Mental Health Awareness Week — Day 3.

Coping Mechanisms part 1 — a safe place, running away

1. Riverside — Agnes Obel

Down by the river by the boats
Where everybody goes to be alone
Where you won’t see any rising sun
Down to the river we will run

We find places to get away. It’s escapism. We find quiet places where our life can’t find us. Nature (the theme of this year’s mental health awareness week) tends to be a good safe place. Mine is the river. It’s sometimes quiet, and if it’s not at least I get to watch the boats. The repetitive action is calming. In the summer I can swim in the river. When you close your eyes and put your head under the water you can’t see or hear the outside world. It’s calming, another escape from the present. We have safe places.

2. The run and go — Twenty One Pilots

Don’t wanna call you in the nighttime
Don’t wanna give you all my pieces
Don’t wanna hand you all my trouble
Don’t wanna give you all my demons
You’ll have to watch me struggle
From several rooms away
But tonight I’ll need you to stay

I am on the run and go. Keeping busy as a distraction. Literally running from our problems. When my brain is bad I have to keep it occupied. I have to tire myself out. This song also eludes to distancing yourself from others — we distance but we don’t want to feel totally alone. Sometimes it’s difficult for people to wrap their heads around. Cerebral thunder — that sounds like a stressed, anxious brain.

3. I will be found (lost at sea) — John Mayer

It doesn’t matter where you roam
When no one’s left to call you home
I might have strained a bit too far
I’m countin’ all the moonlit stars

I’m a little lost at sea
I’m a little birdie in a big old tree
Ain’t nobody looking for me
Here out on the highway

So I keep runnin’ ’til my run is gone
Keep on ridin’ ’til I see that dawn
And I will be found
I will be found

Again, we distance and we need comfort. We need space, we need to not to be totally alone and forgotten. We often feel a huge lack of self worth, and we don’t feel worthy of being important to others. We distance ourselves so we don’t burden others, but that space gives the depression time to spread, to worsen. We feel lost in our lives, and we need to feel hope that we will be found, that we will be okay in the end, it’s just not our time yet. We’ll keep fighting it until we’re found.

4. Holocene — Bon Iver

And at once, I knew I was not magnificent
High above the highway aisle
Jagged vacance, thick with ice
But I could see for miles, miles, miles

“It’s a part of me apart from me” — we feel empty, we’re missing part of us. We’re walking but empty. We’ve lost a large part of our personality under that dark cloud of depression. The world feels very small. It’s just that leftover part of you and your depression. You are not magnificent, you are empty, you feel no self worth. “I can see for miles, miles, miles” — Sometimes looking a huge landscape helps a little to remind us how much bigger than us this world is. The same with the night sky and the stars — there is so much more to this universe than us, and we are just a tiny cog in the universe. This links nicely into one of tomorrow’s songs, in which we’ll talk about altruism and the effect we have on the world around us.

5. To build a home — The Cinematic Orchestra

There is a house built out of stone
Wooden floors, walls and window sills
Tables and chairs worn by all of the dust
This is a place where I don’t feel alone
This is a place where I feel at home

’Cause, I built a home
For you
For me

Until it disappeared
From me
From you

This is again about a safe place. A home. But a home the speaker has built — our houses often aren’t our homes. We have to make those places were we feel less alone and more at home. This could be a physical place, it could be certain company, hobbies, escapism, any way we can to make a home. Like Holocene and Riverside, this one has a focus on nature, on seeing a large landscape, and reminding ourselves of the size of the world, in the peace and quiet of nature. We hold onto these safe places, safe company, safe foods, safe activities. Anything that makes us feel more tethered to this life.