Mental Health

 I'm sure you have walked down the street one wind swept evening, shoes squelching wetly in the light drizzle, to see the ghostly pale form of a plastic bag, mutilated by some hungry urban fox somewhere, half drifting half rolling miserably across the road. Perhaps you, upon seeing it, put aside such environmental concerns as the biodegradability of plastic and stopped to look at the bag in order to briefly wonder what an apt metaphor for a tired and downcast state of mind the plastic bag could be. In which case I take this opportunity to humbly apologize to you for stealing your metaphor.
 However recently I had been feeling a little empty, lacking in confidence and an absence of general happiness, in short, I felt like a torn plastic bag. Of course I still had a certain amount of class and dignity in so far as being a torn plastic bag from Waitrose, not from Sainsbury's or Tesco's but my days of being a bag from Fortnum and Mason felt well and truly behind me.
 I'd been assaulted by a sudden torrent of doubts, I got the feeling that I wasn't as full of offensive witticism or snide remarks as I used to be, that I had become generally less amusing. Where was that verbose abusive flare with which I used to articulate statements designed only to irritate and upset? Where was the mind with which I had taken every opportunity to weave the most inappropriate and emotionally scarring of jokes into the conversation? Is this a mid-life crisis? In which case does that mean I only have sixteen more years to live? To put plainly, I felt like some spark that had burnt stubbornly in me for the last ten years or so had quite suddenly given up and vanished with a tired sigh, leaving behind only a fast dispersing smoke-like remnant of vaguely amusing cynicism.
 Even in the darkest of times however, there is light. On the very hour I was feeling least confident about myself, almost as if by fate, my school held a lunch time assembly on "Mental Health". An assembly there to cover lack of confidence, depression and other symptoms of teenage pubescent angst. With as much hope as someone mildly dejected can muster, I was, along with everyone else in my year group, shepherded into the assembly. Perhaps, just perhaps the talk would improve my mental health.
 As the chatter dies down, I wait in anticipation as the talk begins. The two women in charge walk onto the stage, armed with an optimistically colored power point behind them and a presumably helpful speech in their grasp. They open their mouths in preparation, I assume, of great enlightening words that will open my mind to the wonders of psychiatric treatment.
 "Hello," the first woman, let us call her Messiah One, announces while the second woman, Messiah Two, fiddles with the power point presentation, "We're here to talk to you about mental health. Do you know," a healthy pause as the power point changes slides, "That we all have different personality types."
 By which she of course means human beings are all, believe it or not, different and individual... my eyes are opened, not to new and enlightening facts about psychiatry as I had hoped but to the now painfully apparent fact that this talk is an irritatingly patronizing game of State the Obvious. With that comes the realization that I might as well replace the two women, Messiah one and two, with some suitably wizened looking bearded homeless man off the streets and he would fulfill the role of Messiah far better than the two on stage both in terms of appearance and genuine ability to enlighten.
 At that moment, fueled by vexation, my motivational spark rekindled and roared into a full blaze. And like the fallen warrior rising from amongst the corpse littered battle field to face the oncoming enemy or the limp fighter rising from amongst the graying bushes with the aid of Viagra to face the on coming...... I slowly raised my hand high into the air to make a contribution: an intelligent, malicious, needless, spiteful, cynical, provocative, irritating, misanthropic contribution to be articulated confidently and verbosely with a facetious grin across my lips.