[Trigger warnings: mental health, neurodivergence, pandemic]
I’ve often read and heard about mental health issues, or mental illness, affecting relationships, disrupting them, straining them, sometimes even completely tearing them apart.
It wasn’t until the pandemic and my own mental health issues, though, that I became fully aware of these impacts, also through my own personal experiences.
I grew up in a society where stigma and/or ignorance around anything concerning the mind or brain was extremely pervasive: very little was known, or mentioned, about mental health; the word or concept of “neurodiversity” didn’t even exist; any form of “mental issue” was taboo.
In hindsight, I realize that two or three very important relationships I have had were negatively affected, and eventually torn apart, by my own — and probably also the other persons’ and society’s — ignorance and incapacity to deal with mental health issues. In those cases, though, I was sort of “at the receiving end” of the situation.
Lately, I’m realizing, it’s some very good friends of my own who have been “at the receiving end” of my mental issues.
In a week I will, at last, get professionally evaluated for autism & ADHD and hopefully get confirmation of some neurodiversity which I’ve been experiencing and coping with my entire life. The real issues, though, came during a phase of anxiety/depression that I had during the first year and a half of the pandemic and whose effects are still dragging on now. My own parenthesis of anxiety/depression made me so often incapable of being there for some of my dearest and oldest friends, incapable of listening to them — even literally, incapable of listening to a wonderful podcast that one of my best friends from grad school has been doing, or incapable of reading interesting posts/articles that other friends have been sending me, or making it hard for some other dear, close friends to spontaneously share things with me. While I fully believe in the vital importance of healthy boundaries and the right to have them respected and to ask for trigger warnings, I also realize how estranged my own phase of anxiety/depression has made me from some of my dearest and oldest friends. And this is terribly sad for me.
I’m an incurable optimist, though, so I will do what I often do (at least, when I’m at my own healthy baseline): now that I am aware of these facts and of how they have negatively affected some important relationships in the recent past, and now that I am doing so much better myself, I am going to use this newly found bandwidth, this newly found mental well-being & emotional energy to start being there, again and/or more, for my friends.
On another positive note, I also want to mention how the courage and openness to share personal experiences about mental health and/or neurodiversity/neurodivergence have, on the other hand, brought me so much closer to so many wonderful people, old friends as well as new ones. Since moving to California in 2016 and even more since the pandemic and now living in Colorado, I have had the fortune to meet more and more people who are aware of, and open to talk about, mental health and/or neurodiversity and I have been sharing some important growth in these directions in parallel with some good old friends in Europe. Their courage to share with me as well as my own improved awareness have allowed to build stronger, deeper bonds, weathering the difficulties that naturally arise in human relationships, and giving rise to wonderful and often unexpected closeness in many old and new friendships.
The Little Prince and the Fox 