3 C's To Overcoming the Intangible
An essay and speech that was written for a contest, breeching the topic of youth mental health. As the thought piece, " Jot It Down & Grow" reads:
" Today I would like to discuss not only the obstacles that youth face with mental health, but the culture that sharpens them. In my younger years I was raised in the garden, and learned a lesson that applies far beyond soil and watering methods. My mother taught me that you can pull a weed, but if you don't get the root, it won't go away. We can give out bandaids and therapy, but as a society is we overlook the systemic cause of circumstantial youth mental health, nothing will alleviate it. I believe that the teen mental health epidemic is a by-product of our innate culture of individualism coinciding with the privatization of consumption over connection. I am not just an observer of this culture, I am a product of it. The summer after the ninth grade I journaled, " No matter the years, days, seconds, I always dream of a better version of me," and as summer temperatures were rising, so was my screen time, "What's hurting and helping me reach these goals is comparing myself to the girls online." At this time I was completely immersed in a vain world of self comparison, with my mental state deflated by thoughts of me, me, me. By writing down all of my indefinite feelings, sticky thoughts, and harmful patterns I was able to find fallacies within myself. I felt isolated, and struggled to find connection beyond the screen. I began to ask myself a different question: how can I connect in a world so digital, with problems so invisible. Now let me be frank, social media isn't just diminishing my self esteem, but it is having an effect of youth mental health nationwide. Talker Research reports that the average American citizen consumes over 42 hours of digital media a week, and a paper in the National Library of Medicine by Devi KA found that adolescents who spent over 5 hours a day on social media were 70% more likely to experience suicidal ideation. Many teens in this room alone can honestly admit they have spent more than 5 hours on their phone in one day. Now I wonder how that left them feeling? What thoughts filled their minds after 300 minutes of screen time? My journal is just one personal story. Multiply that by millions of teenagers, and you have a public health crisis. Thus my approach formed, which I call " the three C's to overcoming the intangible": compassion, confidence, and community. A concrete solution to overcome harmfully abstract feelings. As I see it, we are spending a large amount of time on a platform fostering helplessness, pushing overwhelming content from photo shopped models, and devastating global affairs, to extraneous wealth and a new must-have product. The most fickle aspect of social media's grasp on teens is that the time spend scrolling, texting- consuming- is displacing vital aspects of life like exercise, sleep, and in person connection. The latter of these are all things that bring healthy stability, and help us grow into who we are capable of being. Social media acts like a black out curtain in a greenhouse, and we can recognize now that screens do not replace sunlight. How can kids overcome a sense of inadequacy, and find the natural joy in life? That is where the first C comes in. We must have enduring compassion for others, and ourselves. Compassion means all encompassing motivation to alleviate another's struggle. I used to spiral very easily, and I was keen on "individualizing my problems that are universal". That is a line from my 7th grade journal, and let me tell you it didn't do me any good. It was only once I took a step back, and gave serious consideration to those around me that I tilled the soil of my own mind, and all my problems seems to aerate. Unfortunately, that clamping feelings of being excluded stuck around. A universal aspect of growing up that I associated as a personal shortcoming. I was feeling tired of being on the outside of the joke, so I shifted my attention to alleviating this feeling in others. While at a party, I senses my friend's comments being overlooked, and I pulled her back into the conversation by asking her questions, sparking the attention of others, and extinguishing those feisty thoughts of exclusion for her. Acting with compassion fuels a sense of belonging, one that I have never felt before actively giving it to others. Compassion cracked the door open, but I still didn't believe I deserved to walk through it. Leading to the second, and my personal favorite C, confidence. The courage to act as if you already matter. Understanding my worth didn't directly lead me to believe in it, there was a persistent thought of, " What if everything isn't enough," continuing to entangle my potential and leave me action less. To contrive confidence, psychiatrist Alfred Alder introduced the concept of "acting as if", where he encourages us to act as if we are already the person we hope to be. So, I started talking to people beyond my comfort zone, lifting my head when I walked, and behaving as if I already believed in myself. It clicked. We need to allow the individualism within us to magnify our unparalleled identities, and lead us to take ownership of our own lives. we cannot let doubt, and feelings of "what if" hold the pen to our narrative. There isn't going to be a time in life where we will know if we are on the right path, doing the right amount, but we can have confidence in the matter that we have a purpose. This year, after facing my worst mental health battles yet, I wrote, " I know I am capable of doing great things, and I won't let myself down." Alfred Alder has a point, for by this time I was no longer acting. Confidence changed how I stepped outside myself, it got me out the door, but standing alone in the hallways is just another form of isolation. Through numerous journal entries I noticed that I would meet amazing new people who inspired me, challenged me, but most importantly, offered me chances of inconvenience to build our relationship. In an individualistic culture telling us to prioritize our own schedules, and our own comfort, we need people who need us- people who would ask you to run their errands or rest the instabilities of the day upon your listening ears- but that inconvenience is not a burden, is is the price of admission to the third C: community. As social media displaces in person connection we need a community to root us in reality, especially when we find ourselves constrained within our own mental barriers, and overwhelmed with the magnification of all our inadequacies by social media. A community will support you, as you support it. Community can look like remember people's birthdays, showing up to dance recitals, or bringing someone a casserole when it's been a hard month. The little actions that not only bring joy to others, but inadvertently cultivate an ecosystem of love. The grass is greener where you water it. There have been so many points along my personal journey where I would fall, and fall again, but no matter how bruised and beat up I felt, those people I had supported in their own time of need were there to hold me together. Each step on ever mattered because it led to the next. To have a heart of compassion, and the confidence to build relationships with people I never would have even spoken to, let alone drive to the airport during rush hour, has proven to me my capability of overcoming my own mental barriers, and dulling the cultural isolation of the 21st century; all possible from picking up a pen. Turn off the screens, jot down all that overwhelms, and reflect on how to move forward. We cannot simply pull the weeds of crisis when they appear. We must tend the soil, believe in the beauty of what is to come, and continue to cultivate the garden that is life."
Apparently 16 year old me had something to say.
Works Cited
Devi KA, Singh SK. The hazards of excessive screen time: Impacts on physical health, mental. health, and overall well-being. J Educ Health Promot. 2023 Nov 27;12:413. dot: 10.413/jehp.jehp_447_23. PMID: 38333167; PMCID: PMC10852174.
Talker Research. "Talker Research Media Consumption Trend Report." Talker Research