It's Okay, Not Be Okay

Sometimes the hardest thing isn't what you're going through it's admitting you need help.

There's no easy way to start this post. I've written and rewritten this several times now, trying to find the right words. But I think that's part of the problem, isn't it? We spend so long trying to find the right words, the right time, the right moment to be honest about how we're feeling and in the meantime, we just keep carrying it all.

Despair is rarely a single system failure; it’s a series of cascading errors. It’s the accumulation of grief, work pressure, and financial strain, all feeding into each other. You patch one leak only for another to burst sleepless nights, family loss, the weight of everything you haven't processed. By the time you stop to look up, you’ve been running on a depleted battery for so long that the original baseline is gone.

Where do you store this?

I've been good at compartmentalising. I think a lot of us are, especially in high-pressure jobs. Something difficult happens and you deal with it the same way every time you take that feeling, put it in a hypothetical box, seal the lid, and push it somewhere out of sight.

Grief from losing someone? Into the box it goes. Tension at home after a rough week where you've barely spoken to your partner in weeks? In the box. That creeping anxiety about a deadline at work, or the feeling that you're letting people down, or the guilt of knowing you should be more present but not having the energy? All of it. Straight in the box. Lid on, push it down. Carry on, nothing to see here!

And for a while, it works it’s been working for me for more than 20 years. I tell myself you're coping. You're managing. You're fine. I am fine, am I fine? The box says otherwise, of course. It's getting heavier. The lid doesn't close; I haven't been able to close mine for several years at this point, it's bursting at the seams. But you press it down, tell yourself you'll deal with it later, and crack on with the next thing, the next project, the next app.