Finding Beauty in Mental Health at Holme

There aren’t many topics more important to talk about than mental health. It’s what affects almost a billion people globally and takes 1 million people a year from suicide. It’s the leading cause of death in adolescents and young adults.

It’s the last stat that impacts me the most. How many of us felt the darkest times as a teen and young adult? Who suffered from suicidal ideation and dissociated through self harming, addictions and problematic behaviour?

I did too. Which is why I care so much about it now and want to use any opportunity I can through Holme to remove the stigmas attached and get the conversation out there more. Mental health has been something I was passed down in my genetics. My great grandmother was in a psychiatric hospital in Papua New Guinea for much of her adult life, my mother has suffered from horrific mental disease which has caused her lifelong addiction to alcohol, cigarettes and other things and I also experienced many things as a child and young adult that propelled those emotions forward.

I have spent much of my life’s work, energy and money so far navigating through the challenges of a brain that just works different to many. And whilst for so much of my life I have hated how my brain works and processes, and many of the people around me did too- I am now in a stage of my life where I am actually starting to see the profound beauty of it all.

I think about all the people we know personally and publicly that have died from suicide or addictions and I think about how their brains worked.. I can’t tell you a more beautiful mind. The things that have been created from the depths of their thoughts, the way they view the world and their relationship to their fragility.

We look at being mentally strong as the epitome of success, but what if we viewed those who aren’t “strong” as the epitome of wonder? What gifts those minds have bestowed upon us.

Sylvia Plath’s words, Robin William’s humour, Kurt Cobain’s music, Anthony Bourdain’s food, Mark Rothko’s art, Kate Spade’s clothes, Amy Winehouse’s music.

All these people existed in the depths of their minds and struggled to find ways through. It wasn’t their failings or their brains dis-function, it’s how our world is set up to see mental health and the ways that brains function differently. If the minds of those who are looked at as though they are suffering, are instead supported & shown the beauty of their thought processes and the delicateness of their feelings and are guided to see it as wonderful and not as a failing- do you think we would have more people alive today?

This week I hold space for the deep thinkers, the ones that seek the depths of the themselves, those who stare at the clouds or the way the leaves move in the wind a little longer than most. I see you. And I wish we can start to build a community that not just sees you but reminds you that you’re the beauty in our world. You’re the one that allows us to see life through a kaleidoscope, because without you we wouldn’t know to make something that shows us that you can view life through an entirely new and magic lens.

Much love, Hilary x