When we see a life in wreckage, someone drowning, a marriage dissolving, a career imploding, a mind fraying at the edges, someone suffering mentally and/or physically our first instinct can sometimes be to stand on the dry, safe land and point at the tide, explaining to the person gasping for air exactly which currents they should have avoided to avoid the pain they are going through now and not reach for the life jacket or just be a supportive listening friend.
When someone is drowning, the last thing they need is a lecture from the shore. They need someone willing to get a little wet for them.
And if you can’t reach, if you don’t have the capacity, the words, or the understanding, then kindness still has another shape, and that is supportive silence. The kind that refuses to wound further. The kind that reminds them that they are not alone in the water. One that chooses not to turn someone’s worst moment into your commentary or soap box.
If someone in your circle is struggling today, resist the urge to be the professor. Don’t audit their mistakes while they are still clearing the salt from their lungs. Just be the rescue. Or, if you can’t be the rescue, be the quiet. Let the lessons wait for the morning. For now, just let them breathe.
September is suicide awareness month and I think it is very important for us all to realize how much mental illness affects someone’s desire to commit suicide and how prevalent it is in our society. From celebrities to teenagers, from CEO’s to stay at home moms, suicide and mental illness affects people of all walks of life and different stressors. And it is important for us to be there for them, to be the calm and their steady, to sit with them and listen, just listen, so they feel heard. That is what I have wanted most in my darkest times was to be seen and heard truely for how much pain I was experiencing emotionally and not for someone to fix it, but acknowledge it and empathize with it.
Our culture is a culture of advice from talk shows to self-help books, to social media reels everyone wants to tell us in the middle of a crisis what we did wrong and how to fix it. But maybe it can’t be fixed or there is no easy solution but our life is still falling apart and we are in shambles, what then? We need support, quiet steady support. Holding back from the advice giving to let us sit with our pain and accept it, to have the chance to work through it on our own terms, but being there for us is so important.
I will always be an advocate for the mentally ill as I have suffered from mental illness myself. I therefore have the unique ability to see things regarding the mental health world from both sides as both the patient and the advocate. I understand suicidal and depressive, intrusive thoughts because I have experienced them. Now, can I explain them fully even though I have experienced them, no, but I can understand them and empathize with someone experiencing those things in the way someone who has never had mental illness can’t because they haven’t had those experiences fortunately.
I think the best thing to remember is to be kind when someone’s world is falling apart and sometime supportive silence is the kindest tool at one’s disposal. If advice seems too harsh for the situation I would refrain from giving it until specifically asked for that said advice. And being there for someone can take many forms other than just advice, so utilize those first. We all may be someone’s only hope in a dark place and being that person to someone comes with a great responsibility of helping them through a rough time that without your support may result in drowning or suicide. Be the steady, be the calm, be the silent supporter.
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