12/09/2026
R U OK? Day was this week, but maybe the conversation matters even more on all the ordinary days that follow it. 🤍
I think mental health is one of those things we believe we understand, right up until life teaches us that we don’t.
Last year was, without question, the hardest year of my life.
Not because one catastrophic thing happened. There was loss, friendships changed and life happened, but nothing I wouldn’t ordinarily have coped with.
It was as though, after a lifetime of coping, my brain simply reached its limit.
I don’t know that I’ll ever find the words for constant panic. I felt disconnected from myself, terrified of my own body and like I was losing my mind. I rolled from one panic attack into another, with even sleep becoming something I feared.
I had to claw my way back to myself.
The photo I’m sharing is from that time. I’m lying in a hospital bed, smiling.
I’d just been told I was being treated for a suspected blood clot on my lung. Strangely, I felt relieved. I remember thinking, f**k… there’s a reason my body is doing this.
By then, every check engine light in my body felt like it was on.
Somehow a physical explanation was easier to understand than my nervous system being capable of making me feel that unwell.
And yet, there I am smiling. I think that sums up mental health better than words ever could.
I journaled through that time. Last week I read an entry to my husband, with tears in both our eyes reading the words of someone terrified, sad about everything she was missing and guilty that her family had her.
I wish I could tell her how bloody hard she was fighting.
That year also began understanding a neurodivergent brain that had spent a lifetime masking, adapting and pushing through. Things I thought I needed to hide or try harder at were never character flaws.
My brain just experiences the world differently.
Those of us who have lived severe anxiety, depression or mental illness would never wish it upon anyone else.
We don’t want you to have to live it to understand it.
We just want you to know it isn’t a lack of strength, gratitude or trying.
Just ask, “Are you okay?”
And make space for the real answer. 🤍
