Sick and Tired

It won’t be long before you discover that the human mind is sick. Our emotional body is wounded and infected with emotional poison that manifests in the form of fear, anger, hate, sadness, envy and hypocrisy amongst other emotions that practically make humans suffer. Where did we get this disease.

Suffice to say, all humans are mentally sick with this same disease and this world might just be a huge mental hospital. What hurts the most is not only the effects of this sickness but the fact that this disease has been with and within us for thousands of years such that it has been normalized in all facets of life. The medical literature, psychiatric literature and the society at large has accepted the disease as normal which has even led to the education system adapting such a norm and instilling it in us from a tender age. We have even come up with names such as paranoia, psychosis, schizophrenia just to come to terms with our illness but what it all means is that our reasoning mind is so frightened and we are in pain that it becomes better to be isolated from the outside world.

We live in continuous fear of being hurt and this only attracts drama everywhere we go. We get jealous, sad, envious and angry for no apparent reason and the way we relate with each other is emotionally painful. We are even afraid to feel good to an extent that we are scared to even say “I love you”. Regardless of the pain and fear instilled in us, we keep going, we get into relationships, get married and have children, most of the times being strengthened by the denial system.

We create a very sophisticated system in our minds to protect ourselves from emotional pain: a big denial system. In this denial system, we lie to ourselves and even believe our own lies. We don’t even notice we are lying and sometimes when we do, we justify the lies and give an excuse to protect ourselves from emotional pain.

We thought we had a dream but the human society before us created the big dream inclusive of rules of the society, it’s laws, religions, cultures and norms which we just strive to live by. We have nothing to do with most of their dream and their dream has made us to lose perspective of who we really are individually. We suffer over things that are not important let alone real. When you become aware of who you are individually, you begin to realize the nonsense behavior of humans and what is a big drama to everyone else becomes a comedy for you. 

We are born and raised in this society where we are taught to be like everyone else and compete with mere nonsense. We do things we don’t even like doing just to get “likes” and “followers” on social media. We are born healthy up until the age of 3 to 4 years when we get infected with emotional poison. 

Before the infection, we are genuinely happy, our imaginations are so powerful and the way we dream is an adventure of exploration. Before the infection we are not ashamed of the past neither are we worried about the future. We express how we feel and are not afraid to love. When we behave like children, this is the normal human mind and the normal human tendency. As children we were full of innocence and it was natural to express love but along the way something changed. What happened to us? What happened to the whole world?

What happened is the adults before us had a mental disease and it was very contagious. As we grew up these adults hooked our attention and taught us to be like them and made us believe that being different from them was an abomination. They repeatedly fed our minds with information on how to behave, how to dream and how to live and we were programmed as such. That is how our parents, older siblings, our teachers and the whole society of sick people infected us with that disease.

Our minds were programmed and we were domesticated with punishment and reward the same way we domesticate a dog or any other animal. What we call education today is merely domestication of the human being. We are afraid of punishment but later we are afraid of not getting the reward, of not being good enough for mom or dad, sibling, friend, teacher or the society as a whole. The fear of not getting the reward became the fear of rejection. What makes us try to change or create an image is the fear of not being good enough for someone else. As children we didn’t care whether we were accepted or not, nothing was personal and people’s opinions didn’t matter because we just wanted to be happy and live in the present. But growing up brought with it the need to be accepted.

As adults we try to project an image according to what the society wants us to be, just to be accepted or just to have the reward. We learn to pretend to be what we are not and we practice trying to be someone else just to be good enough for someone. We idolize people we have never met and we allow them to put unnecessary pressures on our lives. We practice and practice until we master the art of how to be what we are not. It’s not long before we forget who we really are and start living the image. We create a particular image for different groups of people we associate with. An image at home, an image at school, an image at work and an image for the relationships we get into.

The same is true for a simple relationship between man and woman. When a man meets a woman, he has an outer image he tries to project to her which is completely different from his inner image. He then makes an image of her from his point of view then tries to make her fit the image he made for her. When we were kids, there was no conflict of image since our images were not really challenged until we began to interact with the outside world and no longer had our parents’ protection. Even when we thought we were prepared to support and defend our images, as soon as we tried to project our images to the outside world, the world fought back. It started proving to us both privately and publicly that we are not what we pretended to be. The bigger the discrepancy between our outer and inner images was, the more difficult our adaptation to the society dream was and the less love we had for ourselves.

Many of us are suffering because of these false images we try to project. We pretend to be something very important when we believe that we are nothing. We work so hard to be someone in the dream that we didn’t create, to be recognized and approved by others. We try so hard to be important, to be a winner, to be powerful, to be rich, to be famous, to express our personal dream and to impose our dream onto other people around us. Why?

Because we believed the dream is real and we took it seriously. 

Now as adults who are infected as it were, let us not rob the future of our children, our younger siblings and the younger generations who are immersed already in this complex world. Let us try to demystify and declutter the complexities in their world. Let us try to provide them with answers that we never had. Let us give them room to dream their own dream, set their own goals and run their own race. Just because we are sick doesn’t mean we ought to be reckless. It’s time we act responsibly and insure that the future generations do not inherit the same diseases we are suffering from. Let us break the chain and be brave enough to say we are “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Written by Terrence Mutemaringa, 2020.