Self-Care Sunday
Don't ever be afraid to ask for help
This is the latest in my occasional series on the importance of engaging in some self-care in order to help you deal better with the fight against worldwide authoritarianism and fascism.
Today is September 1 and it’s also part of Labor Day weekend in the United States. (The holiday weekend will end tomorrow with the actual Labor Day holiday itself.) With so many Americans having the weekend off, I’d thought that I’d write another Self-Care Sunday post that I hope can reach as many people as possible because it is on an important topic that should get discussed some more.
I was inspired to write this latest Self-Care Sunday post after I recently wrote something about the recent death of a member of the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO). Here’s a trigger warning: I will be discussing suicide in this post but I’ll try to be tasteful about it and I’m also going to provide some tips on what you can do as an alternative to taking your own life.
Like I wrote previously, there was a NAFO member whose name was known as Ukraine Memes for NAFO Teens and his Twitter/X handle was LivFaustDieJung. (He also had a second Twitter/X account under the name Pistols, Piglets & Poultry and his Twitter/X handle was Mena_Conflict. I’m only going to focus on the first account because he posted his NAFO tweets there.) Ukraine Memes for NAFO Teens’ biggest claim to fame came on June 19 2022 when he took on Russian diplomat Mikhail Ulyanov. Ukraine Memes posted, “You: ‘we have to bomb all of Ukraine's civilians because Ukraine was fighting an internal war and some civilians got shelled’.” Ulyanov responded, “You pronounced this nonsense. Not me.”
Ulyanov’s retort soon became a NAFO battlecry when taking on the Russian trolls. Over time the phrase has been shortened to “pronouncing nonsense” or even simply “nonsense.” Such innovation was only possible because Ukraine Memes managed to draw that phrase out of Ulyanov.
Despite that brief bit of fame, Ukraine Memes for NATO Teens apparently was troubled. I’ve read posts on Twitter/X on what could have been the source of this person’s problem but I’m not going to repeat them here because there’s no way to tell if any of those posts had any bit of truth to them or not. Additionally we all need to be mindful that not every post you see on social media is truthful or accurate. Some people love to post fiction about real people as a way of getting attention or gaining clout. The main fact to consider is that Ukraine Memes isn’t even here to defend himself or even speak out on all of these rumors.
The one thing that I can verify by looking on Ukraine Memes’ Twitter/X account is that on August 2 he felt a bit of sadness as he realized that his daughter was now an adult. He wrote:
“Kiddo finished her first tattoo, on her sternum, without so much as a whimper. After dropping her off at their townhouse, I drove home leaving my babies on their own as they start college.
Friends. I. Wept. Literally half my life has been a parent. And now they’re grown ups.”
It’s not unusual for parents to feel sad and wistful at the realization that their children are now adults, especially as they go to college and/or work their first full-time job and/or move into their own place and/or get married. It’s a common emotion that parents feel knowing that their job with raising children is done and they have to learn how to deal with their own children as adults and not as young people.
But Ukraine Memes wrote his last-ever post on Twitter/X where he essentially retweeted the above tweet then added his own updated note to that retweet: “Fuck this, the sad is overwhelming. I’m watching the entire LotR [Lord of the Rings] trilogy. I need the serotonin.”
Ukraine Memes for NAFO Teens committed suicide sometime after posting this. Like I wrote earlier, I don’t know if was only the fact that his children are now adults have made him feel so much emotional pain that he felt that suicide was the only way out or if he had been going through a long string of problems for a very long time and seeing his children go off on their next stage of life as full-fledged adults was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back and he really didn’t feel that life was worth living anymore. I also don’t know if he had any problems with drugs and/or alcohol or if he had a history of being in dysfunctional relationships. I’ve never met him nor have I ever communicated with him so I can’t really provide any insight on what could have made him conclude that suicide was the only way out.
One thing for sure is that this person has definitely made such an impact on NAFO that he was even mentioned on TVP World in Poland.
I don’t know if Ukraine Memes for NAFO Teens had attempted to seek help before he did what he did or not. But I want to put out the word that there is nothing wrong with seeking help. There are times when a problem becomes so overwhelming that you can’t work on solving this on your own. There are times when you do need help from others. In fact, if you’re reading this and you feel the urge to do what Ukraine Memes for NAFO Teens did, I want you to first call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.
I have been touched by suicide myself in my life. When I was a young child there was a relative on my father’s side of the family who killed himself. The last time I recalled seeing Great-Uncle Jack was at some family get-together when I was around seven or eight years old. About a month or so after that get-together my parents learned that Great-Uncle Jack had jumped out of the window of an upper level apartment in Baltimore where he lived. Years later I learned that Great-Uncle Jack had lost his wife to cancer about a year or two before and he had missed her so much that he apparently created some kind of a small shrine to her in the apartment that they once shared together. The sadness and grief became so overwhelming that Great-Uncle Jack felt that jumping out of the window was the only solution.
A few years later my aunt (my mother’s sister), who was a housewife, realized that her house was very quiet during the day since the youngest of her four daughters had started attending elementary school. With all four kids in school during the day, my aunt had an idea of earning extra cash by babysitting other people’s children in her home during the week. Most of them were infants, toddlers, and preschoolers but there was sometimes a child (or two) who was in elementary school but he or she needed some supervision for a few hours after school until the parents got off from work.
At one point my aunt started watching three brothers where the oldest was around six and the youngest was an infant. The infant’s name was Ben. The children’s mother had decided to go back to work full-time and with two working parents, the children needed my aunt’s services. I later learned that the parents were having marital problems, which explained why the mother decided to go back to work. (So she would have a steady income to rely on if the parents ended up separating and she couldn't get reliable child support from her husband.) A few months after my aunt began babysitting Ben and his brothers, she learned that Ben’s father had committed suicide. It was a shocking thing. For the next few years my aunt continued to babysit the three brothers until—one by one—they reached middle school.
I met Ben and his brothers a few times when I visited my aunt and uncle’s home with my parents. I didn’t know Ben too well but I knew who he was. Even after he got older he considered my aunt, uncle, and cousins to be his second family and he visited them frequently, especially since his family and my aunt’s family attended the same church. He served as an altar boy at my oldest cousin’s wedding. The last time I saw Ben was at my aunt’s funeral. (She died of breast cancer at 48.) By that time he was in high school.
I didn’t hear any further about Ben until a few years ago (just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic) when I looked on Facebook and learned that my cousins had attended his funeral. It turned out that Ben, at the age of 43, had taken his own life just like his father did decades earlier.
I don’t know what Ben’s problems were nor do I know if he had even attempted to ask for help. I wished that he had found help before he did what his father did.
I also felt bad for Ben’s mother and brothers. It was bad enough that they had to deal with the aftermath of one suicide in the family only to have to go through it all over again with Ben.
There were other people I know who have attempted suicide but they survived their attempts and have long put that part of their lives behind them so I’m not going to elaborate any further here.
The hardest part about being an adult is admitting that there are times when you might have problems that are so overwhelming that you need to seek help from others. I don’t know everything about other countries and cultures but I live in the United States and there is so much emphasis on individualism where people are expected to solve their own problems and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I was born in Baltimore and I grew up in nearby Glen Burnie and I still remember my late mother talking about growing up poor in Baltimore but being proud that her parents (my grandparents) never sought welfare (which was established in the US in 1935, just a few years before she was born). She was on Social Security for a couple of years after my grandfather died when she was 16 but that was it for getting help from the government. (My mother and aunt worked in a local department store after school. I don’t know if my grandmother, who had been a housewife for many years, had even attempted to find work herself or if she tried but was turned away due to sex and age discrimination.) My mother used to tell me that there were times when money was so tight when she was growing up that the family would eat apple fritters for dinner. As an adult she refused to make apple fritters because they reminded her too much of her impoverished childhood.
And it’s not just my mother acting like she’s proud for her parents not getting government handouts as she was growing up. I’ve read posts on Facebook groups that are devoted to people who live (or lived) in Baltimore and/or Glen Burnie and you’d be amazed at the number of posts I saw that say something to the effect of “I grew up poor but my mother never asked for help or went on welfare.” They act as if they are morally superior because their parents didn’t ask for help. There are times when I had to restrain myself from writing “Didn’t it occur to you that your childhood would’ve been less poor, less harsh, and slightly more comfortable had your parents actually sought help?” Many of those writing about how they grew up poor without any help admitted that they grew up in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, back when it was easier to apply for welfare than now.
What’s even worse is that the social safety net has been shredded so badly ever since Ronald Reagan became president back in 1980 that even if there is an organization that could help you, that organization might have had its funding cut so badly that they can’t help you because there aren’t enough resources to help everyone who walks into the door. The social safety net shredding that began under Ronald Reagan is the main reason why I rarely ever saw homeless people on the streets prior to the early 1980s.
As an adult I had somehow ingrained my mother’s message of not asking for help. It was only when I joined a Unitarian Universalist congregation as a young adult where I learned about being in a close community of people who encouraged fellow members to ask for help if there was something that was too overwhelming in your life that you can’t solve it on your own. My congregation has a We Care committee whose volunteers do things like provide rides to doctor’s appointments. My congregation also has a Pastoral Care committee where members can listen and provide advice for a problem that you might have.
In my town there are a few nonprofits that are also there to provide advice and referrals to people who need help. I learned that there is no shame in asking for help. In fact, it’s imperative that you ask for help as soon as possible. Over time I learned that the only thing about not asking for help is that you end up hurting yourself and your family in the long run.
How to find help? Like I wrote earlier, if things have really become dire for you, you can call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in either English or Spanish at 988.
If things are not dire or life threatening, you can first try asking among family members. If none of them are able to help you or if they are incredibly judgmental, then try asking friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. They might be a valuable resource for knowing where to go or they may have been through something similar and they can give you some first-hand advice.
If no one you’ve contacted are able to help, you can try speaking with a clergy person if you belong to a house of worship. If you’re not religious at all, you can do Google searches on your problem and see what comes up. You could be referred to an organization that can help you.
Librarians in your local public library are another resource for finding help. If a librarian can’t immediately answer your question, he or she could look up addresses and telephone numbers of local organizations who could help you.
The only people I would be leery about confiding in are people at your job, especially if you work in a corporate environment. I’ve seen too many cases of people who confided in coworkers and bosses only to have these people use that person’s personal problem as a way of denying that person a promotion or that so-called confidant might take advantage of your problem to stab you in the back or to even have you fired or laid off.
Asking others for help is the first step in self-care and you shouldn’t feel too proud or too afraid to ask. You are only hurting yourself if you don’t ask. I don’t know if Ukraine Memes for NAFO Teens had tried asking for help or not but if he didn’t then it’s a shame that he didn’t because he would still be alive today had he asked.
Other Self-Care Sunday Tips
Contact current friends and make new ones.
Step away from social media for a few hours.
Cultivate a sense of humor and laugh.
My blog is free to subscribe but if you want to make a comment, you’ll need to take out a paid subscription. Click on the button below for more details.