Let it Pass

Personally, I struggle to know how to support both myself and friends with Mental Health, more than I do with explicit “my leg is on fire” problems. Two of the challenges are time and personality based. Your leg being on fire is solvable. Quickly. Your leg being on fire doesn’t change “who you are”. Mental Health professionals are trained to handle and understand things that most of us aren’t equipped to. The best we can do is be good friends. Sometimes that is hard. Especially if the issue changes who our friend is, and we feel like the friendship becomes lopsided. The leg stays on fire. The friend stays absent. Heather Plett wrote a beautiful article on what it means to “hold space” for people, and how to do it well. My take home is that as a friend we shouldn’t treat mental health challenges as legs on fire. We all have to deal with the waves in our heads and hearts. We aren’t problems to be solved. To hold space for each other, we have to hold space for ourselves. It’s a dance. Somehow, it’s a case of seeing the beauty in the dance rather than feeling overwhelmed. Going with it. Breathing into it. Experiencing it, and letting it pass.