tearing my heart out to prove tiktok wrong
can we talk about how fucked the modern mental health narrative is?
I started writing this piece 2 years ago but felt like I internalised these lessons before finishing it. However, a couple of conversations I've had recently convinced me this still desperately needs to be said.
In the weirdest orgy of all time between the Enlightenment, Capitalism, and online mental health movements, there's been a predominant and insidiously harmful mental health narrative emerging.
It portrays advice that seems - and can be - genuinely and innocently helpful. It tells us to focus on ourselves, embrace self-love, to heal before we hurt ourselves and others. After all, you can't pour water out of an empty cup, and how can you love someone else when you can’t love yourself?
At its core is an idyllic vision of peace: A world where relationships are mutually fruitful, boundaries are respected and held, and people are self-sufficient individuals who don't need to burden others with unpleasant emotions and validation they should find within themselves.
But this peaceful vision holds two deeply flawed assumptions that deny us the relationships that save us. Relationships where we may unfurl our broken selves that haven't quite been put together yet, where we can bond over not just joy and sorrow but our shared evil, where we can find love without total acceptance.
Isolation: False Healing
In this narrative espoused by self-sufficiency and defined boundaries, there's a deeply rooted idea that healing is done in isolation. Find refuge from toxic relationships and a very messy world, figure your shit out with the space and time you need, and emerge from your cocoon happy independent of any external validation.
And isolation does feel like healing.
It’s an intoxicating idea in part because isolated healing is a study in false negatives. When relationships are made difficult by traumas, anxieties, and neuroses — and when those issues are triggered as you navigate complicated relationships — being alone really can feel a lot like being cured.
-Rayne1
You may be alone, but it is safe, controlled, and of course, more productive. After all, the only thing worse than being alone is to feel alone while surrounded by people. When we're tangled in a clusterfuck of a knot of relationships and life and everything in between, it can feel easier to simply cut them and start afresh. And maybe it is easier sometimes, to throw everything out rather than untangle a long messy history.
But a life like that is like living in an IKEA showroom. It is clean and pretty and there is nothing out of place, but there's a difference between a productive life with a sterile one.
It’s easy to feel healed with the magical properties of isolation of a deliberately designed therapist's office, reinforced with HIPPA and the safety of a transactional relationship. It's easy when you know there is no judgment, no stake, no risk between you and your therapist. But you need someone in your life to call out your shit before you translate it through your narrative for your therapist, someone in your life you can physically lean on, someone you can hurt and be hurt by.
Life is oddly poetic. Joy costs pain. Struggle births meaning. Without risk, there is no love.
Yes. This is all messy. But it turns out life is messy. Humans are messy. In the murky waters of life, isolation is like a fish in a pool (not planned but I did the name thing!). Safe, but entirely too artificial, too shallow, too suffocating.
To be a dam for damage. My shittiness will not enter the world, I thought, and quickly became my own hero
-Ocean Vuong
The Martyrdom of Isolation
Ever since a young age, my brain has been madly addicted to maladaptive daydreaming. I have suffered a thousand hypothetical tragedies. Crushing rejections, unexpected disabilities, and simulated deaths of my loved ones over and over again. But maybe the reason my brain always comes back to those imaginary tragedies is because part of me enjoys them. Part of me enjoys being the main character of suffering.
It is the twisted way that depression romanticises itself. The part of your brain that feels special because it is broken. The part of your brain that sometimes wishes that something horrible could happen to you, something that would make you irrevocably and irreversibly special. It is an illness born of privilege. That's the part of our brains that romanticises isolation. We see it not just as a necessary sacrifice to be ‘healed’, but secretly, hidden even to ourselves, enjoy it.
When I pull myself into isolation, deep down, there's a sick sense of righteousness. Of martyrdom. I am keeping the emotional burdens from the people I care about. I am holding the weight of my sorrows alone, and that must mean that I am strong.
I am suffering and alone, but it is a noble suffering.
Of course, these standards are unfair. If a friend felt this way, I would tell them that sometimes we need friends to show us the love and compassion that we are unable to give ourselves. I would proceed to slap them with the truth until they leaned on me.
Perhaps, deep down, it's not that I'm incapable of loving myself as I should. Deep down, I enjoy being unfair to myself because it makes me special.
I am not so special. I don't have to be the main character, taking on the weight of the world. It feels horrible. It feels unbearably relieving.
Oops. Is this ✨Capitalism✨ defining our relationships?
Phrases like “You can't pour water out of an empty cup” are a form of logic used to protect yourself, but they imply that to give to others means to lose something of your own. You can’t pour water out of an empty cup because water follows the conservation of matter. As far as I’m aware, there is no conservation of love, no conservation of happiness, no conservation of any of the colours that make life worth living.
If you believe that a relationship is a mere channel of exchange, then to ask for help would be to ask for others to pour you their water, to trade them for their love with the poison of your pain. And so it is the kindest people who prevent themselves from asking for help, who choose isolation because they have been sold this silly narrative of relationships through this undeniably capitalistic lens.
But relationships are not transactional. Relationships are not defined by a ratio of productive to unproductive emotions traded. The threads we weave our relationships with are made of all shared experiences, not just productive ones. You cannot paint with white alone, and you cannot have a relationship with only joy.
I know that most of us have experienced a cautionary tale in the form of unwanted trauma dumping. I know that for every person isolating themselves in martyrdom, there is another weaponising their trauma to mug people of their attention and empathy.
All I can say is this. If you are concerned about being that person, you have more than enough self-awareness to never become that person. If you are concerned that you do not know how to love well, then you have everything you need but practise. Know that you are not simply taking when you lean on a friend, but likely giving them something deeply important.
We all exist to save each other. There is barely anything else worth living for.
-Rayne fisher-quann
Saving is mutual
Truth be told, it is I who am getting saved when you come to me for help.
I may not play the biggest role in people's lives, but I play a role no one can. There is very little in my life more meaningful than that. I told the truth when you needed to hear it, I saw who you are through my eyes, and it was my arms you cried in.
There is a profound responsibility of knowing that a specific string of words could change your life, that the series of emotional collisions have elapsed into this moment in between us, that coat my words with a glimpse of enchantment.
I have not accomplished any of the greatness I want, not made any of the impact that I dream of. But the fact that I can confidently say that I deserve to exist at all is because I genuinely believe I've made my friend's lives better. I genuinely believe my existence has caused people to enter a better path.
When I save someone, I am getting saved in turn.
And in this context, isolation is so silly. We like to hold and yet are afraid to ask to be held. We like to be leaned on, yet leaning on someone else feels like we're a box full of rotten apples whose weight is threatening to crush and spill putrescence over the very person carrying us. You believe that you have somehow fooled others into loving you. That if love comes from someone as flawed as you are, then it must in some way be as flawed as you. You believe that you should retreat and isolate until you and your love are whole and healthy.
Here's the thing. “How can you love someone else when you can’t love yourself” can just as easily be phrased as “how can you love yourself if you can’t love anyone else” because it goes both ways.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we have it all backwards. Maybe we shouldn't crawl into a cocoon until we become someone society judges suitable for interacting with other human beings. Maybe we heal by loving.
Of course, you can give too much. There's always a balance. You lead a horse to water, you can communicate and pour your heart out, but you cannot make it drink.
I'm not saying boundaries are bad. Your ability to set boundaries is exactly what you need to be willing to help people. Knowing you are capable at any point of setting a boundary when you recognise someone is hurting you is precisely the safety you need to extend a hand.
But boundaries of all types need to be challenged. If boundaries between right and wrong are not challenged, being gay would still be heresy.
When we respect autonomy above all else, life becomes simple. Responsibility becomes delineated. But sometimes respect for boundaries can start to look like a shade of indifference. We walk in bubbles of our own world, showing sanitised versions of ourselves to not infringe on anyone's peace. But I think the world could do with more reminders that every single person you come across has their own vivid life.
It is embarrassing to admit, but there are times when I proclaimed needing isolation to skip out on plans when I just wanted someone to want me there bad enough to ignore my own words. It is an immature test of attention, it is a desperate and unhealthy method of validation, but it is true. Sometimes what you need is a good journal session alone, but other times what you need is a friend to ignore your complaints, to bust down your doors and drag you out, to lend you their will when yours is plagued with irrational insecurity.
The truth is that there is no formula for breaking boundaries. There is only trusting you know the people you love enough to do the right thing for them. If you believe in something, do not let boundaries become an unscalable wall. The other person may be leaning against it on the other side.
What we "deserve"
This narrative says the right thing is always simple. Protect your peace, respect others (if they say they want space, they are autonomous human beings who would never have self-destructive tendencies), identify those who would ruin your peace with burdensome emotions and cut them out of your life before they do.
There is a certain moral righteousness that scares me, and I can't help but feel like it is so dangerous because it's right. You don’t owe anyone anything. But I also can't help but feel that this fervent protection of an unburdened peaceful life strips away some part of our humanity
This narrative focuses so much on “protecting our space” and “becoming our best self” that it forgets that we are invariably a reflection and accumulation of everyone around us. I cannot help but see the irony in which not sharing political issues halfway across the world means you're complicit, but ignoring someone right next to you because they're too draining is simply ‘protecting your peace’.
Do toxic people deserve good relationships?
I don't know.
But I think “deserve” is a terrible word. There are plenty of bad people who don’t deserve the kindness you could give them. But maybe the world would be a better place if you did so anyway. If everyone sees you for what you are to them, who will see you for who you could be? There is little that is more powerful than someone who believes not only in you but who you can be.
That is why I can't help but feel these barrages of videos teaching people how to watch out for “red flags” are deceptively destructive. In the world of infinite options, it seems easy, even right, to simply cut someone off when they have problematic qualities that threaten your peace and growth.
Paranoia is a useful trait for survival. If you are looking for a tiger in the bushes, every rustle of the wind will seem to be caused by one. Better to be wrong in that direction. But if you are constantly looking for these red flags, you are constantly classifying people into those who deserve your love and commitment and those who don't. What happens when you're the one who has toxic qualities?
A couple of years ago, a friend was talking about two of her best friends who had gotten closer and had started hanging out without her. Although there's nothing wrong with that (she also hung out with either of them alone quite often), I recognised a feeling I have felt many times before in her words.
If you have never felt it, it is this sinking, oily feeling in the pit of your stomach. It is a queasy sensation that they will get so close that there will be no space for you, that your role in their lives was for them to meet each other. You know it is born from your own insecurity, but you nevertheless feel yourself wanting to split them up, and nevertheless feel the guilt from wanting that.
Parked under Atlanta's questionably lit street lights, we shared why we were like that, sulked over our moral shortcomings, and of course made lots of jokes to cope 😎. But we mostly just watched cars roll by, feeling that queasy emotion together. We still sucked but we sucked together, knowing that the feeling lived in the stomach of the person next to us.
We weren't happy, but we were nevertheless being saved. It was because a person I saw as deeply good felt the same thing as me that let me face it. There are some fears that you can only overcome by experiencing, and some experiences that you can only overcome because they are shared.
It is in the safety that I am loved despite the truth that I am deeply flawed, despite my arrogance and stubbornness, that frees me to come to terms with those flaws.
The moon does not always have to be full for us to love it.
The thing about tailored narratives is that they never have to accommodate the stubborn imperfections of reality. They abstract away the messiness of being alive as overcomplicated monkeys who built overcomplicated rules to loving each other. They can turn the hard lesson of finding those right for you (or more commonly those not right for you) into 30-second TikToks, turn healing into not-yet abandoned but serenely pretty notion templates, turn life lessons that need to be etched through joy and pain into stories that start with “so I was talking to my therapist” like you're the main character in a movie (the story will of course, end in some wise yet simultaneously quippy analogy that you can apply without thought).
There is a lot of validity in these narratives. But it undeniably exploits our tendencies to retreat from life. You cannot compartmentalise every difficult conversation as “something for my therapist” (therapy is there to get you to talk to people in your life about them, not as a replacement). It undeniably arms the easy way out with weapons of righteousness. You don't owe anyone anything, but that doesn't mean that you might not be better off if you helped anyway.
Try to love well, and when you can't, you don't need to isolate yourself until you feel like you can. Just try anyway. You do not need to be healed to deserve love, you do not need to be tragically and heroically capable of handling all of your burdens (nor singlehandedly anyone else's burdens!!!). You can be vulnerable in a true sense, with your flaws and societally incompatible feelings, and through those glimpses into the deepest truths about each other get the courage to face them together. Someone will know you deeply, you will know them deeply, and you will be able to hurt each other deeply. And you probably will hurt and be hurt.
And in that risk lies love.
The universe is poetry.
It’s been a while. I’ve been incredibly busy since 2024 (in good ways, mostly). I’ve made a lot of changes that haven’t finished panning out.
In more relevant news to you, I’ve never stopped writing and will start publishing one post a week, and branching out to different topics like productivity!
Stay curious & love well,
Jesse
I had written maybe a quarter of this first draft before I stumbled upon Rayne’s “No good alone”
She said everything I wanted to say but more, and better. Most of my time since has been trying to create a complete essay while adding original and valuable thoughts to the topic, and I’m not entirely convinced I did so.
Another inspiration and great essay on a similar topic is Persinette’s “Less tiktok, more screaming”.
