This Is My Way of Lending My Hand To You
For too many years, I silenced an immensely essential voice of my narrative. Today, this voice overpowers my existence, forcing me to become stronger than I am. I feel compelled to say something. It’s powerful in the way that it flows freely as I type and immerses me into a state of vulnerability I didn’t think I was capable of.
I want to help myself, because
I want to help somebody.
I want to help you, help yourself.
I want to give you a space, a community.
That shows you the power you have over your own life.
A community that supports you.
To give you a place where the voice you’ve silenced has somewhere to speak up. A community that welcomes vulnerability and authentic existence with acceptance and encouragement. An amplified space for the silent voices that could change or save someone’s life.
I just started conducting surveys on mental health around my campus. I was excited to validate the problem I felt others were experiencing other than just myself. It feels weird to say I was excited. It is in no way exciting to discover that mental health issues are as prevalent as I assumed. I think what I am most excited about is uncovering a very silent issue by having complete honesty from strangers. Honesty is fueling my purpose to discover a solution to help these issues.
I’m writing this piece more to share my thoughts about the silent moments I share with complete strangers. We sit in a space of complete vulnerability for a few minutes as they quietly fill out my survey. I don’t know their life story. They don’t know mine.
I struggle with how to end these private exchanges. This may have been a person who is dealing with overwhelming issues. The person that I want to help.
What can I do in this moment? What do I say?
I guess this is my way of lending my hand to you.
You aren’t alone, and I want to create a welcoming space that helps you understand that.
We are more alike than I’ve lead you to believe. We have both been through things that could change the way each of us live. We have an ability to impact one another. We all struggle with something. It may not appear so through our perfectly posed Instagram pictures, or the many accomplishments we continue to share on Facebook that momentarily satisfies our craving for external validation.
We are all raw. Human. Just for some reason, we like to cloud this simplistic existence with materialistic values, judgments, and social exclusion. We want you to believe our life is great, in fact, it’s probably better than yours. We create an illusion to be envied, because what we really want is to be worthy.
We want to be worthy of being loved.
But to open ourselves to love, we have to be vulnerable. I hope that you find this to be a space where you are able to be yourself, vulnerable and all. I hope this feeling can follow you into your daily life, opening yourself to new possibilities and people.