Love is no longer in the air! 💔

It's up to us what happens next!

**As a note, this Substack post/audio is a very heavy topic so please be gentle to yourself if this is not something you feel ok reading now - It discusses the passing of Matthew Perry and the topic of mental health, suicide and the intense darkness which is a constant battle for so many…..This is not the tone in which I usually write on this topic but I feel I need to write these words in this moment. please skip this post if this is too heavy to read x

*Audio is included if you would prefer me to read it to you x

MATTHEW SHARED TWO PHOTOS OF THE MOON JUST ONE WEEK AGO AND ASKED IF ‘WE UNDERSTOOD WHAT HE WAS TRYING TO TELL US?’ HE ALSO SHARED A VIDEO OF CRANBERRIES JUST ONE WEEK AGO TOO - READ WHAT YOU MIGHT BETWEEN THE LINES BUT I’M SENSING HE WAS SENDING OUT A MESSAGE.

In the middle of last night, the very sad news broke that the lovely and much loved tv personality and actor Matthew Perry had left this world. Of course not confirmed but my gut tells me, & I’m sure you are feeling it too….That from the signalled signs that he drowned in his LA bath tub like lots of many others of our favourite celebrities who have left in this same way ( Whitney, Aaron, John, Dolores and the list goes on and on), no more words need to be said (and they won’t). Sadly we have lost another. Another human. Another heart. Another mind. Another gifted soul. Another beautiful son, friend and a wonderfully talented person has left way before their time. Matthew was so brave particularly in recent years coming forward to talk about his struggles particularly with addiction. I admired him so much, more so for that, than even all the screen time he contributed to so many of us. Yes I am like everyone else a huge fan of Friends. I actually watch an episode every single night before I go to sleep so I will definitely be looking at it different tonight when I go to close my eyes 🫶

See at the end of the day, Matthew was a human. He was just one of us trying to travel along this path called life and he too met the shadows, the darkness and the struggles that we all meet as we go day to day on this journey. He so bravely carried his cross and in recent years with his book launching, he really wore a badge of a warrior trying to help others who recognised his path ✨

As this story broke in Ireland, not only within my fellow country men and women, but across the world, you could literally hear the sigh of sadness of every single person who woke up to this dark news. The sigh and sadness that we have yet again…. lost the battle! We have lost another good person who really shouldn’t be gone! I want to re-iterate that no confirmation of suicide of any kind has been confirmed in relation to Matthew and I hope with all hope that will be the case, but in the following part of this substack I am going to raise the discussion and the topic of why I feel suicide is on the rise across the world at the moment. For many, the heaviness I feel Matthew was feeling - it does indeed get too heavy and from my personal experience of standing at way many funerals in which the beautiful person has died by suicide I take this moment to take a further look into what might be contributing to so many people feeling that they can’t stay here anymore and that the option of leaving is their only choice

💔We are losing brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, friends and family every single day in this heartbreaking way 💔 & if we were honest we need to face up to the fact that directly or indirectly we are all playing a part in them letting go 💔Their loss is on us if our conscience allows it. These are not deaths that should have happened but instead each life lost should really be a catalyst to make us change and to make us move… They should highlight to us, that as human race we are simply and sadly - failing each other! And that failing is the fact that we are moving apart rather than together!

👈 👉

Matthew’s death signals for me the absolute outright failing on all our parts to help each other. Something has gone wrong on earth and we are not calling it out. Sadly, as a society that have so much - we actually have very little when it comes to the important things. We are failing in a big way when it comes to friendship! We are failing when it comes to the fact that we are creating and intensifying the loneliness people are feeling! 💔We are failing when it comes to being consistent in our patterns to help each other! We are failing when it comes to kindness and checking in with each other! Sadly the war may be in the Middle East east at this moment, but the war is much bigger than that. The war in the Middle East is a symptom of the war we have created on the ground and it is creeping into every home. The war of not being happy within ourselves is one thing and then the next is the unhappiness we hold towards each other. To fight with each other is not only sadly happening in Israel and Gaza but it is happening in our hearts and in so many homes (and in our minds) and therefore fuels the big picture of discontent and anger across our globe…….

What has gone wrong?

Of course man and woman have never lived blissfully in peace over the centuries and wars are something we have all learned about as we sat in our history classes in school. But genuinely when my teacher used to talk about World War’s and such, when I was much younger I always thought about them as being in the past. I would sit there listening & thinking ‘oh yeah the stuff that happened when people had nothing. Of course they fought with each other - that makes sense right?!?’….Never thinking as I grew up, and grew older that as the world became a much wealthier, capitalist driven culture and when everyone had so much, that we would not only continue to fight with each other but we would actually continue to kill each other too. We now kill for nothing really. We kill just because we are in such distaste of ourselves that our aim can be to hurt someone else to make us feel good. How messed up have we become? We kill each other not always outright, but in little ways. Little chips. Little knocks. Little jabs of intentional rejection. Little hooks of upsetting angles. Little moves of ‘I’ll hurt you before you hurt me’. Little cracks caused to someone’s confidence but done with intent to lessen that person. To lesson their hope. To lesson their light. Little strikes of jealousy leering into someone who is just innately good.

What have we become?

In the past it was to gain more, to possess more from those who might have lots but we now live in a time where most have a lot. And that is the big thing that worries me most. We have so much and we have never been so unhappy, so lonely and so lost. The darkness doesn’t have to do much to enter us, as we have left the door wide open and we are not willing to step in enough and consistently help someone else it if it’s not our door.

And Why is that?

Well for what my tuppence is worth, I believe it is because we have forgotten what happiness truly is. As the world has got more access to money, we have placed happiness somewhere between status, stuff and selfishness. We have forgotten that happiness does not live in stuff. It does not live in big houses. It does not live in fame. Nor even fortune. It does not live in success (whatever that might mean to you). It does not live in travel. It does not live in the sun shining. It does not live in Instagram posts or brags of the next adventure or nights out. It doesn’t it live in a big wedding or a World Cup medal or even 3 million followers. Nope it lives in none of the things in which today’s society of the modern day holds so high in esteem. And this is where I feel we have gone so wrong.

The only one true place happiness lives is inside of us when we are SEEN, when we are HEARD and when we ARE LOVED!💖

LOVE seems to be some forgotten idea nowadays.

Instead we are surrounded by bad bad news and we are being fed fear for breakfast, dinner and tea. And of course the result of that is we have a society, a world that is afraid. Post Covid - we still haven’t spoken or reviewed what happened in that massive world event that actually harmed us all. I’m really beginning to think we haven’t even learned from the pandemic. Worse still we probably have pushed a lot, if not it all, under the carpet and have just decided to keep going. It doesn’t seem to matter who died or how they died in that time or who didn’t feel seen, heard or loved. It doesn’t even matter who got left behind in the carnage of that time - mordern day society is adamant to just keep moving and it doesn’t matter who doesn’t make it through. We have applied this same oversight in day to day living since being ‘let back out’. ‘We are all in together’ has never been a bigger lie or false sales pitch that I once heard. We now live in a time where we can very much live isolated& not needing anyone - this is probably the worse social setting and mindset we could have ever created, accepted and now live within that boundary of what we call ‘life’ where we don’t need anybody else & we think we can do this alone.

It actually might take an ice age and a few dinosaurs to walk down the road, for modern day society to lift its head, call out what actually is gone wrong and then moves towards stopping, taking time and making the necessary changes to our behaviour where we actually look our for everyone and not just ME!

One failing that I feel is making everything much worse nowadays is that;

‘WE ARE NOT BEING HUMAN ENOUGH TO EACH OTHER ANYMORE.’

We are not minding each other enough. We are not talking to each other enough. We are not engaging with strangers enough with the intention of gaining a friend or just to be human to each other. We are not minding our friends enough. We are getting too wrapped up in ourselves that we like a snail lock ourselves into our shells until we need something from someone else. It is the most unhealthiest way to live and we are not questioning it! And my heart breaks because of this! What kind of world are we leaving for the next generation if not to show love, kindness and compassion to all we meet. Not just those we know or those who have the stuff, the status or the selfishness to shout the loudest! What about the quiet ones? What about the humble? What about those who feel alone and are alone? What about the ones who have nobody to shout for them? Or whose voices aren’t being listened to?

Coming back to Matthew as a moment in time, that I feel we really should sit up and question things and the reason I am writing this piece is that I feel if we don’t take these losses personally in responsibility, well then what is the point? What is the point in celebrating his life if not to identify that we contributed to the reason he felt so broken! To take his leaving out of it, and just to know someone somewhere is feeling dark, low and just broken right at this minute, how is our world and the way we act and behave in it, helping that person going forward, how is this world and all of us in it contributing to them seeing the light? ….If this moment alone, just makes us think harder about the way we are living our lives and ultimately how we are treating each other on a day to day basis, and if this is what comes from Matthew’s loss (which in fairness is why I felt I needed to write today) then I know Matthew would be nodding his head in Heaven. He never shied away from sharing that he felt very low and how for him his addictions were driven by shame and a tough road of personal darkness in his mind and heart. What a beautiful heart and mind and I wish he didn’t feel that low. But the one thing that is true, is Matthew’s story is all our stories in that none of us will or have escaped the darkness. What has happened is the world is very good at shaming and pushing down on those who own that darkness and even further loneliness is created! We need to call this out!

Matthew, Whitney, Aaron, Dolores are people just like us, who in their final moment, could not beat their darkness on this earth and sadly in the end I do believe it was took them all whether intently or not. It is in this moment when the world is feeding so much darkness to us and so much darkness is taken over, we need to stand forward with compassion and not conflict. Going forward, we need to learn to lead with our hearts and not be false by thinking our heads is the way towards a better world. We need to stay close to people we love and check in with people who matter to us. We need to be kind to all not just people we choose. Our attitudes and our behaviours to strangers MATTER! We need to say hello to people even if we don’t know them.

Loneliness is what is crippling the world and that is not down to any one person but to us all. Matthew is a public loss but everyday there are thousands of families that go through the exact same loss as his family and friends are going through today. When someone dies through darkness leading them there, it is never the people they loved that didn’t try hard enough. It is never the people who loved them fault. The heaviness is within the fibres of our being and sometimes the dark just gets a step ahead and none of us will ever know any further than that. Any of us can be in their shoes at any time. The family and friends left behind are indeed the ones who never gave up on that person. Their families and friends are the ones who kept that person going again and again and again and kept them alive. And that is what family and friends are for! ✨

The one aspect that is to highlighted is the world as a whole and what we are contributing as the overarching feeling in the air and how we are treating each other on a ground level basis.

Elton John has a song called ‘Can you feel the love tonight? The lyrics open as follows and they are serious food for thought in this moment:

“There's a calm surrender
To the rush of day
When the heat of a rolling wind
Can be turned away
An enchanted moment
And it sees me through
It's enough for this restless warrior
Just to be with you

And can you feel the love tonight?
It is where we are
It's enough for this wide-eyed wanderer
That we got this far.” ✨

These words alone make tears well up in my eyes. Why is that? Because I can’t feel the love in the air anymore not like I should be able. Instead I can see & feel bullets, hurtful words, bloodshed, anger, people left behind, people fighting with each other over opinions and just a distaste and disregard not only for human life but also for human connection and I’m not even talking about the war in Gaza…..I’m talking about us as a human race. We have let the world move forward fast while leaving love, kindness, heart to heart connection along with genuine friendship way behind.

We can blame technology. We can blame the government. We can blame money. But at the end of the day, this earth is ours. This is our planet. This is our families we’re talking about. This is all about us and the power of love lives in our hands……💖

It’s time we wake up. Today it’s Matthew Perry’s family and loved ones who are devastated and we should feel for them like it is us at the centre of that tornado of sadness. We will say all the right words in this minute but will we bring them into our behaviours tomorrow that is the question. Another family will travel through the storm and be broken and it will continue until we make the changes we need to put LOVE & FRIENDSHIP right back in the focus of our lives. UNTIL WE LOOK EACH OTHER IN THE EYE AGAIN AND SHOW KINDNESS WITHOUT MOTIVE - THIS SILENCE PANDEMIC WILL CONTINUE 💔🤐💔

It is our responsibility to break this cycle. It is down to us to create a better world for those coming next not leave it worse than we found it. And that is what we need to change. We need to change our attitudes to each other. We should not be driven or motivated to talk to someone because we need something. NO! Instead we should talk to each other because it’s good for us. It’s good for both of us. And is the only life saving measure that when the battle of darkness comes knocking on our door, and I promise you it will, it comes to us all, we will be ready and we will be able to fight it back and replace it with the light and love in which we were working on in everyday up to that moment!

When tomorrow comes, smile more, love more and leave this world better than we found it. And most importantly let’s hold each other tighter and not let another hand slip from ours.

Love and light always from my heart to yours,

Lou

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