it means that you’re “adulting”, but being able to see where the error lies in your own state of mind and being? I think of that as a true sense of maturity. No one realizes how scary it is to cross the threshold between being a teenager and being an adult. It’s mortifying, but it’s reality and that’s what we all face in this day and age: the reality of life being hard and struggling to find yourself in the world through adulting while keeping your sanity in check. But there’s a beauty to that long and troublesome journey. There’s a realization of self and an awareness that no one can give you. And although the journey is tough, it builds character that is unparallel to those around you.
Mental health is important to society, yet in the African-American community, we graze the idea of mental health ever being taken seriously. Our health matter just as much as our state of being does, and those things should be cohesive amongst one another.”