Cry and you cry alone.  Unless the cumulative effect of various external factors leaves you sobbing like a loon to The Notebook while you’re flying on a plane FULL of people between London and Sydney.  In which case, your crying is so excessive they don’t believe it’s just The Notebook making you cry, give you cups to hold over your ears with some kind of oil or essence inside to alleviate pressure AND page any passengers who are doctors to check you over.

But enough about 2004.  And yes, The Notebook is a tear jerker.  In case you haven’t yet watched it.

It’s World Mental Health Day today and I’ve been thinking a bit about communicating with people who are living with depression and anxiety, reaching out to people you think are affected, and all the other things initiatives like RUOK encourage you to do.

Here’s the thing – depression is not subtle.  It’s an insidious beast who strips away any dredge of self worth, self esteem or sense of value you have. When you ask somebody who isn’t okay – Are you okay – mostly they’re going to say they are fine.

Source: Unknown – Please let me know if you do

Want to know why? Because they don’t believe that anybody really wants to know because they are worthless.

When you are depressed – you frequently don’t have the language to express how you feel. And that’s even if you’re a highly articulate individual.  There are no words that express the feelings. There are words that come close. There are words that convey elements. There are songs. There are pictures, but rarely anything which can explain the darkness.

That is because everybody’s experience is absolutely unique to them and finding common ground with other depressed people can be hard enough, let alone finding the language to connect with somebody with no lived experience.

What people can do though is persist. Don’t just ask ‘how are you doing’ or ‘are you okay’. Say ‘Dude – I know you’ve got a lot on but I’m worried about you because you don’t seem yourself – can I do some listening?’.  And then say it again a slightly different way tomorrow. And then again.

And if you know you don’t demonstrate love the same way as somebody else – acknowledge it. Say ‘Hey there, I don’t know what’s the best way for me to show I love you so for the moment – it’s going to be a call and some memes, but if you need something else from me, we’ll work it out together’.

Basically – don’t assume somebody knows you are there or understands your intentions. Be present. Be present even when they don’t make you feel welcome. Be present in a way that shows them that you are looking out for them and that you care.

If somebody cancels on you AGAIN, ring them and ask if you can come and veg with them in front of the TV instead of going out for drinks. Don’t just dismiss them. Don’t say stupid things like ‘snap out of it’, or ‘get off the couch’ or ‘eat better’ or ‘drink less’ or ‘exercise more’ or ‘in my day we just got on with it’.  It’s an illness, not a pity party.

And be super mindful of people whose lived experience is different from yours but may be subject to some fairly intense external pressures.  Sure we’ve got marriage equality, but it’s been a fairly brutal few years and with politicians still trying to implement homophobic and queerphobic legislation into the mainstream, the negativity is still alive and well for people in the LGBTQI community. Be an active ally. Be vocal about bigotry so that even the people you don’t know are gay, know that you are on their side.

Call people that have just had babies. Not just the person who gave birth, but their partner. New babies are cute but they are not easy. It can be isolating.  Keep in touch. GO AND VISIT. Don’t ask them to call if they need something – turn up and do something.

Keep in touch with friends and family that move to new cities for work or study or just a change. They say change is as good as a holiday but we’ve all had holidays that totally suck arse. Let them know that they might be away but they are still part of your circle.

Find things to laugh about – share good stories in your socials as well as disdain for the cricket team. Tell people about a show that made you laugh. Or a book that cheered you up. Or terrible unicorn jokes. Tell them about small things that you have done which have provided a solid dose of slapstick to the person that saw you fall on your face or mistake a stranger for a friend from behind.

Basically, do what the great JC (and all of them) commanded of his followers – “Don’t be a dick”*

*This is not a direct biblical quote. But to quote Denis Denuto “It’s the vibe of the thing”

Fact: This body of mine is overweight. It is overweight because at this current point in time I don’t exercise enough, drink too much and eat erratically. I think way too much about this body of mine. The marketing tells me that I don’t think about it enough.

I often comment that some people are born to be an inspiration, and others, a lesson.

I definitely fall into the lesson category.

I don’t think that I do any more daft stuff than anybody else, it’s just that I tend to do it all at once and then tell everybody about it.  If you had ever told me my va-jay-jay was going to be the talk of the school playground I would have DIED.

But somehow in 2018, having ended up in hospital having emergency surgery after a cyst in my Bartholin’s gland ruptured – there I was standing under the COLA chatting about unexpected mining of my nether region by a bunch of people I couldn’t name (surgeon and accompanying theatre staff) and explaining how a week ago I didn’t even know what a Bartholin’s gland was. Anyway, everybody knows what it is now and since it has healed beautifully I even officially have a gynae – which is something every self respecting woman of a certain age should have I’m given to understand. The lesson for you all – don’t ignore lumps and bumps.

I fell down the stairs, sober, doing housework and landed badly. Went to emergency with strange pains in my shins but turns out I’d actually fractured an ankle which meant a walking cast. Which as everybody who has ever had one knows – is a pain the everything.  Ankle healed. All good. The lesson for you all – don’t do housework.

My laptop blew up. Since it’s my livelihood this was disastrous.  The lesson – don’t blow your laptop up when you’re wearing a walking boot and have to add in additional walking to visit computer experts.

I went to a funeral. Then to the wake. Then when I was walking home, I tripped over on the footpath and stopped my fall with my face.  In gravel. The graze on the chin went FERAL and I had to go to the doctor to have it scraped out and then went and met a new client with the biggest chin bandages in the history of mankind. It looked like I had had surgery to remodel my chin in the shape of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. Lesson for you all – pick up your feet and go to the doctor to make sure your remove gravel from your facial wounds.

I took my daughter to the Katy Perry concert. I lost one of my earrings. They were a gift from my husband and daughters and had huge sentimental value. The lesson here is sometimes earrings fall out and it’s sad, but it’s just an earring.

And yes, I laugh at myself. It means you guys don’t look like complete arseholes when you start to laugh at my complete inability to stay upright.

It feels like it’s been a huge 2 months. It has been. In addition to my exploration of the medical system, life has continued. The mum thing, the wife thing, the friend thing, the work thing.

But I know I’m lucky. I can access medical support without having to fight for the right. I’m not locked up in an Australian concentration camp. I don’t live in a country where the gun culture means I have more chance of being shot by a toddler accidentally then I do being killed in a car crash.

I’m also not the parents who got a diagnosis of Leukemia for their youngest child last week. I am not the parents who have been unexpectedly and unwantedly thrust from their comfort zone into inspirational. I am not the parents who are traversing the nightmare of a life so different from the one they had a week ago.  The one where their six year old is going to become fluent in the language of cancer.  It’s a club, but not one you’d pay money to join.

Perspective is strange. I have known all along that my mishaps have been small. They have been surmountable. That my tendency to give everything and anything a comic twist is representative of my own dark sense of humour. If I can laugh about living with depression, the other stuff is a breeze.

But if I could choose something for my friends, it is that they, their daughter and their other children, weren’t unlucky enough to be at the start of their journey as ‘inspirations’. Because, I know them well enough to know, that they have the courage, the humour and the love to navigate the scorched earth approach to cancer which is the best option available at the moment.

And I know that we will be full of admiration, and that their approach will be inspirational – because we’ve seen others go through it and even if they are absolute arseholes, we can not help but admire, and be inspired, by people who wade through the sludge of adversity in their own unique and definitive style. Inspiration is always about the trek – never about the destination.

Perspective is knowing that I’m blessed to be a lesson.

All love to you guys. And remember I know swear words if you need them.

The fact that it’s World Refugee Day and the US has pulled out of the UN Humans Rights Council is abominable.

The fact that when Australia ratified the UN’s anti-torture protocol last year they specifically excluded our off-shore detention centres is abominable.

The fact that our media gives more outraged coverage to the USA’s policy of putting children in concentration camps than they have to the fact that we’ve been doing it for years is abominable.

My feed last week was full of people talking about Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain’s deaths by suicide and encouraging people who are feeling suicidal or have suicidal ideation to reach out. To ask for help.

And then people shared some fabulous articles about what living with suicide feels like. And then more people shared it.

And then people shared the numbers of Lifeline and other support agencies. And said their door was always open – so just reach out. Just ask.

And then somebody shared a meme saying people that are depressed don’t ask for help, it’s up to us to recognise that our friends are suffering and reach out.

And now we’re at the stage where people are sharing articles saying just because people look like they have a wonderful life doesn’t mean that everything is wonderful. And sharing Pooh and Piglet memes saying it is okay not to be okay.

And in about a week – we’ll be on to the next thing.

Everything that is happening is good. It’s good that we talk about mental health, especially because EVERYBODY has mental health in exactly the same way as they have physical health. And while I appreciate that we’re talking about mental health because we most certainly need to – I’d like us to start talking about mental health less generically.

If somebody dies of cancer, we don’t say they died as the result of a physical health condition. If somebody has a week off work with the flu, we don’t say it’s because they have a physical health condition.

Less than ideal mental health conditions like depression and anxiety have names. I didn’t spend time planning on removing myself from the planet in 2016 because I had a mental health condition, I did it because I was severely depressed. I was very, very sick.

In a conversation recently, a friend said that she was finding the whole #metoo thing a very discomfiting experience. She noted that every time somebody spoke out, spoke publicly about the abuse they had experienced, or outed one of her celebrity crushes – she felt incredibly uncomfortable, and hated that her first reaction was quite often ‘oh that can’t be true’.

I don’t think she is alone. In fact, I know she’s not. I sometimes feel like that too. And it’s not just about #metoo. I have had friends personally tell me their experiences of sexual assault, rape, domestic violence and even war, and initially it always feels unreal. How is that this person could have experienced all this and I didn’t know? How is that they can have experienced all this and be able to talk about it? How are they so normal?

And when you see people like Asia Argento stand on a stage in Cannes and state publicly that Harvey Weinstein raped her when she was 21 – you can acknowledge her bravery and the power that comes with telling your truth, even if it makes others feel a bit uneasy.

Women of a certain age, and that’s pretty much everybody born before the year 2000, were raised to be quiet. We were raised to know that if anything happened to us – the shame was ours. It would change what people thought of us. If violence of any nature was inflicted upon us – well then, who was ‘really’ at fault?

But one of the powerful positives of mass communication is that it has given a voice to people who didn’t otherwise have it. People are no longer isolated from other people’s experiences. Slowly, around the world, women, and many other marginalised groups, have been finding that they are not alone.

See – it’s not just me that thinks that!

Everybody has a unique experience. What has not been unique is society’s response – ignore, minimise, reshape. And so people started talking. They gathered their courage. They spoke even when their voice shook. They overcame all the things they have been raised to believe about their position, about their worthiness, about their shame, about their responsibility and they have spoken.

And finally society is listening. They are listening in India, they are listening in America, in the UK, in Australia, in every country around the world – change is happening.

But to listen, to truly listen, is discomfiting. We have to challenge our own internalised processes. Our own perceptions of people we know. Our own understanding of people we may have admired. We have to reconcile what we now know, with what we thought we knew.

And the hardest of all, is we have to truly look at ourselves and think about what we have internalised. What unconscious bias exists in our own perception of the world and the things that happens to it? Are we judging without listening? Are we making assumptions without evidence? Are we holding people accountable to standards that we would not hold ourselves to? What are we doing as an individual to support the voices – both the quiet and the loud? The ordinary and the famous?

I think it is good that we are uncomfortable with hearing other people’s stories. I think the fact that we find oppression, cruelty and violence to be unbelievable at first speaks to the inherent goodness that is in most of us. Often, what we find most unreal is that these things have happened to people we care about, people we love. We find it discomfiting that people we have looked up to have abused others and are not who we believed they are. This is true of celebrities, it’s true of other people’s fathers, it’s true of people’s priests and ministers, it’s true of people’s teachers.

We don’t need to be comfortable with messy fucked up internalised and societal expectations of how women should or should not be behaving, nor do we need to be comfortable with hearing women’s stories of the violence they have experienced, nor do we have to be comfortable with challenging our own thinking.

Because ultimately – comfortable is important for sofas.

But completely irrelevant for change.