On May 18th Chris Cornell’s death was officially ruled a suicide. As I heard the news I started reading people’s posts and passed by one Travis Meadows wrote. What he shared inspired me to write this… 

Mental illness is killing our society, one great person after the next. We are seeing this day after day, month after month, year after year. It’s real.

It takes so much courage and willingness and awareness to get help and to ask for help and that’s just the beginning. It’s a long road to any type of recovery.

And yes….there are good days and lots of bad days, but when you have a support team, you know you’re not alone; you have another option, to reach out, rather than go to that dark place, that eventually leads to fatality, as we all see this happening with our greatest actors, artists, musicians etc.

Success is wonderful but it can be filled with a lot of alone time. If one is not healthy, it is hard to handle that alone time and it turns into loneliness and that causes one to self sabotage on bigger levels. It’s a way to numb the loneliness, the judgement, the chatter and fill the void all at once.

That void is deep….

Anyway, I know for me, I do my best to really be aware of others around me. I notice them. I ask how they are doing. I smile. I walk through my day knowing the person to the left of me may have it better than me and the person to the right may have it worse off… But in either case… we are all aligned. We are all human. We all deserve to be treated with love, with respect, with kindness…

That’s my two cents.