If you have more than four friends, chances are that you love someone with a mental illness. Your friend in Calculus may have just been diagnosed with depression. Your Thursday Night Football buddy could suffer from PTSD. Your best friend's daily vitamin might include anxiety medication that she's been taking since she was 14 years old. It is incredibly likely that someone in your life is suffering quietly considering one in four Americans have a diagnosable mental illness. This is what we want you to know.
1. We're sorry for being exhausted.
It's draining to constantly fight with your brain day in and day out so more often than not, we have no energy left after a while. We'll go through days at a time that we are just too tired to do anything and we're sorry that we have to turn you down. We just need some time to recuperate, please don't think that we're blowing you off.
2. We're sorry for being exhausting.
We get it. Bad mental health days are stressful for everyone, not just the person going through it. It's hard to have to peel your friend off the bathroom floor once a month without a reason for being there in the first place. We understand that it can be draining to deal with, we do it on a daily basis with ourselves.
3. We're sorry for being sorry.
We're going to apologize a million and one times for needing things and feeling the way that we do. This society that we share doesn't look too kindly on us for not having a visible, physical illness and needing help anyway. Having such a stigmatized diagnosis makes us feel shame for it and so we are probably going to apologize any time we talk about it.
4. Not all days are bad days.
Just because we spent the last three days attached to our couch doesn't mean that tomorrow we won't catch a break from it. These days are everything to us. We want to do everything we possibly can to experience it because we know that this feeling is temporary. Please forgive us when we get a little excited.
5. Some days are really, really bad.
Please understand that for all the good and bad days, there are still a handful of worse days. Chances are, we won't even tell you that we're having them. If we suddenly go radio silent or lose our spark, understand that it's not our fault -- we're trying to hold it together but things just unravel anyway sometimes.
5. We appreciate you.
It is nothing short of an Everest-sized blessing to have friends who try to understand what you need and stick around while you figure out what that is. We lean on you more than you could even be aware of. It's so important to have people who are understanding and flexible -- it's absolutely crucial to have someone to love you through it.
Thank you.
