Coping Hard

“Brought to you by my crippling mental illness.”

Lines like these are common expressions used to comfort, cushion a blow, make you forget. Anything spun into a joke in this sense can turn any morsel of drama or ill-feeling into a sense of momentary cope, an outlet. What I’ve experienced time and time again through friends of mine and even my own emotions is that downplaying or re-wording the pain we feel is a way of lessening the pain or saying that things have become too much but that there’s no comfortable way of relaying those emotions off easy. That‘s something that hurts.

From a young age, there seemed to be an incentive for me to try and make myself laugh at my misfortune anytime anything didn’t go my way so that my outlook on the situation changes, and as such, I, in theory, become less effected to said misfortunes. But this method can only go so far.

Laughter stops feeling good when the muscles that create the function begin to ache. Any good feeling can be wiped with a heightened sense of doubt and lack of real coping mechanisms. These methods of support are not always available, and people who feel these emotions as strong as they do have to become creative. They have to do something. Even knowing happiness only lasts so long, it’s an emotion we desperately reach out for as if it were the only commodity left on earth.

“Brought to you by my crippling depression” is a method of coping, but that does not mean that said person has coped or will. Be kind and loving, for every rainy person raises high their umbrella toward the sky.