Listen, breathe, patience.

We have all had these happen in our lives, the moments when something happens and no matter how hard we try, we just keep trying to dig ourselves out of the situation. Sometimes it is best to just stop digging, climb out, and re-evaluate the entire situation.

These situations happen in almost every instance of our lives, be it in our career or personal lives. Those relationships that can help form the foundation of who we are as individuals, and how other see us. Who we associate with has as much, if not more, of an impact on how we are viewed in the world than our skills or even personal attributes.

As human beings our identities are intrinsically linked to how others see us and interact with us. It can be through a variety of forms, verbal, visual, written, and other communication avenues bombard us almost daily. It can be challenging for anyone to live their best lives when we are always worried about how other people perceive us, and treat us.

In our careers it can be much easier to navigate because we tend to spend more time nurturing our business contacts. It is not that we are more appreciative of our careers, but when you remove the elements of personal relationships and replace them with the structure of a job, it is more predictable. Even when things seem to be going awry, there are rules and guidelines for how to deal with these times.

In our personal lives, there are no rules, at least none that apply equally. We all have our own ideas and notions about how to deal with, or avoid, conflict. Without the structure that we live in our working lives, personal relationships often flail and eventually fail altogether. Not from a lack of effort, more from a lack of understanding or even lack of empathy between the two parties.

In a career the focus is normally on what is best for the organization, in the personal world we are, by nature, looking out for number one. All disputes result in one or both parties being hurt, and it is really hard to look beyond yourself, especially when you are hurting. If you are in any way neuro divergent, or are challenged with mental health issues, everything is... more. Hurt is more hurtful, a simple statement can be perceived as an attack, and while individually these things may seem minor they compound.

One of the issues that many neurodivergent people struggle with is the ability to let things go without complete resolution. What I may think is resolved, can be a festering outstanding issue in someone who suffers from any sort of mental health disease. Even with therapy, medication, and doing all the right things a person who suffers from these diseases does not have the same built in tools that the rest of people have.

A lot of people spend their lives being medicated and it creates a screen between what is felt, and what the world sees. Medication does not cure the problem, it mitigates the symptoms and with the right work and support the underlying issues can be, over time, managed. There is no cure for mental health diseases, like the common cold, when you are hit with it - you can only manage it the best you can. There is simply no other option because even on medication, there is no guarantee that you will not fall again.

The other side of the coin? If you have never experienced being diagnosed with the disease, how can you ever really and truly understand it? Mental health is a puzzle, we barely even understand how the human brain functions and according to some, we have mapped more of space than the human brain. That means, there are no instruction manuals with how we are supposed to deal with someone who is experiencing a mental health crisis. It is not your fault, mine, the person suffering, or anyone's fault really, and we have to stop looking at it this way.

I recently met someone who I greatly connected with over a short conversation. He was incredibly open about his own circumstances and it opened my eyes to a lot of things in the world around me. It also caused me to deeply reflect on my own life and circumstances - the results of which are yet to be known.

Here was an incredibly intelligent, talented, and highly educated person who was sharing with me his experience being neurodivergent and how that has impacted his relationship with family, friends, and colleagues over the years. Some of what he said I could relate too, some of it was horrific. Some of the people in his life got it, they stuck it out and helped him navigate what he described as a black room with no windows or doors. He then told me something that rang so true it was like standing in a belfry as the bell is being rung. The reverberations are still there.

We have the notion that we take a pill and everything is OK. That once in treatment, everything should just go back to the way it was. That was how it was for him, and it made things worse. He indicated that it was that pervasive thought that eventually created conflict in his life, and caused him to change his relationships. He was not looking for a permanent dissolution of the relationships, but had to re-evaluate the impact that they had on his life.

We all, or most of us anyway, approach all of our relationships with good intentions. We also, by nature, place expectations on others and get pretty disappointed when they are not met. That is not on the other person, it is on us, unless someone expressly accepts your expectations and there is consensus - if our expectations are not met we should not be surprised, angry, hurt, or anything else. That is because our expectations of another person, are ours and there is no obligation of the other person to accept that, unless there is agreement and consensus.

That is how the world of work generally functions, no so in our personal lives.

He told me that one of his biggest challenges has been to balance his life. He could spend his life on medication and, in truth, really feeling little or nothing. The advantage is that it numbs him to the nuances of relationship, but it also mutes all emotion. Happiness, love, anger, depression, it doesn't matter - when medicated the world is dull. Medication is also not the sure fire solution that many believe it to be. It does not make things go away, it only make it bearable some of the time, medications taken to resolve neurodivergent health issues also come with side affects. Things like suicidal thoughts, mental doom spirals, and more can all actually increase when in treatment.

There is no such thing as a magic pill. There is also no such thing as asking for help.

I belong to a men's social group that discusses things like this and other challenges that exist in in our modern world. The most common theme that I hear from everyone is the same thing that I think most of us experience, fear. The number of people in that group, from a wide variety of standing in society, all confront the same thing when it comes to discussing difficult topics.

The fear was not around sharing, nor was it about people knowing about their struggles. The fear is always about being judged, always about feeling "less than" in the eyes of others. One gentleman told me that he never felt listened too, not because people are not open, but because he always felt that he was letting people down. It is hard to communicate what you are feeling when others take it personally or as an attack, and it is incredibly difficult to find the words to use without having your audience feel attacked.

In our careers we are taught to use language like "this is how that makes me feel", or "when that happens I feel like this" - language like that is supposed to be universally accepted as not an attack on the person, rather feedback on how what someone does impacts others.

The reality? No one does that - ever. We all take it personally, even when we know it is not directed at us or is something that we did. We focus on the specific words used and not the intent or tone of the message received. We do this to people in our lives who struggle with mental health diseases on a regular basis, all of us.

I have even spoken to therapists who have done just that. We listen, or read, the first couple of lines and have already made a decision. We see things from our perspective only and rarely try to put ourselves in other people's shoes. Just because we think something should not hurt another, doesn't mean we are right. There are things that happen in our lives that upset us which others would consider wrong, or "silly", but it does not negate our feelings or how something makes us feel.

We have to listen to people in our world, and that lack of really hearing what is being said is a large part of the problem we have in modern society. We only hear what we want too, and we make determinations based on the pre-judgement that we have already made. In fact, most of us start to make the judgement before the conversation even starts.

What I learned from my friends who are neurodivergent, and having my own health challenges over the years, is that we do a really bad job of listening to others. Especially those who have any sort of mental health issue. We are finally starting to treat it like the disease it is, but we forget that this is not like cutting out a tumour, this is a lifelong illness that has no cure, and kills millions of people worldwide every year.

We have the expectation as a society that once taking a pill everything should be back to normal. That is the absolute furthest thing from the truth. Any time we put those impossible standards on someone who struggles from these diseases we are telling them that even with medication, they are not good enough. That may not be what we intend, but it is the message that we deliver the moment we focus on what they do not have, or what they are not doing right. We hope that these people have these things in their lives, based on our own lived experiences.

The thing is, when you place - even with the best of intentions - expectations on someone who struggles with mental health it can backfire and cause more issues than it solves. I might say to someone, as an example "I really wish you could find someone to be in a relationship with", or some other wish that they can have something you want for them. It all sounds innocent, but...

Everytime that happens, we point out to people what is missing in their lives. We tell that person, what you have in your life is not good enough and we want different things for you. That is not what we say, but when you struggle daily with finding happiness and managing mental health, it can be felt like a slap in the face.

From all I have learned those who struggle with mental health wake up every single morning and have to search for happiness. Each day present new challenges and when there is no feeling of support (you will note that I said feeling because support only counts when it is directed by the person we claim to support). A person who suffers from a mental health disease can stand in a room full of people and feel absolutely alone. They can be sitting around the Christmas tree with family, and want nothing more in the world then to go home and be alone.

It doesn't mean that they do not love their family, friends, it means that they do not feel like they belong. They feel like they offer no value to other's lives, and they struggle with even the most basic interactions with other people. That has nothing to do with us, that is the symptoms of a disease.

We would never speak to a cancer patient and tell them to 'suck it up', 'get over it', or 'let it go' - rather we celebrate every single milestone in their recovery. We need to do the same for those people in our lives that suffer from mental health diseases. Like cancer they are diseases, unlike cancer, there is no possibility of a cure, only management.

When we have people in our lives who have physical challenges we make accomodation for them. We make accomodations for people food preferences, and more.

The other thing I want us all to remember, it takes around one month to recover for each day of severe depression someone suffers. It only takes minutes for all of that hard work to get flushed down the toilet and each time that happens the person has to start all over again. IT is like getting half way around the race track and being picked up and dropped at the start line again.

Once the spiral is in place, it can be a brutal and painful exercise to try to get back to a place of happiness. Too many do not.

I also want us all to remember something. If someone in our lives suffers from mental health issues, it has nothing to do with us. This is a disease and unless you are the cause of the disease, it has nothing to do with you other than you are experiencing the symptoms. We have to stop placing all the blame on the person.

Lastly, I have talked to a lot of people that have told me the only way they could see forward was to remove themselves from the lives of people. They felt that they caused more pain, and at their current state could not be a good friend, sibling, co-worker etc. They all said that they never intended it to be permanent, and some come back once the health issues were resolved, but most do not. Most people never forgive the person, when the truth is - the disease is the enemy, and we all play a role in defeating it.

Not a single person in my group could share a story of their struggles with mental health that did not resolve in the loss of friends and family members. in a room of over 40 people, every single one of them have lost friends, family, jobs, and even the relationship with their children.

Now, imagine that 18%, or 6 million, Canadians struggle with a diagnosed mental health disease. That means that if you have 10 friends, 2 of them are fighting to survive a disease that has no cure. Until we start actually treating people in our lives with mental health diseases with the same compassion and empathy that we treat a patient with any other disease, it will never get better.

We all, myself included, need to a much better job supporting those people in our lives who we know are struggling with mental health diseases. They are not fun, they are not a joke, and we have to start accepting the seriousness of them and how dramatically theses diseases can rip apart lives, and not just the for the people suffering from the diseases.

This is my opinion based on my lived experiences.