This one isn’t about my own mental health. It’s about someone else’s, and what it’s like standing next to it.
For a long time I thought being supportive meant having the right thing to say. I became something of a professional suggester. Have you tried going for a walk. What about therapy. Maybe if you ate something. I meant every word of it, and I was, in hindsight, exhausting to be around.
Then I’d overcorrect completely — go quiet, give space, tell myself I was respecting their process, when really I think I was just relieved not to be doing the harder, slower work of actually staying present. From their side, I imagine that looked a lot like disappearing.
The bit that took me embarrassingly long to accept: I cannot fix another person. Obvious, written down like that. Much less obvious at eleven at night, when someone you love is struggling and doing nothing feels unbearable.
Some of the most useful evenings I’ve had were the ones where I made tea, sat nearby, and didn’t try to engineer the night into ending on an upswing. No advice. No plan. Just there.
I also underestimated how tiring the whole thing is, and then felt guilty for being tired, since obviously I wasn’t the one having the harder time — which, in retrospect, is its own small trap, comparing whose difficulty counts more.
Eventually I started actually talking to a couple of people I trust instead of performing “fine” at everyone, including myself. That’s probably the thing that helped most, longer term.
Discussion prompt: If you’ve supported someone through something hard, what genuinely helped, and what did you expect to help and didn’t?
— sidekick19