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[wisecoffeewasteland-blog1]

Cry for help

Crying is actually pretty natural for humans. It is one of the most primal instincts. It is actually one of the first things people learn to do as infants.

Most crying happens when you need attention. It could be the good kind, an actual emergency, or the attention whoring in general.

As adults, we’re conditioned into hiding our tears, never crying in public, conceal, don’t feel…you know how the song goes. What doesn’t change the fact is the why of it. We cry because we are in situations that overwhelm us. Be it due to happiness, pain or sadness…it is something that becomes too much for our bodies and/or mind to handle, that it needs a physical release.

Back to the topic. Crying for help isn’t the most evolutionarily sound tactic for survival, if we’re looking at everything in a survivalistic point of view. An injured animal is an easy prey, and once it cries for help, it is easy dinner. That’s how it works in the wild. But us humans aren’t wild animals, I hear you say. And yes, it’s true.

The fact of the matter is, we’re way worse than animals. Because we hunt, kill and tear each other to shreds, not for food or survival, but for something far more sinister. Society is supposed to function with the coordinated effort of everyone, where we work to help and support everyone in the system. In a utopian world anyway.

A cry for help is most definitely a sign of weakness, because obviously, you’d ask for help when you can’t handle things by yourself. A cry for help is a taboo, a sign of you not being strong enough to deal with the big bad world around you. A sign of not being….enough

As someone who has had many, many cries for help ignored, I honestly don’t know how to cry anymore. After years and years of being called weak, getting looked down upon, and having my mental health issues trivialized, I realized it wasn’t the cry for help that was the issue. It was me.

People love helping people out when the victims are out there, being vocal about their issues, crying left, right and center, being attractive for their issues. But bring in someone who manages to have a strong-looking public persona and boom, suddenly it’s all fake, it’s all a cry for attention and it’s just a phase (actual things said to me throughout the years, btw).

Then you have the ones who called it quits. Suddenly the people’s collective consciousness becomes aware of mental health issues. Suddenly everyone around you is “really depressed”, because we’re addicted to jumping the bandwagons and boarding the hype trains. It changes the entire narrative, because in its hyping, they end up undervaluing it. Or worse, people trivializing it, saying why not just ask for help? Because it is easier to victim shame and victim blame, instead of accepting the horrifying reality that maybe you’re just not that good of a listener. All too common, all too acceptable. And all too damaging.

The cry for help fades away in the distance. It’s just the deafening echoes of the cries for attention and validation.