LATE: Mental-Health Monday

It’s Thursday, June 15th, and I’m playing blog catch up — because I’ve been fairly low again this week.

I’m working on getting better. My psychiatrist is adding a temporary medication to help lift me out of this trough, which is a combination of melancholic depression and unmotivated depression, as far as we can tell. If you’re reading this and you’ve experienced depression, you’ll understand something I talk about in my book, which is that being depressed makes it extra difficult to pursue proper support and treatment for depression. I’m grateful that I am healthy enough to ask for help.

Asking for help isn’t easy. I think it’s a basic human instinct to protect ourselves and seem as invulnerable as possible, and asking for help leaves us open to rejection, scorn, and misunderstanding. I’m a writer (you might be, too), and one of the reasons it’s taken me so long to find a path as a writer is that writing involves almost daily rejection, sometimes from other people, sometimes from ourselves.

People will tell you to develop a thick skin if you want to be a writer. A dear, wonderful, talented friend recently told me that you have to have a thick skin if you want to work in publishing. I believed them.

And yet. This morning, I was reading a piece about Kate Beaton’s brilliant graphic memoir “Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands” in the London Review of Books. Beaton spent two years, as a younger woman, working in Alberta to pay off her college debts, the only way she could do so, coming from the impoverished region of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. The other workers are mostly men, and many of them are sexual predators. She is raped twice. One of her colleagues — male — tells her she’ll have to grow a thicker skin if she wants to survive.

That took me aback. (Beaton, it should be noted, writes honestly about her trauma but does not blame all of the men, or even the industry that keeps them all in chains.) To grow a thicker skin was a way to accommodate the bad behavior of others.

We know that we can’t control anyone else’s behavior. We know that every occupation, every industry, and every way of living requires adjustments. But for those of us who live with mental-health challenges, might there be a way, at least in our search for wellness, to keep our skins thinner? To view asking for help as a sign of strength and not vulnerability?

I mentioned the phrase “human instinct” above, and I know that for millions of years and in different eras human beings have had to rely on physical strength just for survival. There’s a reason we all watch the Olympics: “Faster Higher Stronger.” We’re programmed for good, better, best.

Or we were programmed that way. I have hope, from the progress we’ve made in mental-health education in the past few decades, that we can also now embrace the new Olympic Games motto, which is “Fast Higher Stronger — Together.” We have the Paralympics to demonstrate how much people can accomplish physically when they have challenges.

When we have challenges, mental challenges, we too can accomplish a great deal. Sometimes not on the same schedule, or measured by the same scale. But I believe that it’s okay not to accomplish much, and I also believe that the greatest accomplishment is to hold out a hand in the hopes that someone will clasp it and provide strength when our own is tough to find.

May you be well, may you be safe, may you be happy, may you be at peace.