Only if you're kind to yourself, can you be kind to others.
Ruby WaxRead
How come every other organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy, except the brain?
Interpretation
Mental health issues often go unrecognized or stigmatized compared to physical ailments.
Ruby Wax's quote highlights the societal stigma around mental health, emphasizing that while other bodily organs receive sympathy when affected by illness, the brain, which governs our mental health, is often overlooked and misunderstood. This reflects a broader conversation about the normalization of discussing mental health and the importance of acknowledging that emotional and psychological suffering is as valid as physical ailments.
In practice
In a mental health awareness campaign, this quote can remind individuals to empathize with those struggling with psychological issues.
For me, depression is very much tied to my feeling that so much is being asked of me. I have to 'perform' rather than necessarily be myself. I have to perform a perfect Margo Jefferson, at an impossibly high level.
Depression isn't just being a bit sad. It's feeling nothing. It's not wanting to be alive anymore.
One of the manifestations of depression for me is that I lose my will. And I thereby lose my ability to focus. I don't think I'll ever have the day-to-day consistency in my performance that something like This American Life has. If I'm not depressed and I'm on and I can focus and I can think through something hard and without interruption and without existential emptiness that comes from depression, that gives me - not mania. But I exalt. I exalt in not being depressed.
I had really bad obsessive-compulsive disorder. At its worst, I was compelled to leave my house at three o'clock in the morning and go out in the alley because I just knew that the paper-towel roll I threw in the recycling bin was uncomfortable, like it was lying the wrong way, and I would be down in the garbage.
I guess I realize that I don't want to die. I don't want to live either, but-there really isn't anything in-between. Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst. But since the tendency toward inertia means that it's easier for me to stay alive than die, I guess that's how it's going to be, so I guess I should try to be happy.
I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.
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