I had been crying to sleep for a few nights in a row. It wasn’t due to any particular incident or a lack of self-worth on my part. I was and still am a pretty average person with a fairly satisfactory life. Good health, a decent job, a caring family, I had pretty much everything a 25-year-old could want in a place like Hong Kong. Yet, I would have instances, sometimes stretching to fortnights, when all I’d feel was desolation and sadness. Normally, I’d talk to my friends about it and be greeted with an “I understand” or “it’s okay.” It wouldn’t necessarily help me feel better or any less of whatever I was feeling, but it would be reassuring. It was as if we were validating each other and our feelings one at a time. Now though, it’s a slightly different story. Maybe it’s the pop culture or the modern way of dealing with emotions, but the same words of sadness generate a different kind of response. Instead of “Do you need help?”, the more general reply now is “ikr” or “me too”. Better yet, ”same dude, I wanna die.” No lie, it’s easy to collectively mope about similar issues and validate one another’s emotions but it’s come to a point where you can hardly differentiate between mindless chatter and a genuine cry for help. If we keep this up, how can we know when to reach out for help? How do we know when to play our role as a backbone to the sufferer?
I myself have succumbed to this contemporary manner of conversing countless of times. And looking around and looking hard, I see that there’s an increasing number of people suffering internally. Ergo, with the lives of so many on the line, it’s becoming more and more essential to exert vigilance and wariness in our words.
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