Never Fully Heard #10 - Trauma, Uniqueness & Suffering

Never Fully Heard is a space for men to listen to and engage in open, vulnerable & uncomfortable conversations to help improve their mental health being.

Author

Nick Horton
October 09, 2022

The 5-minute mental health newsletter.

Never Fully Heard is a space for men to listen to and engage in open, vulnerable & uncomfortable conversations to help improve their mental health being.

In today's edition:

  • Podcast Episode 2: Turning trauma into impact. H Clothing Will Middleton

  • Self-reflection question: Are you choosing to be yourself?

  • Article of the week: Your suffering has meaning if you want it to

It's Sunday, let's go!

Before reading I want you to do four box breaths.

Exhale to a count of four, holding your lungs empty for a four-count, inhaling at the same pace, and holding air in your lungs for a count of four before exhaling.

Repeat 4 times.

Turning trauma into impact. Founder of H Clothing Will Middleton.

Link to podcast here

Will Middleton took on the challenge of building a sustainable fashion brand that combines fashion, community and expression to encourage conversations around mental health after the untimely death of his young brother to mental illness.

Their products are made with 100% organic cotton and they provide funding to plant a tree for every item they sell.

10% of their profits go to the mental health charity YoungMinds

You can find them on Instagram and Tik Tok at H Clothing.

This conversation spans a lot of important and emotional topics, I hope you enjoy hearing more about will’s story.

Topics covered in this episode:

- Mental Illness vs mental health

- Dealing with grief

- How to start vulnerable conversations

- The stigma around mental health

- How H Clothing came about

https://giveusashout.org/ Mental health crisis line

@HClothingco

❓Self-reflection question ❓

Are you choosing to be yourself?

"No one in the world is going to beat you at being you. You're never going to be as good at being me as I am. I'm never going to be as good at being you as you are. Certainly, listen and absorb, but don't try to emulate. It's a fools errand.

Instead, each person is uniquely qualified at something. They have specific knowledge, capability, and desire nobody else in the world does, purely from the combinatorics of human DNA and development.

Your goal in life is to find the people, businesses, projects or art that needs you the most.

There is something out there just for you.

What you don't want to do is build checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing. You're never going to be them. You'll never be good at being somebody else."

Link to book below:

📝 Article of the week :

"We’re suckers for meaning, because all of the movies tell us that you can will it so.

Accepting Our Pain:

“Both men had talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument — they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.”  Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor E. Frankl

I had an emotional breakdown the other day — the details of why, I won’t get into, but the brutality of it all, I will.

I was feeling particularly low and self-loathing and I’d taken a small problem and turned it into a small continent. And before I knew it I couldn’t sleep, was stewing and mad at myself for feeling like shit.

If you want to see what this nasty vicious cycle looks like, I’m happy to highlight it in a future article, but just know that it gets fucking dark in there.

And so, I was standing in the shower and I could feel that pain, and so I just kept repeating to myself, I’m in pain. I’m in a lot of fucking pain. And I’m scared and I don’t know what to do.

Often when I get at something that shakes me to the core — something deep in my throat or cock or whatever — something intense comes out."

Link to article here

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