Hello Apparel

Hello Apparel are an independent company set up as an outlet for artists to manufacture and sell merchandise online without giving up their rights by signing major label-style merch' contracts. They carefully maintain personal relationships ensuring no one ever feels abandoned. 

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The cactus is looked at as a plant with lots of symbolic meanings. Native to arid regions, it adapts to extremely hot and dry environments, thriving in its harsh conditions. Many assign perseverance as its most remarkable trait, because even in tough times it lives frugally and endures all things no matter how painful or difficult they may be.

Can you relate?

It's pretty awe-inspiring.

Except it isn't.

Because we're not cacti, and we don't have thistles to protect ourselves.

#Bummer

We're human, and that can be weird, and strange, and confusing. Because humanness is messy and challenging. We're layered and nuanced little things. Who, behind the lens, aren't living perfectly curated lives. Contrary to the popular myths of social media, none of us is snowballing into a wonderful utopia filled with blissful happiness. We don't whiz by each day with plastered smiles across our faces. 

There's highs and lows, good parts and bad parts, and it tends to be a bumpy ride. 

There isn't always a party to be thrown.

We taste heartache, and sometimes it can linger, churning awkwardly in our mouths. We experience boundless emotions, they can intensify and pin us down like a ceiling. We bruise. We feel too much and know too little. We invest emotionally, and there's no umbrella of safety to shelter us from that. We express and we suppress. We cannot follow a tidy formula to be folded into something safe from destruction. Nothing bounces off us as we remain rigid. 

We each hold a rough idea of how distressing things can be. We can sympathise. We can empathise. Because we all produce similar symptoms. 

So, why, in this day and age, is there still a taboo and lack of awareness when it comes to speaking openly about our mental health? Why can we not conceptualise it, address it and take it seriously? How is it misleadingly different from recognisable grief? 

I've just finished reading Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton. There's two paragraphs in it that spoke to me deeply. These are her words, not mine. 

"I'm discovering that I never really knew them. We've spent our time together talking about everything but what matters. We've never brought to each other the heavy things we were meant to help each other carry. We've only introduced each other to our representatives, while our real selves tried to live alone. We thought that was safer. We thought that this way our real selves wouldn't get hurt." 

"It becomes clear that we are all hurting anyway. And we think we are alone. At our cores, we are our tender selves peeking out at a world of shiny representatives, so shame has been layered on top of our pain. We're suffocating underneath all the layers."

And it's true, we're trained to obey the societal crap, and become award-winning actors in our one-man shows. We showcase our representatives, conjuring up new personalities, and it's all jazz hands and deceptive smiles. The show must go on, so we play the game, and don't let people in fully. Our real selves are kept at a distance. The world's a stage and life is a theatre set.

It's a dangerous exercise. Almost like crossing a river in a leaky boat. You plug one hole for another to sprout elsewhere. You know a sunken boat isn't a solution, unless you want to drown, but in that moment, you have no other options so you keep at it.

We have other options. 

Sometimes, we need assistance, and that's fine. It's a sad irony, that it's during the times we most need to ask for help that most of us are reticent in doing so. 

To tear down your walls isn't a sign of weakness, to recognise and pinpoint your struggles and fight through them, despite how crippling they may be, requires backbone, gut and strength of character. It takes balls of steel to speak up, dive into the shadows, and illuminate the dark spaces. Plus, if you expose yourself to the things that you fear most, you will eventually start to give them less credence. How enormously consoling is that?!

I'm learning, it really does take a courageous person, a brave mother-fucker to wave their hand in the face of perpetual darkness and confront the poison before it obliterates them. That force lies, dormant, within us all, we're not poised motionless watching from the sideline. It's not elusive, we are narrating from the driver's seat of our own vehicles. 

What stops us asking for help? What obstacles prevent from us filling in the gaps and picking up the pieces along the road to truth? 

Pride and shame. 

They both carry a ferocity of fear, and overrule logic and truth. We rack ourselves with guilt and deem ourselves total losers, and cower from their wrath. 

We're all imperfect and we all have needs, sadly that's often a foreign concept ingrained in us to dismiss.

To admit we are anything but strong and independent is hard to fathom. We deem it synonymous with failure and the default action is to berate ourselves harshly for not adhering to the unspoken rules. We're insufficient, fraudulent adults, if we don't live up to the expectations we set ourselves. Pride renders no margin for error and takes zero prisoners. Saying you're overwhelmed or depressed or burnt out shouldn't look like an admission of guilt and need to be softened with a note of apology. We are allowed to hurt, that's not up for deliberation, to suffer doesn't require a permission slip.

For a while I've been feeling mentally depleted and drained. My turmoil has mushroomed and the deficit is visible. There's smoke signals undeniably there, and I've, finally, acknowledged whatever has been swimming endlessly around in my head needs to be evicted.

Planting a single seed can create an entire forest, so rather than wither away and concave, and slip down the rabbit hole, I've acted up before everything manifests and it becomes too late.

I've sought counselling. 

I booked myself an appointment, two weeks ago, to see a therapist.  

And then, I cried, excessively. Liberated with happy tears for disregarding the dark arts of secrecy and silence. For taking the plunge I needed and making a conscious effort to piece my jigsaw puzzle back together.

I say all this with confidence, not disgust. 

After years of vague attempts to go, I went. No longer catching myself in excuses, I was straight in there like a rat up a drainpipe, ready for remedy and set to get my bearings. Seeing a professional isn't a symbol for what a fuck-up I am.

Therapy isn't a dirty word.

Before going, I believed bits of the stigma surrounding it. It was a place for unfulfilled whingers to yammer on about their problems. They'd lay there whimpering to a cold, inattentive listener that struggles to camouflage the cash signs flashing before their eyes. While you're answering their inane questions, they're sketching euro symbols into their notepad and plotting their next vacation-going itinerary. It'd be very be self-pitying, and nauseating, and the entire experience would a total waste of time.

I was wrong, obviously.

Counseling isn't a ridiculous thing or a load of hocus-pocus, it's helping me deal with many underlying issues, and mend the dissonance I've created in my soul. Y'know, everyone's baggage can be harnessed for good. Exposing the silent killers swarming my mind has been constructive. 

'It's okay not to be okay' is a cliche well worn, a sentiment circulated in various reincarnations. But how often are we truly reading between the lines?

Don't be ashamed or embarrassed if you're going through something. Hard periods of frustration and despair are all part of the party. You're not less than, certain aspects in life are too harsh and difficult to bear. We hurt for nothing, and we hurt for something, no small degree of pain is unjustified. It's normal, you're not the only one. 

Now and again, we must struggle to succeed, and maybe (in some fucked up human-experience way) that's what makes life beautiful. The restorative joy. 

I put down my armour and freed up my membranes.

I'm not a cactus, and either are you. We owe it to ourselves, first and foremost, to shatter that illusion, and stop shutting down or hiding away. 

If you have issues riding low and heavy on your mind, do something before they swell out of control. Bite the bullet. Allow yourself to be vulnerable. Allow yourself to heal. 

Please, take this as your invitation to feel. Sometimes, we need the obvious laid out in front of us before we can see it transparently. 

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As always opinions are entirely my own, I received no fee to write this. I was given the Cactus t-shirt from Hello Apparel for review purposes. The clothing on their website is elegantly designed and full of fun prints. I love how most items have primarily bright, vibrant colours. There's a real joy that comes with loud dressing. 

Thanks to Love Joules, for helping me shoot this look, and lending her visual eye. 

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