Friendeavours: Friends Don’t Support My Wellbeing. They Are My Wellbeing

Three years ago, when I was in the throes of my first bout of bad mental health – undiagnosed post-natal depression and/or rage, plus sleep-deprivation – I remember my friend Alex coming to visit. The visit, I thought, went well. We drank tea and ate florentines (a breastfeeding staple) and chatted about our babies and partners and how we’d almost got divorced six times that week, even though I wasn’t even married. Standard.

But then, an hour or so after Alex had left, she called me. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew something was up – she hadn’t forgotten her wallet and there was no emergency: there was just – in her breath itself – an air of concern.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked. The most common of questions (now often reduced to a mean meme with the addition of ‘hun’) and yet, sometimes, it feels like the most profound interrogation.

‘Yes,’ I said, too quickly.

‘Are you really OK, though?’ she said, the smile gone from her voice. ‘I mean it.’

I cracked a few jokes to fob her off.

‘I mean it,’ she said, not laughing. I didn’t reply. She told me she’d call and check on me tomorrow.

I felt... cornered. What she knew, as did I, on some level, was that I was far from OK. But what she also knew was that I had to see that for myself to really start to get better. She didn’t tell me that I seemed weird (when I must have done because, looking back on the woman I was in that period, I barely know her); she just let me reach my own conclusions. She was so bloody gentle.

I hated Alex a little bit for making me start to face up to things. I felt like a kid caught out. But it was exactly what I needed. Now that I can look back with clarity, I see how it’s a little like the editing process in a novel; a good editor will not tell you what to do, they’ll show you the heart of your story, and set you on the right track again.

Same with a good friend. It’s show, not tell. It’s that quiet concern – the kind that reveals you to yourself. It isn’t bossy or dictatorial, but a kind of deep tender power that gets you in the gut, or wherever your most trusted instincts are. Your true friends are the ones who will make you look yourself in the eye, even when it’s hard.

And mental health is hard to talk about – partly because we don’t have the language, the cultural grammar or historical know-how. Also, if someone isn’t themselves, you almost don’t know which part of them to appeal to. I will say this: love, kindness and gentleness are universal languages, whatever state you’re in. I know there are many more serious mental illnesses that require a fuller intervention but, for what I had, Alex was exactly the kind of brain shaman I needed.

In this way, my friends don’t support my mental health; they are my mental health. They are my barometer when my cerebral shit hits the gigantic fan of life. And at times like this, when everyone’s sanity is clinging by the thinnest of threads, our friends are the ones who can make us laugh, keep us hopeful and remind us that there is some bedrock of normality under all the scary guff. Guff-clearing brain shamans. That’s friends.

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