Trigger warning
There have been times in my life when the constant grinding of my own cognitive dissonance has worn me down enough to question whether I should go on living. Sometimes it crashes around me from nowhere but other times it stays quiet in the background until I'm standing on a train platform. I've reached a point in my life where outward signs of age have begun creeping into contrast. I'm plagued by an obsession with unresolved relationships, things I had squashed down into that cluttered cupboard-under-the-stairs in my mind, but trapped by a heavy inertia that prevents me taking the lessons and changing anything about the now. Sometimes it seems that all we have at our disposal to paper over the cracks of this fragile mess are platitudes, typed out on to photos of sunsets, posted in a neat square with a ream of hashtags underneath. In the quest to de-stigmatise mental health we've created a monster that prioritises less severe or enduring conditions and paints