Rights, weaknesses, superpowers.
Two days ago — Aug. 26 — was the anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment, the one that gave women the right to vot
e. If you’ve never read the story of Alice Paul, the Silent Sentinels and the amazing and harrowing protests that led to that amendment’s passage, I strongly suggest it! (They made a film about it, too, called Iron Jawed Angels — the pic is from it.)
And this is not Personal Mental Health Awareness Week, but I’m declaring it anyway: Take some time to learn your own mind and its quirks — what sets you off and how to combat the effects of negativity — so that you can survive weeks like I’ve had with maximum grace and minimum medication!
…In all seriousness, if you don’t make a habit of surveying your brain and learning its strengths and weaknesses, please do, for your sake and your loved ones’. You pay attention if you have a bum knee, don’t you? And perfect mental health is about as common as perfect physical health.
As I often explain in real life, I haven’t gone fifteen years without taking psychotropic drugs for my depression by simply "not being depressed" (I love how many people think that’s possible–again, can you just "not have a bum knee"?), but by learning as much as humanly possible about what my situation is and how to handle it. …You might be amazed at what you don’t know, too. For instance, I never realized I was claustrophobic until I made an active effort to figure out why I felt so disoriented and uncomfortable in certain situations!
—–
On the flipside, what are your superpowers? Come on, everybody has some. I have abnormally good luck with words. I know people who have no body odor, who can’t get lost in the woods, and who can spot the smallest detail at great distance in spite of wearing glasses for normal seeing! It’s fun to figure out, not only where you’re amazing, but where the people you know are, too. And it promotes gratitude, which is a darn useful thing to have around for Mental Health Week, too.
17 devoted students of Roshi accepted this page in 0.226 seconds without moving, or saying a word.
My tiny little superpower: I’ve always been able to easily get into the lotus position without having ever trained to do so and despite being bad at almost every stretching exercise. I don’t even need to use my hands.
One of my superpowers is that I hold conversations with a singular focus at any one time, can go off on tangents, but always come back to the original topic at hand. This is a bane in every day chitchat, but is incredibly powerful in work where people often lose focus on the actual problems at hand (sometimes going off on important tangents, but more often than not completely lost). Another superpower (I love how this comes off like I have many) is that I can eat an ungodly amount of calories (2500+ a day) and not gain weight.
Oh, so does Mental Health Awareness Week run from Thursday to Thursday? That’d be odd, perhaps cool, but weird.