Thank Your Mom and Dad

    Picture yourself in the pale, freezing arctic with ice forming on your eyelashes and the tip of your nose almost burning from the cold. Think about what would happen to your body if you weren't nourishing it and providing it with the resources it needs for survival like warmth, food, water, shelter, etc. Think of your brain as the human in the torturous conditions and the freezing elements as unhealed trauma. Isn't the brain arguably the most important organ in the human body? It basically controls everything and malnutrition of this essential part can literally haunt you for the rest of your life. 

    Over quarantine I grew obsessed with mental health. I lived off of YouTube videos made by psychologists, documentaries about psychiatry, Tik Tok therapists, and basically any information that I could get my hands on. I even read articles. Actual, non-fiction articles. The best part of it all was that I started to examine people left and right as if I was some detective. It was addicting analyzing, for example, micro-aggressions and triggers some people had. Every single thing can ultimately be tied to someone's environment from an early age. Impressionable minds are either nourished or scarred and I felt like I could finally understand why some people act in ways others would not. What most amazed me was that ones upbringing can literally lead to a life of success or an impending doom. Victor Frankenstein's story is definitely the latter of the two. 

    Frankenstein went through it. Like actually went through it. Let me elaborate. As a child, he was encouraged to pursue a relationship with his cousin by his own parents, his mom died and he had basically no reaction, his brother was murdered by a creature which he, for some reason, thought was a good idea to create, he faces emotional abuse and discouragement from his father and a bunch of other things that the average person should not be facing. Don't get me wrong I still see him as the antagonist of the novel but he was pretty much set up for failure. All of these hardships this man faced were just packed into a neat little box and stowed away for later and essentially led to bad decisions being made countless times. The fact he refers to his childhood as a pleasant experience scares me because it really did not sound that great. He probably trauma-pushed memories out and just held on to the good ones (this is a real thing)! Remember when I said every decision or action someone makes can be tied to their childhood trauma? Victor's dad's constant nagging and vocal disapproval imbedded into his young son's brain and like a parasitic organism, controlled his actions for the following years. Why do you think he tried so hard to become something of himself? Why did he want to discover something so big? Achieve the unachievable? Because of daddy issues!!! His more than disturbing kind of abnormal attachment to Elizabeth: thanks mom! He dehumanized people from the womb and objectified and obsessed over them as well. He lacks the idea of boundaries because as a child he pretty much had none. 

    Takeaway from this blog post- go to therapy! Why don't we treat mental health the same way we treat our physical health? We go to doctors for our annual checkups so why don't we check up on the most crucial organ of our anatomy? Don't be that guy. Don't be Victor! Mourn, heal, recover. Packing up your emotions and withholding them is like putting a bandaid on a bullet hole. Don't be a ticking time bomb!