Millenials — we are scared and need help — Here’s Our Validation

Twenty-five percent of college students meet the diagnosable criteria for a mental illness. The current unemployed or underemployment rate for those with a recent college diploma is 53%. Going to college nowadays means you have a one in two shot at getting a satisfactory job after graduating and one in four shot at experiencing a mental health issue. These two sad outputs clearly point to a dysfunctional system and beg two simple questions. Are functional students experiencing a system that creates dysfunction? Or are we inserting a dysfunctional student into a system inept at reducing this dysfunction. I thought one’s college years were supposed to be the “best years of your lives” — well, unless you peaked in high school.

Growing up in an affluent suburb I was fortunate enough to have access to sustenance, shelter, education, emotional connection, and recognition. A healthy home life, social, athletic, and academically gifted, I was positioned perfectly to stand atop the proverbial pedestal of success and be selected for better opportunities over my peers. So I did as told and excelled in said categories. Team captain, top 10 percent, All-State athletics, admitted to a top business school, prestigious internships, and active social life — I had it all, including depression. Junior year I called my parents and told them I was dropping out of school and I couldn’t continue. They convinced me to stay and I carried on.

Head down, I plowed through each day’s activities without taking a moment to reflect on anything. Work, study, eat, work-out, study, try and sleep, maybe sleep, wake up, repeat. I was like a washing machine set on heavy, trained to rinse out the mental and emotional pain and discontent with the latest detergent of work, school, facebook, booze, or porn. Then, I started to contemplate suicide daily. I’d fantasize about hurling myself off the Washington Ave. bridge or jerking the wheel into light posts on the highway. It offered me temporary solace to think that I could end the suffering so quickly and I used suicidal ideation as a tool to help escape. I even thought that was normal. I figured it was pretty common to think about suicide because I didn’t think that I was anything special. I didn’t think I needed help.

Eventually I broke down. I got arrested at a bar for being an idiot and after a night in detox, I was forced to make a change. I drove home that day with a large manila folder of legal documents from my lawyer and the police. I walked in the house and carried on as if nothing was out of the ordinary. For some reason, today, of all days, my father walked outside and saw this manila folder. It was very unlike him to inspect any of my things, however, today was the day. He walked back into the kitchen and dropped the manila folder on the table. Busted.

He said “were you going to tell us about this?”

After a deep inhale, “No,” I exclaimed.

“Well, we should probably do something about this,” he suggested — that was how I got help. I had been struggling for almost a half year, thinking poorly of myself, others, my situation, everything about my life. And for some reason, I felt the need to keep this private from everyone. In fact, I only actually told one friend about my dissatisfaction, she recommended that I see a therapist and I totally rejected the idea. I was so certain that I was going to handle my own issues myself that I was willing to continue living on the edge of suicide just to keep this image I had to maintain for myself and others that “everything was alright.”

“Everything is alright” — the detriment of an authentic conversation right away. Our generation has such a difficult time approaching emotions, authenticity, suffering, barriers, vulnerability because we are a generation marred by word problems, multiple choice tests, relationship statuses, immediate replies, commercial breaks, trophies, and the question “what do you want to be?”

I certainly don’t want to be a doctor or lawyer or businessman or soldier with my identity and self-worth wrapped up in my perceived performance in that role. As John Lennon said to his elementary school teacher who asked him what do you want to be when he grows up, we want to be happy. Then his teacher told him he didn’t understand the question, John replied “you don’t understand life.” Young people have been misled by similar ideas all throughout society: the media, school curricula and activities, social networks, achievement awards. Now we feel alone, lost, helpless, and lied to.

This dissatisfaction is emerging through the tragedies of our culture such as suicide, shootings, bullying, and cheating. Suddenly “mental health” has become a household phrase synonymous with destruction and abuse. Yes, stigma is being reduced by increased conversation although this is another great example of a society obsessed with addressing surface symptoms rather than root causes. Like pills, quick-fix surgeries, and credit debt, mental health is merely an output that demonstrates a dysfunctional system.

After experiencing my breakdown, I spent the last two years at my alma madder trying to change the paradigm around how we assess, address, and improve mental health. I held events, spoke in classrooms, student groups, at large auditoriums, wrote thousands of dollars’ worth of grants, filmed people talking about struggle, published articles, created websites, organized and lead peer support groups and overall, encouraged a little conversation. I know I helped some people. All of my efforts have been aimed at increasing an ability to “catch” troubled outputs of a dysfunctional system and help encourage positive, help-seeking behaviors to increase mental and emotional wellbeing. This is an important role as real systematic change takes years, often generations and we need places for people experiencing struggle to feel valued, supported, and safe. We also need to begin a dialogue about our own individual and collective discrepancies between our Projected World and daily life.

Generation Y (most humans) is (are) paralyzed in learned helplessness, ill equipped, personally, socially, professionally, and spiritually to navigate the discrepancies between our perceptions, and scared. A nasty combination of culture and conditioning has produced a generation capable beyond their wildest dreams, like any other, and struggling to overcome unfamiliar barriers. From the start, we are fighting an uphill battle because of our default fearful and conflict-avoiding nature. Helicopter parents, highly-structured activities, and television and media have contributed to our discomfort with ambiguity and leads to a persistent stress-induced state because by nature humans are participating in a complex sensory-motor world we are constantly trying to decipher. Our minds are wired to simplify and organize trillions of tiny signals to make sense of the world. The little practice we have had sitting in, accepting, taking responsibility, and acting in amorphous situations has ended up paralyzing millenials presented with large, ambiguous situations such as discovering our purpose, contributing to society, creating meaningful and changing relationships, and navigating the evolution of the self. We are only now finding out that these exact skills are what matter most in the world.

We are ill-equipped when deciding to take action because not only have we not been taught how to work in these complex environments, we have been trained to perform and excel in exactly the opposite. Education, rank and reward activities, and class and cultural “progress” have all relied on our performance of manipulating a few variables within heavily controlled scenarios. We are conditioned into a continual state of scarcity and then we look at our capabilities to perform a task such as navigating the ambiguity mentioned above, and we see a huge gap in our capabilities. We feel inadequate to address these life situations and then have to manage the incredible personal and social expectations. Our “American dream” is turning out to be nothing like we’d imagined or been told. The whole internal story we have been telling ourselves for the previous 18 or 22 years, influenced by the many external factors afore mentioned, is turning out to be false. And because our sense of self is intricately tied to our performance in social and professional matters, we are seeing ourselves as entirely inferior.

This feeling of inadequacy relative to our bold perceived expectations is causes extreme discomfort and frustration. We feel lied to by parents, care givers, educators, mentors, and friends. Then, we have a bunch of artificial ways of representing our identity the further blow this reality out of proportion. The ability to hand-pick an identify and public self-image courtesy of texting, myspace, AIM, facebook, twitter, pinterest, video games, and other virtual reality games allows us a temporary escape from the sad idea that we are not what we think we are. We can avoid the discomfort of sitting with our inadequacy and addressing the root causes. Instead, we continue to thread together a facade that maintains appearances and the status quo because that is what we have been taught to do. We are taught to avoid ambiguity, discomfort, vulnerability, when in fact, we must embrace these emotions to move through this collective and individual dissatisfaction.

This puts us all on the mountain of expectations and we are scared. To our front, below a steep cliff we can see the small figurines below that represent the ideas we tell ourselves of our worth, identify, and community. It is light, it is defined, it is familiar and simple. We cannot go down that way but we can gather more figurines and shuffle them around a bit to look a little different. To our back, there is nothing but black. We can sense the darkness behind us and are afraid to even look at it — and we know it is powerful. A few brave souls, often those who experience traumatic events in life, about-face and stare into the nothingness. Some of those souls are so fed up with the bullshit that they venture a shaky foot into the darkness. Wobbling fearfully forward they experience the divine loneliness that is being a human and are forced to hover vulnerably with this foot before gently feeling solid rock with the toes. Gradually, the foot comes down onto something we decide is going to support us. Elation travels up the spin as this soul experiences momentary rejoicing in its tiny triumph. Then the grim reality sets back in as they contemplate the next terrifyingly beautiful step to find their authentic path down the mountain.

Some fall over and never get back up, some retreat to the light and seek comfort in the same old story. Some become very aware of where they are in that moment, use their surroundings and evolving support structure, and take the next terrifying step through the blackness down the mountain. Some lucky souls have distant and familiar voices and/or feelings calling them down the mountain. Some do not. Some sit and wait calmly for the next signal to motion them further, some sit idle with the accomplishments they have made and tell themselves they are satisfied.

This journey is unique to every human being. It is not something we are taught in schools, jobs, or even some families or religions (where it typically resides) and that is nobody’s fault. As a culture and individuals, we must undergo whole-hearted self-reflection and go beneath the figurines to discover our true essence. We can re-frame our interpretation of life, our situation, and ourselves and redefine how we view success, failure, good, bad, hard, easy, worthy, unworthy, wholeness, brokenness, rejection, acceptance, fear, and love. We can become aware of the broader needs and subtler actions outside of charts and diagrams and research proposals. We can integrate this style of being into our daily lives and truly ask ourselves if the life we are living is our life worth living.