Have you ever had that conflicting, agonizingly painful feeling? You know, when you feel like you can speak for hundreds if not thousands of hours and you'll still not feel understood by your peers? What am I saying, if you're a human being, surely you must have felt it at one point or another in your life. It's complicated. Everything is complicated, but there is beauty in the complex mechanisms that push and sustain life. Why wouldn't it be complicated when you have such a beautiful and complex mind surrounded by more and more complex minds. It could feel distressing at times, maybe even causing you to dissociate when you let that realization sink in. One must smile at this fact and find solace in the simple truth that everything is so complex that it's actually quite simple to navigate through life as long as you have the right basics hammered down in your mind because your mental health depends on it. Let's start by defining mental health, what exactly is mental health? Some might say it simply refers to the health state of your brain, if you have any deficiency like Dopamine deficiency, which is a very important hormone for our brain and body. Some might say it just refers to whether or not the patient has any mental disorders of any severity or rarity. The World Health Organization actually defines it as "a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their community...". They then go on to explain this idea in a more extensive manner and already just reading this first line, I couldn't help but agree with what they described it as. This feels like how I perceive mental health, it's not just the mental disorders or the deficiencies that one might have, mental health encompasses a wide range of elements that make up, well, the mind of a human being, including his psyche. In turn, this affects his ability to function on a day to day basis, whether that is on a personal, professional or social level. Most of the time, it's all of the latter combined.

For reference, psyche refers not to an actual physical part of your brain rather the place where all your thoughts and emotions originate from. "Psyche comes from the Greek psykhe, which means “the soul, mind, spirit, or invisible animating entity which occupies the physical body.” I saved you a quick Google search there by quoting Vocabulary.com's definition of the term Psyche. You see, the beauty in the minds that Allah gave us is that we get to shape our own ideas and have our own vision on how things are, can be or should be. Not just that we have the ability to, we're even encouraged to do so, consciously or subconsciously. You might be on your way home from work with a couple of your friends one day, and you just randomly choose a fast food to have a meal together at because you're feeling hungry for x or y reason, whether you missed break time because you were hard at work, or because you simply didn't pack lunch with you that day. And after you're done eating, you might just think that this fast food might just be the best you've ever eaten at or the opposite, the worst place you've ever had the unfortunate opportunity of having a meal at and come to regret it severely. Or it just might be the middle ground, you might just think hmm this fast food was not bad at all maybe I'll try some other meals next time to see if it can be my new favorite spot. Throughout all these outcomes, what matters is that you have the right and ability to shape your own opinion of the experience you've felt, whether it's a fast food joint you've tried, a conversation you've had with somebody, a devastating, heartbreaking failure you've experienced, a movie you've seen, a video game you've played, a song you've listened to, the loss of a close friend, whether that happened through death or a fight you were never able to recover from. All of these examples with a multitude of variables, circumstances and more shape you into the person you are today and the person you will be tomorrow. And more importantly, they heavily impact your mental health and can either make you carry the widest smile on your face or feel the most heart sinking, gut wrenching, painful emotions one can think of. Isn't that actually wonderful when you think about it? It actually blew my mind the first time I thought about it, which was around the time I was twelve years old I believe. "Wow, it actually gets this deep? Wow." Is what my younger self thought at the time haha.

I might write another one of these one day inshallah, but for now, I would like you to remember that you're special, no matter how old (or young) you are. You have a lot of potential, bright ideas and a whole lot to bring the table in any setting you're in. Allah created you and gave you unlimited potential and a voice, not just the one you use to speak but the one you develop ideas with in your mind. Don't fret the bad experiences, there's no bad experience, just painful lessons. Take the positive from everything you can and focus on enjoying the little things in life and I assure you you'll be at peace inshallah. Thank you.