Are you ok?

September 19, 2015

I would venture to suggest (with no statistical research to back this statement up) that ‘I’m fine’ is potentially one of the most commonly told lies these days. I’ve lost track of how many times I said it this week when it wasn’t true.

There are of course times when it is appropriate to say you are fine, even when you’re not. But what I’ve noticed is how easy is it to fall into a habit of staying at arms length, when you automatically answer even your closest friends with a ‘yeah, I’m fine thanks’ before you’ve even thought about it.

So many times lately I have ended up having the same conversation with people about how hard it is for us to get real with each other. How rarely we get past the small talk and get to the real things – the gritty, awkward, painful and sometimes embarrassing things. But when the statistics tell you that about a quarter of the population will experience some kind of mental health problem in the course of a year, maybe it’s time we got serious about being bit more real with people.

I saw an initiative going around Instagram on World Suicide Prevention Day the other week which was encouraging people to ask those close to them, ‘Are you ok?’. It struck me how simple a thing that was, how easy, and yet how incredibly important and potentially life changing. You don’t need a counselling qualification or any kind of training to ask that simple question of those around you. In reality, the only thing you need is to care for someone, and to be willing to listen.

One of my favourite quotes at the moment is from a blog post by a guy called Jamie Tworkowski, the founder of To Write Love on her Arms, an organisation dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury, and suicide:

“You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.”

We need people more than anything else.

I know that I am often scared of letting myself be that person to someone else and asking, ‘How are you really?’ because I’m nervous about what the answer might be, that it might be something that I don’t know how to deal with, or how to fix. The fact that I might not have an answer makes me uncomfortable.

It’s a lot less scary to realise that it isn’t about fixing people, or even having an answer or the ‘right’ words to offer. It’s ok that we aren’t able to do that – in fact, most people don’t want that anyway. They want someone to sit with them in their pain, their uncertainty, their fear, their anxiety. They want someone to see how they feel, not to dismiss it as trivial but to acknowledge that it’s valid.

The answer, most often, is simply our presence.