Green Ribbons and the Fear of Getting it Wrong

A while ago, the Time to Talk campaign ran a series of cartoons contrasting "scary conversations" with the simple act of asking someone how they are: someone experiencing a challenge to their mental health.

They're cute cartoons, but I think they miss the point. Quite a few people are quite terrified of having a conversation with someone about mental distress. I was reminded of this quite abruptly recently by someone who at least had the honesty to be genuine about these fears and to articulate what most people won't: "But how do I know that anything I say to you won't make this worse, or that you won't come back later to me and say that to me and blame me for all your difficulties, or [otherwise behave in ways I find scary and threatening]. You really did melt down, you know, how am I supposed to know how to make sense of that or know what to do?".


The simple answer to this, which I gave, is that, in real terms, all human communication is like this, we just don't typically give it much thought. No one ever really knows when they open their mouth to speak how it will be received, and that is always true.  Why is asking "how are you" so hard in the context of mental distress, though?  We manage it well enough when people are physically unwell, or recently bereaved. I don't know. I gave some Green Ribbons for Mental Health Awareness to some colleagues not long ago. One of them advised me to stop "peddling negativity", that I was giving into "self-limiting beliefs that will get you nowhere".   A good few did the head-tilt and smiled, or said fragmentary things, the kinds of isolated comments that typically act as conversation closers e.g. "Mental Health Awareness, yes". One person, doing her best to be kind, read the bullet points on the back of the pin to me, nodding and pausing between each one, looking very meaningfully at me, but without leaving space. There was nothing further to be said between us. What struck me as most strange about it was the personally charged nature of what is essentially a message about humans being human with one another, as though - by virtue of being someone with an identified mental health condition the simple act of sharing that it's good to talk becomes so much more, almost an act of passive aggression. Such curious, dead, one-sided conversations!  We seem to imbue these encounters with a culturally uncharacteristic heaviness, weightiness and awkwardness that, ironically, only serve to create further heaviness, weight and awkwardness. A nation of talkers, struck dumb.

The true answer, of course, is probably that asking an open question demands an open answer, and in the context of mental distress, and all the upheavals and unpredictabilities that can come with it, it can feel like opening a Pandora’s box.  Ask that question, and you’ve no idea where the conversation might go – and what then? To open to the uncertainty of that question, there must be a willingness to accept that conversations that touch on confusion, fear, pain and anger might just be a little scary: indeed, a little confusing, fearful, painful and angry.


In distress, it is also not uncommon for all the rules of normal human interaction to be violated.  One person talks too much, the other too little; conversations skirt around unspoken difficulties; feedback lacks honesty, is off point, too wordy or too brief, too ambiguous and unrelated to what's really being discussed, tangential or out of sequence. The most uncomfortable aspects are not responded to, or glossed over by one party and amplified by the other, in both directions. Funnily enough, I couldn't help but have a certain respect for someone who finally, after months of all of having to deal with my endless obsessive words upon words upon words,  emotions spilling out from every pore of me, absolutely lost it with me for just how chaotic and difficult and well... nuts... I had become. It was the feedback I probably needed - and at least it was an honest reaction; at least it was real.

While we're at it, let's be real. Many clinical manifestations of human distress are not the stuff of schoolgate conversation. "How are things?", "Ah sure not too bad, heading to Zumba tonight. Oh yeah, also battling internally over whether I have a very overactive imagination or am actually hallucinating, even though I know I’m not, while also obsessively contemplating how to keep myself safe from accidentally killing myself if I can’t make others understand I’m not actually hallucinating, even though I have no desire to die. Hey, how are you? Any movement on the house? Will you be in for Christmas, do you think?".

I once heard someone describe OCD as "the sane person's mental illness", because as a form of madness, its unique characteristic is that even in the grip of absolute terror and lack of control, there is a part of the self  who gets to sit back and watch the freakshow as it unfolds unstoppably, this mad part of one's self running rampage, somewhere between chaotic free-spirit and intolerable bully.  Sometimes I am just gobsmacked at my own inability to control my actions in full obsessive flight. How do you begin to explain what it's like to witness this endlessly looping bad behaviour in your mind, observing it controlling your life even though you know it’s nonsensical rubbish?  I don't know if you can. I certainly don’t think it’s likely at Baby and Toddler group.

OCD wears a mask of perceived acceptability in the world, of perfectionism and neat-freakery and smarties all arranged by colour, while simultaneously existing in the body as the most pervasive felt sense of terror and isolation, with the most vulnerable, tender emotions that propel it immobilised, obscured and lifeless, like Snow White behind the glass coffin.  Most of us with OCD live the majority of our lives in hiding, the madness undetected behind our smiles and outward competence. On a handful of occasions my life, most often during Exposure and Response Prevention procedures (the gold-standard of OCD treatment, a non-negotiable if I want to do more in this life than merely exist), the physical overwhelm of facing my thought-demons has betrayed the emotional and physical reality of what it's like to live with this, allowing it to leak out and be seen by others. I have fallen apart. I can see this must be a terrible shock:  "But you seemed so normal!!" . Yeah, well, sorry about that. As it so happens, I am wholly ordinary and boring, too. Both/and. I don't expect that to make sense to anyone, when it makes no sense to me.

And yet, behind the odd behaviours and meltdowns, nearly every OCD spike I've had is so human.  It relates most closely to love: to the fear of losing someone I love, or causing them unimaginable pain and hardship by letting them see my sadness, my despair and my loneliness – because ultimately, I just want them to be happy.  It is so… simple, makes perfect sense in the context of my life history and, when you strip it down to all that's good and wholesome, is actually kind of sweet and decent and true.  Behind all the noise and nonsense of OCD mind, the ritualising and the impulsivity, there is the most simple and genuine human desire for connection, tarnished by the pain we all must meet on our journey through life: the kind that when they see it, people respond to and feel heart for. Love and the possibility of losing it; the desire for self and others to be whole and happy and free from pain. Just that.

So, there is something so awfully sad about the fact that this humanity becomes hidden by behaviours that, if I allow them to be seen, can seem designed to force others to reject me: behaviours that in one way or another are so rigid and difficult and unlikeable, that they say over and over, you don’t want to know me, I’m dangerous, I might contaminate you with my hidden sadnesses and suck all joy out of your life. Can you blame me for hiding that, for having chosen to live with that hidden? Can I blame others for not wanting to see or engage with that? For not knowing what to say to that?

No, in all honesty - and ultimately, that’s kind of the point.  The reason we need campaigns like Green Ribbon Ireland, and to learn how to talk more easily and adeptly about human distress and to risk getting what we say wrong about it, is because ultimately, every one of us in this human life wears a mask that obscures the pains we carry, however they may manifest. This is a very great, and more or less universal, part of the pain of being human. Research helps us here. Social support keeps us alive, and helps us to thrive. An absence of social connection is more toxic to a human than smoking.  Every single one of us is fighting some internal battle we hide from the world, that exerts behavioural control, that sometimes leads us to act in difficult and unpredictable and even distressing ways to others. Not everyone gets sucked into a "clinically diagnosable loop", but everyone will know pain and hardship - and everyone needs at times to reach out to others when in their most vulnerable and most difficult, unlovable, rejectable states. Across the many different contexts of our life, we all need to keep on risking if we are to find those people who won’t look down, or away: someone who won’t choose to stay silent instead of risking saying something awkward or pointless or a little off colour. Someone who sees our magic, our true colours, who laughs with us at the absurdity of it all. We will also all meet moments of being this person and failing to be this person for others. We will also all meet others who are this person, and fail to be this person, for us.

The alternative is unimaginable loneliness, and as poet Neil Hilborn puts it, isolation is not safety, it is death:

If no one knows you're alive, you aren't
If a tree falls in the forest, and no one's around to hear it, it does make a sound, but then that sound is gone
I'm not saying you'll find the meaning of life in other people
I'm saying other people are the life to which you provide meaning

To provide meaning to another's life is at the heart of living for most of us, yet there's no way to do this without being vulnerable, and raw, and honest about the really tough parts of our experience. Over the last year as I have been more and more open about OCD, I have been amazed and humbled and sometimes shocked by the people who have shared their stories with me, people I would never have expected to have struggled alongside me. I have had so many laughs with people about this, it has been profoundly elevating. The moment we share our true vulnerabilities with someone can be such a moment of  grace, where we can meet it with space and time and an open curiosity. I am also reminded again and again of why I chose to be open about this: because of all the people who offered me this life-buoy of when I really felt like I might just be the only person alive feeling quite as alone and ashamed, defective and despairing. It was such a great support in times of recovery and I am forever grateful for the simple kindness of "me, too".

Of course, it is also true that we don't live in a world where we always get that stuff right, or share our vulnerabilities with people who will respond kindly and warmly in a given moment (though they might in a different context or with another) and that's part of being human too. The truth is, there are no conversations worth having that are guaranteed to be easy, there is no way of meeting the messiness of being human that can always be simple or stress-free and sometimes, the heavy stuff can’t be made light. It hurts and it’s hard and, sometimes, the only way of meeting it is to fall down, over and over, and feel your face and heart and soul bruised and bloody in the mud as you miss the point of connection again and again - until you find the ones who will get it, or at least wait until you wake up from whatever trance you may find yourself in from time to time. Talking about mental distress is no different from any important conversation  - it is not always fluffy, it is not always easy and it can be scary as hell. However such communication is the price of admission to all that carries meaning in the world.

Given that we’re all human, and none of us is getting out of here alive, we are bound to struggle with meeting the hard and dark parts of our own human hearts, and to wince when we see them reflected in others. Given that, all we can do is try our best and be incredibly forgiving of ourselves and others when, like the humans we are, we misfire and fail and misunderstand one another.

So, go ahead. Start your conversation and feel your way into it, one word, one gesture, one smile, one darting glance, one false start at a time.   Even if it goes badly today, know that as long as you live, tomorrow, you will get to choose to do what matters most again.