Let Yourself Be Okay

It’s a fight to find the will to keep fighting…and sometimes you want to lose.

As we approach Mental Health Awareness Month, I wanted to reflect on the different aspects of mental health. On top of that, I recently just finished the season 2 finale of The Pitt on HBO MAX. While it was a frustrating and entertaining season, I saw the main character, Doctor Robert “Robby” Robonovich, experience many aspects of others’ struggles that were both relatable and irritating. But despite that, I do think the writers on the show did an amazing job depicting the complicated character who is both a leader and a holier-than-thou savior with deteriorating mental health. One that I found all too relatable, unfortunately.

For anyone who is a viewer of The Pitt, spoilers ahead. The season essentially ends with Robby, after his 15-hour shift of yelling, healing, crying, and slowly dying inside, holding and rocking an abandoned baby, telling it that it was going to be okay. They will be okay. You are loved, and you are needed. All the while, it shifts so the audience can see that he is ultimately talking about himself, trying to keep it together as tears well up in his eyes. This all comes on the heels of him being beligirently harsh, mean, and critical of his staff. And let me be clear, he wasn’t just all mean. Sometimes, throughout the season, he was a genuine mentor, more like his first-season counterpart. He wasn’t a villain, but he was complicated. His colleagues, who knew normal baseline Robby, could tell that something was deeply wrong with him. Some even learned that he planned on taking his life after this shift during his 3-month sabbatical. Ultimately, the season ends with the audience unaware if he truly will take his own life or take some of his colleagues ad’ advice to get the help he needs. It was the perfect depiction of depression and SI, but it got a side of the uglier version of it down well.

By the way, if you read trades and journals for movies, you know there will be a third season with Robby returning. So we can kinda know he's making it.

Once the season was over, the arc hit me in the chest. I cried. As someone who also struggled with SI and SA, it was harrowing to witness. It also reminded me of many dark times in my life, particularly a moment with my own co-workers some years ago. It was the summer of 2023, and things weren’t great for me. On the surface, I was doing amazing, for the most part. At least, at the beginning of summer, I was okay. Then things changed. A wave of depression hit over me. On top of that, things were changing in my household. My significant other was changing jobs, and I was going to become the household's primary earner. At this time, I’m a preschool and early education teacher. If you know America, you know this isn’t a country of well-paid educators. Especially when your students are extremely young. Being a teacher at any level is one of the most severely underpaid professions in the country, but that is a topic for another day.

With our upcoming changes, I knew I needed to get a new job, and relatively fast, as their shift in timing and schedule had a deadline at the end of summer. So naturally, I started scrambling for jobs. While I have worked many jobs before, I wasn’t a company man. At that point, I had been a lawncare salesman, bartender, retail specialist, who moved to assistant retail manager, pizza delivery guy, office intern, barista, small college newspaper editor, music journalist, and a few other jobs that weren’t always transferable to a “big-boy” job. And to top it all off, I was an English major. Don’t get me wrong. I loved my major and loved being a writer, but I was stressed out because English majors don’t get big jobs. They just don’t. At least not at 26.

With every application I sent, I seemed to get 5 rejection emails. It was terrible, and it made the ticking clock feel more imminent. On top of that, once again, this depression I was experiencing before any of this started was getting deeper and deeper. The suicidal ideation that I hadn’t experienced in years was coming back. On top of that, the book that eventually became Obsidian Sun was getting rejected from contests and agents alike. It was as if everything was crashing down. I was tired, gaining weight, losing weight, crying a lot, and was just feeling too much of the weight of the world for my liking. I wanted to be a good coworker, a good friend, a good partner, a good son, and I felt like I couldn’t show up as any version of that. I was drowning.

While at work, I became this mean, short, and detached person. I still did my job, but part of me wasn’t there. It was as if I woke up with half the battery I had the previous day. I couldn’t hold my normally chipper attitude with a ray of sunshine shooting out my ass. I wasn’t this real version of me. I just couldn’t maintain. I just couldn’t…until my luck changed. I finally found a job. A middle school teacher. The very job I work today. I was finally okay. It didn’t make everything better, but it was the shot in the arm I needed.

After my last day, I called my friend, who is now a former coworker. I was excited and wanted to go out to dinner and drinks. When we got on the phone, she sounded sad, frustrated, and a little pissed off. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me I was the problem. Now, the earlier description I had of myself during the summer is a hindsight reflection. During those two and a half months of depression, I was completely unaware of how I was coming off. I was self-righteous, self-loathing, and wallowing in my own state of mind. My significant other didn’t know what to do with me at the time, as I would just come home and cry sometimes. It truly was one of the lowest times in my life, but unless you were in my head, you wouldn’t have known it.

Yeah, sure, I was an ass, but I didn’t see it that way. I was just sad. I didn’t want to reach out. I wanted to wallow. I didn’t want to be saved. Me? Be saved? I’m the savior, right? The man who can listen to your problems and make everything better. I don’t need help. I was the help. But that was my ego talking. As I’ve been saying many different ways in my Substack posts, I was someone who had the tools, resources, and people around me, but my own ego, sense of responsibility, mental detriment, and more caused me to take all my problems within myself. Famously, I couldn’t take my own advice. Similar to Doctor Robby, I was lashing out at the very people I was supposed to confide in as they confided in me.

I almost lost a good friend that I had known for six years at that point, and many more I made at the school. We cried together. Admittedly, we needed some distance, but I also needed to apologize to her and to all the friends I made while I was there. If I wanted to maintain any relationship with them at all, I had to become better. I couldn’t choose to lose to my own depression. I had to make a choice when someone reached their hand out to me. I had to choose to take it. That meant opening up to them, my significant other, and many more who trusted me. I had to trust them with my truth and my heart.

Luckily, those days are behind me. That’s not to say I still don’t have times where I wish I weren’t here, but I’m willing to make myself be here because I need to be. Not for anyone else, but for myself. I had to let myself be okay. And while I’m still learning it today, I’d like to say I’m much more at it than I was before. That’s growth.