RUOK? I'm OK, You're ok? No one's ok. We are all ok.

RUOK? I'm OK, You're ok? No one's ok. We are all ok.

If i'm asking and you're answering- it's not about us.

I have a complicated set of feelings about R U OK?Day

At a certain point about 15 years ago if someone actually looked at me and asked me if I was ok, and held my gaze for more than 1.5 seconds, and meant it- they might have found me dissolve into tears. I wasn't ok. And it seemed at the time like no one was asking. I certainly wasn't talking.

If they asked and didn't mean it, then I would have said, fine! great! busy!

Careful what you wish for. Because that's the sort of the journey we have been on with mental health. No one admitting it, to almost everyone claiming it.

That's the cultural moment we are in. The trigger has been pulled so many times, for so many privileged boys and girls who have been emboldened to call out their own wolves - excavate their own traumas, that we can't see the suffering amidst the enthusiastic pile-on.

I am all for the individual and collective vulnerability. The acknowledgement that with 1/3 of the developed world being diagnosed with a mental health condition- that not-being-ok is now the norm.

Life is too busy. It's too stressful. The planet is burning. The boomers stole the future. Ai is eating our jobs and my mortgage and yours has doubled in a year.

No wonder.

And I am certainly not for the denial of anyone suffering to use the resources and the privilege available to them to seek the support that they need. Ask for what you need. Offer what you can. Nothing else is sustainable. Getting support makes you better, and if you have asked for it, it makes you more empathetic to those who need it.

But the reality is that the de-stigmatisation of mental health has been a BOON for those who were probably going to be ok anyway.

Tomorrow morning I am heading to a RUOK Business Breakfast. I'll set my WorkLife table up, it will be covered in a cheery yellow table cloth before dawn. I will have some sunflowers. I will have some positive messages to share about how coworking is a great way to ensure the wellbeing of people who are socially isolated and working remotely. It's true. It helps. I see it every day.

I will be on-message and on-brand and bleating at the converted. I almost always am.

Today when I was packing my bag for these few days away in our newest favourite regional powerhouse town of Picton- I pulled out my "SUNNY" yellow jumper. It's yellow. It's joyful. It was a much-loved present for my recent b'day. It's on-brand. But even this morning, before I wrote/thought/wrung out my feelings in words, it felt wrong.

You see- ROUK Day is not for those who are up and at em at a Business Breakky before dawn projecting their SUNNY WELLNESS onto the crowds.

RUOK is not for the 3/10 first world people who are rolling through (like I have) all the latest mental health diagnoses, the ones that often just describe the tension between living, working, parenting, caring and observing the insanity of modern life.

Bipolar 2, Post-natal depression, ADHD, Eco Anxiety, Perfectionism, OCD, sleep disorders, chronic stress, inflammatory everything, depression, emotional dis-regulation, personality disorders etc etc.

At some point the whole world isn't sick. The world is sick.

And whilst we spiralled into a vortex of our own eternal diagnosis, misdiagnoses, alternative treatments, detoxes, re-toxes and burnouts - we missed the real reason for RUOK day...those for whom the stigma, the trauma, the reality and the daily pressure to put food on the table and keep the landlords at bay mean that they will never be able to afford to take part in the psychedelic renaissance to ease the aches of their existential pain.

RUOK day doesn't win when we all fess up to our NOT-OK's- it win's when we look around for those who are NOT at the breakfast, not wearing the shirt, not posting the post.

They aren't here because they are not ok. They aren't here because, just like everything else, corporate greed has commodified the essence of our empathy and care and turned it inwards to the hall of mirrors of our own narcissistic distress and excess.

So if you're asking, posting, thinking, writing about mental health today- you might not be great, but i'm guessing that you, like me, are not what this day should be about.

Mental Health support doesn't win when we are all seen.

It wins when we all sit down, look around, and have a think about who doesn't have their hand up for a FREE cupcake or coffee.

WHO isn't here for RUOK day? Let's give them a thought, then a call, then a hand-up and then the SYSTEMS change they will need to ever be OK.

Those are the the things that make me feel more OK every time.

And it will certainly make more of a difference than a cupcake and a bit of plastic or sugar coated merch.

RUOK?