Dear Evan Hansen

Okay, so, you know when you put something off when you think it'll mean a lot to you? Like, a book, song, album or something? You're putting it off because you think, well, there could be a time in my life when I need to discover this, more than I do now? What if it doesn't hit me as hard as it should? ...or is it just me?

Yes, I'm sorry to the Dear Evan Hansen fans out there, sorry if I insulted you somehow. I was putting Dear Evan Hansen off. The only musicals I'd really paid attention to were Hamilton, kinda Six and Legally Blonde, which I'm doing as my school musical this year (it is underrated by the way). I knew there are so many more musicals out there, and within my last week of school holidays I came up with the brilliant idea to actually give them a go! *facepalm*...

You Will Be Found... that song hit me hard. 

And after I finished listening to it, I realised that it was right. The song itself, the musical, found me. Not entirely, but I realised... maybe I'm not a crazy drama queen that deserved to lose a friendship over asking for help? Maybe we're not living in a world where you have to have been hurt to acknowledge the hurt?

And some of us are socially anxious, or have some other sort of anxiety disorder, which is a curse. Even shyness, a personality trait, can be a curse.

Why? Because there’s nothing we can do about the fact that we're stuck in some kind of paradox where we don't ask for help because we need help.

And sometimes we ask for help. And sometimes this results in people who we thought we could trust belittling us and our problems and then we apologise and never ask for help again. Say "I'm fine" when we're not really.

But you see, this only tightens the spiral. Because the more that we need help, need support, the less that we ask for it. Why? Because last time we asked for help, we were metaphorically slapped in the face by a person we thought loved us. Who we loved.

And we don't even get the "privilege" of saying we have an anxiety disorder, because we were too scared to go get diagnosed. And we don't want to look like we've joined the group of the "I'm OCD" people, the "That gives me anxiety" people. The hypocrites. So we say that we're fine.

And we even wonder, do I have a real mental illness, or am I just crazy?

Dear Evan Hansen is a message to everyone, everyone, everyone, that mental illnesses, grief and genuine unhappiness are real things. That they can be debilitating, can destroy so many people's lives, can end some people's lives. But as there are millions around the world calling out for help, millions sinking and drowning, even more people don't understand. Because people will laugh when their mate makes a joke, and there are no consequences. People get serious illnesses mixed up with personality traits, and nobody corrects them. And before kids hit their teens, they have learnt that it's okay to throw terms around with these false definitions as context. Meanwhile the people who are slowly dying inside are within a strange state of mind where they believe that people will hate them if they confess they have something "wrong" with them, that it's a crime.

Many people are battling with what looks like themselves from the outside, but what they're fighting is actually a type of plague. A lot of people compare these things with things like cancer or a broken arm (on the topic of Dear Evan Hansen). People say that, for example, if a person with a broken arm and a person with, say, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) were sitting side by side, so many people would say, "Hm, what's wrong with that person? I don't see anything." and go to help the person with the broken arm. Even if they already were healing. (I don't know if that made sense. Sorry.)

I wish I could do something to raise awareness for and reduce the stigma around mental illnesses. I'm definitely not an expert on all of these, but I do know that some in many cases they are compared with living hell. Still it seems like nobody understands. It seems like we're making a problem seem bigger than it is, when we're really trying to cram all the pain into an Olympic pool size. That's the problem with invisible pain, usually the only person who can feel it all is the one experiencing it, so other people don't know it's there. And other people don't care.