Friendships and mental health
Like a lot of things, becoming an adult over lockdown was hard - I’m not even sure I’m ready to call myself an adult yet.
The year that we were meant to leave home or get a job or start taking opportunities and make investments in the future was...ruined.
The one thing we could count on to get us through it, was friends. Except one thing you aren’t prepared for, is the friends that you lose.
There’s a Rupi Kaur poem about how losing friends is just as heartbreaking as losing someone romantically, but no one warns you about the pain. After BLM a lot of us discovered that some friends weren’t who we thought they were, while others were exactly who we thought they were but it was time to let them go. It’s a very startling pain that comes with a sort of betrayal.
Then, there are the people who lose friends to mental health - losses that have only increased after 2020. It seems crazy to go from finding out that people ‘our age’ are already having babies, to finding out that young people are also taking their lives. Those are the ones you don’t expect. Because that kind of pain is so easy to hide. The world seems to keep on giving pain at the moment - the more personal, and the more international - so that now when we go on social media, we’re not only comparing how much we fit the beauty standard, but also our mental health. It’s so easy to get into a mindset of ‘well my experiences haven’t been as bad as that, so I must be okay’. It’s so easy to pretend you’re fine when you’re not.
And for the mental health wounds caused by years of racial trauma, whether on a micro or macro level, it can be hard to turn to the friends who may have gaslighted you - intentionally or unintentionally.
Sometimes there are people you can’t get away from. Whether through continued ignorance, a new kind of ignorance, or fetishisation. Those kinds of relationships add an extra layer of guilt to the burnout. I haven’t been able to do any particularly focused activism work in a long time - not because I stopped caring, but because I’m physically trying to recover from it all. And when you’re mental health is low, it’s so easy to feel alone. You can be inundated with friendships, see people regularly, but as soon as you’re alone again, you can’t quite remember what being with them feels like, and you feel alone. It’s really hard when it feels like your own mind is isolating you.
I wish that I could write something uplifting now, about how things will get better. And maybe they will, but the truth is, that nothing has felt that clear in a long time. And if there were no clear steps to adulthood before lockdown, there definitely aren’t now. All we can do is hold onto the people nearest to us. There will always be at least one friend in your life who won’t leave, even when your friendships with others fade, or new ones grow. With the stresses of adult life, it’s important to have that one friend you can open up to when you feel low.
It might just save you.
Taking the step to get professional help for mental health might seem like a giant leap, so sometimes it’s important to take a smaller step. Tell that one person, or maybe two, how you’re feeling, and let them help you take the bigger step.
Image and words by @lydia.baggaley