We are each other's mental health rapid tests

​It's World Mental Health Day. It's worth sharing again this piece I wrote in 2021.

***
A dear friend reached out to me recently and told me a friend of hers recently lost his life to suicide. I could hear the heartbreak in her words. I could imagine the heartbreaks the people who loved him were feeling.

And, I could also deeply feel the pain her friend had been living in prior to his suicide.

No one saw it coming, my friend told me. And I told her, you know what, many times we don't.

We don't, because people who are pushing their feelings away the moment they appear have often mastered hiding them from OTHERS in that very same moment.

They hide them with charisma and laughter.

They hide them with achievements.

They hide them with service to others.

They hide their abnormal pain with images of far more acceptable human delight. Because the reality is, people in pain know the only people who have a harder time accepting their pain than them are the people closest to them.

We are all fighting for two things in this world. We are fighting to understand ourselves. And we are fighting to be understood by others.

Nothing opens the doors for us to better understand ourselves than feeling a desire to be understood by others. The moment someone says I want to know the feelings you're pushing away, that's the moment you start sharing the feelings that allow you to understand yourself for the very first time in your life.

That's the moment you begin walking the path toward enjoying life and not living with the exhaustion that comes with pretending that you do.

As friends and family and neighbors and country, I think we have to get more comfortable with pain. We have to get more comfortable with being Ok with the idea that not everyone is OK.

For almost two years now, we've been way more than comfortable talking publicly about whether someone does or does not have a virus. But if someone is struggling with their mental health, we don't seem to be nearly as interested in developing rapid tests for that.

I need to tell you - We ARE each other's rapid tests.

By being people who are as eager to understand the people closest to us as we are eager to understand ourselves, we become each other's rapid tests.

By coming to better understand the pain YOU are pushing away isn't much different than the pain YOUR NEIGHBOR is pushing away, we become each other's rapid tests.

By recognizing that much of the shared chaos we are living in is really our shared efforts to push away the pains that pain us and the pains we think will pain the people around us - and realizing it's time for less pushing and more pulling each other in, we become each other's rapid tests.

Ours and theirs.

It's time to grant ourselves and each other permission to stop pushing and start embracing.

Stop pushing and start accepting.

Stop pushing and start healing.

Mental health is not that 'other' part of our overall health. It's simply an important part of our health. And like all other parts of our health, sometimes it's well; sometimes it's not.

When we begin embracing that - we'll begin embracing the opportunity to make each other as well as we've ever been.

We become each other's rapid tests.