Why mental health awareness should last more than just a week

It’s at the weekends that I feel it most keenly – the lack of people to call on – what with no family nearby, and relations often strained, and the friends I keep up with either scattered far and wide, or unreliable, busy or a combination of the three.

My own family – the one I started at 24 – offers displacement activity that fends off the loneliness – the void that came from a fractured family, from constantly wishing for things to be different, to be someone’s priority, and relationships that were warm and respectful rather than often frazzled and fractious.

So I keep busy – as much as I can, filling the absence with exercise or cleaning, organising my life into colour coded boxes so I can feel in control of the chaos just below the surface.

But focusing on the now can only take up so much of the present. Anxiety edges in at 3am in monotonous nightly insomnia, or on Sunday afternoons when other people are visiting their families, or drinking beers in groups on sunny afternoons; and especially at Christmas when my own preparations – living up to some childhood ideal – the one time I felt loved – sends me haywire in an unfulfilling climax of excess.

These days, thanks to a husband who (mostly) puts my wellbeing above all else, I have a bolthole to escape to, with all its accompanying admin that keeps the introspection at bay. But I can’t run away from myself – the fear of being disliked, the society anxiety in the playground picking up the kids, the easily bruised ego, and skin that always has some blemish, the hair that won’t grow (except on my face) and career that never really got going.

Much of my time is spent hiding these facts from the rest of the world, be it in happy-go-lucky status updates, over-zealous grooming routines and ruthless photo-editing that even so, can’t hide the worry lines, encroaching greys and cellulite I pummel to little avail. And it’s not even in an effort to be perfect, but simply to be more acceptable to the internal critic who tells me, whatever I do, I’ll never quite be good enough. But for who? The people who care about me like me as I am; it’s the ones who don’t bother that I need to stop worrying about; more than likely, they’ve got issues of their own.

You can’t change anyone else, the psychologists say; only yourself, and then, I would argue back, only by so much. So all the positivity, exercise, good food, optimism and self-improvement in the world can’t change the basic facts of wiring, upbringing, opportunity and, yes, hormones – because those little bitches can play total havoc on a regular basis, but are at least, and for now, under pharmaceutical control.

For me, maintaining good mental health takes constant vigilance – a tightrope walk between keeping control and letting go; of shrugging off perceived lapses while reaching out and offering support; of being kind to myself and others while feeling sometimes the same respect is not always offered in return. Of learning when to say no and when to say yes – getting it right can take up so much energy as to leave me exhausted – just not when I should be- at night, in the witching hours between 3am and 5.

But right now, things feel as though they are more or less in balance, except for the little abscess of self-doubt in my chest whose poison threatens to spill over every time I feel let down, or find myself failing to consider other people’s challenges or their limitations. We’re all flawed, fragile people viewing life through our own warped lens. Beating oneself up won’t change that, but neither can trying to second guess anyone else. The best we can hope for is acceptance – if not always understanding. Which is why better mental health awareness is so important – for all I’d ask what it can actually change, in a society that’s set up to breed resentment, divisions, and to keep one another apart. Though even I don’t have any solutions for how it could be different.

But the realisation that we’re all suffering, one way or another can be helpful. The recognition that it’s rarely personal, how people are, but also that those who really care will show up, on time, with wine –  and those are the ones we in turn should prioritise, rather than the always lates, always making excuses, or the ones who just don’t message back.

There’s very little we can do about them, except offer to lend an ear, if one may help, or at the very least a cup of tea. And if they don’t take up the offer, it probably says more about them than about you: that they don’t like tea, or don’t have time, than how likeable you might actually be.

Good mental health is not a pill you can pop (although the best thing you can do is get help, because as a real friend of mine said, accepting you need it is half the battle). It’s only then that you can offer the same understanding to others – when you turn off the internal critic inside yourself. It’s creates a virtuous circle of kindness that helps you be less hard on everyone else. But learning to be okay with yourself is the biggest battle – and the one you must win – because at the end of the week,  it’s you you have to live with, when the rest of the world’s asleep.