By the end of the day, the building was almost empty.
It had been twelve hours. Station after station. Line after line. The same annual screening every unit ran through that building, the way countless units had before us.
Everyone else had finished and gone home.
I sat alone in a side office with the lights mostly off. My hat was in my hands. I was crushing it without realizing I was doing it.
Resilience: the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
Adversity: difficulties; misfortune.
Difficult: needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand.
Mental Health Awareness Month is upon us. But why? Why bother? You probably will not read this anyway. You will just keep doom scrolling.
I have never been much of a cheerleader. I do not get too excited about things. For a while I wondered if that was a shyness thing. Now I think it is something else. Battle-worn people, jaded if you want to call it that, tend to enjoy things with a side-eye of skepticism and find struggle oddly comforting. Hardship fits like a familiar pair of jeans.
So there will be no fanfare here. And no public trauma dump to fish for pity, or some fake, short-lived, emotion-driven interest in mental health. If you want my story, ask. This is just an extension of what I already do as a therapist. I hold up a mirror, so you, dear reader, might catch a glimpse of something that needs adjusting.
It is time to find a therapist. Most of us already keep a short list of people we trust. A primary care doctor. A good mechanic. A barber who knows what we want without being told. Therapy belongs on that list. Most people just have not added it yet.
We do our best with what we know. But there is no way to know what we do not know until someone shows us. When things start going sideways, it is a lot like the check engine light coming on. You can ignore it for a while. Eventually, something under the hood demands attention.
If feeling alone has been hard for you before, there is a good chance it is harder now.
We were not built to do life in isolation. And yet more of us are isolated than ever. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General called loneliness an epidemic, with health risks on par with smoking. About half of American adults report feeling it. So if you are carrying this, you are not strange, and you are not alone in it. You are part of a very large, very quiet crowd.
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