It’s Ok to Not Be Ok

I had a not-good week a few months ago.

To look at my mood-tracking app (it’s called iMoodJournal and I recommend it), you’d see a spike in emotional upheaval and a lot of unflattering selfies of me, in the midst of performing various necessities (dog-walking, bus-riding) looking deeply unhappy. The notes alongside the photos are mildly descriptive, but mostly they’re a series of words.

Anxious. Exceedingly nervous. Panic attack Thursday. Bad insomnia last night.

This is common in February; it’s historically been one of my worst months for mental-health-related things—something that I became keenly aware of, thanks to Facebook’s look-back feature, which has unpacked a decade of bad Februaries right there in my news feed.

How can a month so short be so fraught? I suspect it’s the weather.

Even still, with this experience and the required mindfulness that comes with living with mental illness (oh hi, have we met?), this particularly bad February caught me off-guard and I found myself feeling not only unwell and also unprepared, which is a truly terrible combination. It took me a few days to even realize what was happening, that this was a Bad Week. Eventually I caught on, fortunately before I did anything more serious than spend too much money at Sephora.

Brains are weird.

During my Bad Week, I had a lot of scheduled meetings and meet-ups and conference calls, all of which I attended dilligently and to the best of my ability. And each and every one began the same way that most of our interactions in the U.S. begin:

How are you?

Which, when you really think about it, is an exceptionally personal way to begin a conversation that is not at all personal. And I was really thinking about it because when the answer that first bubbles up out of your mouth is “terrible, and I’m fantasizing about being hit by a bus on the walk home,” you haven’t got much of a choice.

But in most of the instances—save for a few intimate conversations with friends and relations who I really deeply trust—my answer was, of course, somewhere between “great!” or “oh, you know, doing the damn thing,” which is my go-to Bad Week response.

This is the point in this piece where you wonder why I’m telling you this, and this is the point where I tell you that it’s because I wish very badly that we lived in a world where it was ok to not be ok on days when you are not ok.

And like, we’re getting closer. We really are. At least, we’re talking about mental health more like it’s actually a matter of health and not a matter of willpower or strength (or lack of strength) of character. We’re also getting better about pointing out the ways that it’s used as a punchline.

But it’s still hard, you know?

I know.

And of course there are a lot of other circumstances besides stigma that ensure that living with a mental illness* is more difficult than it needs to be. Writing the Dear Prudence column, Mallory Ortberg recently answered a question about clinical depression and calling in sick to work. In doing so, she unearthed something that I think a lot of people don’t actually know:

You’re permitted, under specific circumstances, to request accomodation at work for mental illness.

Which is all well and good, except for the fact that that requires you to have paid sick leave, which more than a third of Americans do not. If you’re low-income, especially, it’s almost never feasible to not be ok.

There are both logistical and non-logistical reasons why we are conditioned to believe, and then confirmed in our belief, that you must be ok at literally all times. To be a good friend, to be a good partner, to be a good worker, you must be able to snap to it at any moment because there is simply not time or space of acceptance to not do that thing.

This is a social contract we have all struck. And it’s one that we cosign, again and again, in every instance when we possibly could (because we won’t get fired from work or because we have to opportunity to tell a trusted person how we are actually doing) admit to not being ok, but say that we are ok.

It’s something that I am guilty of and I am working on and in part, I wanted to invite you to work on it with me. I want to be able to say “you know what? Not great. But we don’t have to talk about it right now,” the next time I am not ok and someone asks how I am.

Because this isn’t something that we can all figure out individually. It’s not something that any amount of silent suffering can fix, and it’s not something that not-ok people can correct without help from people who are ok, but who make it ok to not be ok.

We can start it by asking different questions that don’t put our emotions on the spot—questions like “what are you working on?” or “what’s on today’s agenda?” are slightly easier to field than “how are you doing?—or, if we are going to ask a personal question, be prepared for a personal answer. We can also start by answering honestly when it is safe and possible to do so (which it’s not always; do what’s best for you).

We can also (come on, you knew I was going to do this!) support legislation and policies which actively fight to make life easier for people who are perhaps not ok, or at least, which create the potential for a person to have a bad day or a bad week every now and then. We need empathy in lawmaking as much as we need it in community-making and friend-making.

But mostly, I just wanted you to know that if you’re not ok, that’s ok.

*It deserves note that much of this is not exclusive to the experience of living with mental illness; chronic physical illness, disabilities, grief, and any other number of invisible but very real conditions or situations may make a person Not Ok on a given day and we should all just try to make space for that, too.