For years now, I have been less than quiet about my mental health issues. For the longest time, I was under the assumption that it was just limited to Depression and Anxiety as a result from PTSD. But last summer I found out that I was actually diagnosed with ADHD as a child, but I was never medicated. Since that bombshell, I have been doing my best to piece together what was reality and what was just my mental illness. For close to 40 years, I thought I was just a victim of bullying and harassment, but it turns out that it was so much more than that. How much of me being on the spectrum and no one knowing how to deal with it, and how much of it was simply people being mean and cruel to a boy trying to make his way in the world?

And let me tell you, I am no closer to an answer than I was when I found out over Labor Day weekend of 2021.

When you go through a majority of your life, thinking your perspective on the world is the truth, and clinging to that truth as your entire basis for reality, and then have that rug pulled out from under you in a short 5-minute conversation is nothing short of devastating. I think I took the news decently. I simply ordered another beer with my meal.

But since that revelation, no one wants to talk about it. The stigma of mental health being something you don’t talk about is still very strong, and I’ve been doing what I can to remove that stigma – and making sure people can start feeling comfortable talking about their mental health issues openly and honestly. Nothing should be bottled up. When you talk about your issues, it removes a weight from your shoulders. The burden of hoarding around some terrible, deep dark secret feels lighter. You’re not the only one carrying it anymore. And it doesn’t feel like a burden either, but more of a detail that just is. The mountain has become a molehill. So, when I said that nobody wants to talk about it – that wasn’t entirely true.

My current issue is simply, nobody wants to talk about it for free. The last time I had an actual validating conversation about my mental health, I had to bill it under my health insurance. And I think that is one of my most overwhelming issues. I don’t feel comfortable talking to anyone about what I’m really going through anymore. I try to talk to some, and they immediately turn it into a competition,

“Oh you think you have it bad…”.

I talk to others and they are dismissive,

“Why are you making such a big fuss over something like that?”

Some like to turn it back on me,

“Well maybe if you didn’t do XYZ, you wouldn’t be…”

Some have absolutely zero clue what to do our say, so they flounder,

“Dude, that sucks. Well, best of luck to ya.”

or my personal favorite, the “You know I’m always here for you” crowd. You know the ones. They can tell you are having a rough time at it, and they immediately say “If you ever want to talk , I’m here for you.” The problem I have found with these, is that when you need them, they are nowhere to be found.  So what do I do? I do the absolutely worst thing possible about it. 

Nothing. I bottle it up, and keep it to myself. Because I have been taught decade, over decade over decade – that what I’m going through, simply does not matter. My feelings… they do not matter. My pain… does not matter. My thoughts… do not matter. And I’ve learned it so well, that even when someone genuinely wants to sit down and talk, I have little or nothing to say. The vault has been locked for so long, I have forgotten the combination.

Oh, of course I’ll talk about simple experiences on social media. Some minor issue that I have had to deal with in the past that I feel others may benefit from, but it’s all scratching the surface. I have never, truly, opened up, and I think at this point in my life, I’m not going to – unless a breakthrough happens. But I’m not going to hold my breath.

Outside of not feeling comfortable talking to anyone about what’s going on under the surface, I don’t really feel like I’m allowed to be broken. This might be true, it might not, but it just feels like this is true. If I’m feeling low, and someone asks how I’m doing, I can’t get too far into the issue before some other crisis occurs to someone else, and we all have to drop what we are doing and go make sure they are OK. And when the smoke settles, and the healing begins, what I was going through has been completely forgotten; A constant victim of the short attention span of humanity.

Now, the weirdest situation I’ve ever been put in is a complete stranger approaching me and telling me that “I’m here for you”, “You can talk to me if you need to”, and to those individuals, I have to say that I thank you for wanting to help, but if I’m not going to talk to people I’ve known for years, family, friends and loved ones that are much closer to me – what makes you think I’m going to open up to a complete stranger that just liked a video of mine on the internet?

It’s nothing personal, but that’s just weird.

Now let’s discuss professional help. Am I in therapy? Not anymore. I was for a long time, but I got to a point where I knew I had all the tools I needed to better myself. When I got low I would do THESE exercises, and when I got suicidal I would do THESE exercises, and so on and so forth. But I hit a wall. There were certain things in my life that no therapist or doctor would be able to resolve. These are obstacles that I have to conquer on my own. No amount of couch time would fix them for me. So I stopped going because I knew it wasn’t going to help me anymore.

I know what I need in my life to truly get past most of my demons. Do I think I will ever get it? Probably not. But I continue to search. Because that is what life is all about. It’s about making your tomorrow a little better than your today. Keep pushing forward until you reach that goal you set for yourself. Of course, there’s that little Melvin Udall inside my head saying “What if this is as good as it gets?” and that usually slows me down for a while, but it hasn’t ever stopped me. So, until I find what I’m looking for, I do what I can to help others with their struggles, a bit of advice here, a tad of wisdom there, crack a joke, leave ‘em with a smile, and hopefully their tomorrow will be better than their today. And it helps, in it’s small, nice to know sort of way, it does help. But it helps in the way that using a ladle to drain the ocean would help. It’s something, but infinitesimal.

Surviving your own mental health demons is a lot like the story of Sisyphus in Greek Mythology. The story goes that when Death came for Sisyphus, Sisyphus chained Death up, so that no one would die. But the gods came to Death’s aid and freed him. Sisyphus’s punishment for holding Death captive was to roll a giant boulder up a steep mountain. At the end of each day, when Sisyphus would complete the task, the boulder would roll back down the mountain, forcing Sisyphus to complete this task all over again the next day.

Every morning you wake up and you are going to have to struggle with your mental health in one way or another. It may be mild, it may be severe, it may even knock you in a direction you had no intention of going, but you still have to push through it until the end of the day. You go to bed every night, exhausted and unable to get comfortable because of your mental gymnastics, and for some reason your brain simply will not shut off. You’ll lie there mulling over situations that will most likely never happen until the gas in your brain will finally run out, and you’ll get your normal 2-3 hours of sleep where you’ll wake up, still exhausted and having to deal with another boulder you’ll have to roll up a mountain.

Now you have an idea of why many with mental health issues often commit suicide. Some think that it’s an act of mercy: they don’t have to be a burden to anyone anymore. Some just can’t deal with the voices in their own head. And some are just tired, and can’t fight any longer. Their tank is empty and they can’t go any further. 

Of course, before they go, they’ll hear the familiar “Just think of So-n-so. What would they do?” And, honestly, if that is your solution to the problem of someone considering suicide – do that person a favor. Instead of putting that guilt trip on them, just push them off a cliff instead. They won’t feel any pain that way. There are people who are seriously struggling with their own inner demons and you thought that laying more guilt on top of them, adding more weight to their insurmountable load is what’s going to bring them back from the brink?!

You must be a Catholic to think that!

And we’re back to the stigma of why people don’t talk about their mental health in the first place. What we need is a shoulder to rest on from time to time. Not always, just when the load gets heavy. We don’t need you to solve our problems, we just need you to listen to them so you can understand WHY we carry them. We don’t need your charity or your pity, we get enough of that as it is simply by saying “Hi, I’m Murphy and I suffer from Depression”. The amount of frowning or crying emojis I get just from stating a fact is embarrassing, and it makes me wish I never said anything in the first place.

Look at it this way, when you see someone struggling to carry a couch up a flight of stairs, you wouldn’t just stand there and yell “PIVOT” and do nothing else, would you? You wouldn’t just look at them and observe “Wow, looks like you’re having some trouble there. Well, don’t give up, there are people upstairs who need to sit on that, y’know!” NO! You would ask if they need any help, and then help them get the couch upstairs.

It’s the same thing with mental health. When you see someone struggling, you ask if they want to talk, and if they do, then you shut the fuck up and listen. This isn’t about you. It isn’t about how YOU can make them feel better. It isn’t about your struggle. It’s about them. So make it about them. Be the help they need. If they need you to listen, then just listen. If they need your advice, give it to them. If they need help, lend it. You have no idea how they are struggling and what kind of help they need until you stop your lips from flapping for five seconds and make it about them for a change. 

We all have the ability to bring mental health out into the open and strip the negative connotation away from it that it is not to be discussed. But we can’t do that until we actually put in the work. And the work is so simple. You literally have to just sit there, and do nothing. Just listen to them. Just let them speak, let them share with you, let them be validated.