Someone should write a book about the teenage mental health crisis. Not one filled with statistics and studies, but a real-life practical guide for parents called How to help your child through a mental health crisis.
The book should provide straightforward advice, tips and scripts of what to say and what not to say. Plus detailed real-life survival stories that only someone going through a similar hell would find comforting.
In fact, the author should be a parent. A mom, let’s say, whose teenage daughter lived through such a deep dark depression that the entire family nearly collapsed under the strain of it all.
A mom whose family somehow managed to come out the other side reasonably happy and healthy. A mom who could honestly say I know how hard it is. You are not alone. Let me tell you what I’ve learned.
I would definitely buy that book.
This is not that book.
I thought it would be. I wanted it to be. I wanted something good to come from what we went through. Lord knows I spent months and months writing that book. Or at least 45K words of it. Double that, if you include journal entries.
I wrote about that night. The one we assumed was our rock bottom.
And then I wrote about all the free-falling months that followed.
I wrote about jagged skin and broken hearts.
I wrote about doctors and insurance companies and billing codes.
And trips to the hospital.
I wrote about self-harm and eating disorders and OCD and autism and ADHD.
And anxiety and depression.
Hers and mine.
I wrote about the privilege of private health insurance and the limitations of the NHS.
I wrote about shutting down my company so I could hover over her
And worry.
I wrote about sleeping on her floor.
I wrote about her nightmares and her medications and their side effects.
I wrote down the best advice we received from counsellors and books.
I wrote down every painful lesson I learned.
I wrote reminders to myself should this ever happen again.
And even as I wrote all that, I knew that I was only writing part of the story.
That every person in this family had their own version of events.
Their own painful memories and their own painful truths.
Do you know how hard that was? To relive and describe all that in painstaking detail? Do you know how many times I wanted to turn off my brain with a bottle of rosé and Netflix? Everyday. I wanted to escape the memories every single day. But something compelled me to keep writing. I had to get that story out of my head and out of my body.
There are people who survive trauma or overcome a terrific hardship and are compelled to make it their new life’s mission. I’m grateful to them and the work they do. But it turns out, I am not one of those people.
I don’t want that story to become my story. And I certainly don’t want it to become my daughter’s story. She doesn’t deserve to relive it all over again. Hell, none of us do.
Someone recently told me that you should only write a book about something if you’re willing to talk about it for at least two years. And that sealed the deal for me. Because if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that I don’t want to spend the next two years of my life talking about the last two years of my life.
Those memories will pop up in this book and in my future. That’s okay. The echo of the past remains, because how could it not? But I’m ready to start writing a new story.
This I love
This is so powerful, Laurie. Choosing which stories and conversations you want to spend time with--I needed the reminder that this is possible!