Crash and burn

 Do you love your life? Do you ever get tired of following the same mundane routine? Does getting up from the bed feel like a daunting task to most of time? Do you feel like you are sinking in a quicksand of mundane routines with no escape in sight? Do u take vacations to take a break from your schedule but end up feeling even more burntout on return? 

Why is it that most of us resonate with the above questions? Why is it that so many of us are dysthymic and anxious and sometimes even on verge of depression. Mental health disorders have the highest prevalence in recent years. We are going around carrying clouds of gloom hanging above our heads . Sure there are tiny sparks of light between bouts of pain and misery, but they seem too small and too insignificant to us. At the end of the year, instead of celebrating or victories, we keep lamenting about all that we lost, missed or failed at. 

Is it because we gradually become pessimistic as we age, or are we silently mourning all the missed chances and sacrifices we made, or maybe because we are stuck in a quagmire of work/ life/ marriage that we despise? Or maybe it is all of the above and more. 

We are naturally wired to remember and recall all our past trauma and memories repeatedly. We are used to self blame and self reproach for even the tiniest of mistakes as that is what we have seen our parents and their parents do. We compete against self made races and deadlines to best one another. From childhood it's drilled into our heads that success gets to our head so we confuse pride and arrogance and berate ourselves for seeking credit and validation. And God forbid therapy is either just a marketing gimmick by today's generation or something only the insane need. Matching society's status and parental/ spousal expectations are more important than what we really need and want. We hate our juniors and peers who seem put together and ahead of us in life and work. Happy,  cheerful and successful people plastered all over  the social media makes it worse for us. We resent them and us and take it out on ourselves, our loved ones and sometimes those working beneath us.

We are trying so hard to be grand and successful, that ultimately we crash and burnout slowly and steadily. Anything and everything we do is never good or enough. This rat race and misery consumes us and spits out few fragmented unrecognizable fragments of past us. With the availability of so many opportunities and options today, and the courage of younger generations to ask for and seek it actively, makes us feel guilty and angry at our choices and failures. We blame ourselves, we blame our partners and children, we blame our parents and we blame the fate and God for what all we deserve but never got. 

But we only deserve what we actually think we deserve and fight for,? Did we even try hard enough? Did we not buckle up against pressure and always took the easy way out? Didn't financial stability made us choose a job/ career we hated? Didn't societal pressure make us choose a life we never wanted but was expected of us? But once we realize that it gets even worse as self blame kicks in. It's hard for us to accept that what's transpired is past and either we should accept it wholeheartedly or muster courage to break free and forge new paths for ourselves. The choice is always there but instead of being brave enough to choose or pragmatic enough to accept, we opt for a cowardly and complacent route of self blame and misery.

We forget that while we are a tiny insignificant speck in this vast universe, we are also the only one of us. Each of us is significant in some way if not to anyone else, but to us ourselves. We are life and life is us and we are slowly forgetting that.