Mental Health Awareness Month – Entry #3

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IMPORTANT NOTE: I am NOT a mental health professional. I’m just a person who loves you and has been through some things myself. If you need professional help, please start here.

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For most of my life, I had a very clear and very wrong idea about what strength looked like.

Strength meant handling your own problems. It meant not burdening other people with your struggles. It meant being the one everyone else leaned on, never the other way around. It meant saying “I’m fine” so automatically and so convincingly that eventually you half-believed it yourself.

Asking for help? That was for people who couldn’t figure it out on their own. And I was going to figure it out on my own.

I held that belief for a long time. And it cost me more than I want to think about.

The Guy Who Had It Together

I’ve spent a good part of my adult life building a version of myself that looked like he had it figured out. Competent. Capable. In control. The kind of person people bring their problems to, not the other way around.

And I’m not saying that was all fake — I’m genuinely good at some things, and I’ve worked hard for all of it. But underneath the capable surface, there was a lot I wasn’t saying out loud. A lot I was managing — or trying to manage — entirely by myself.

The addiction years. The stretches of anxiety so bad I couldn’t sleep. The ADHD that made certain things feel impossible while I pretended they were effortless. The times I was falling apart privately while performing stability publicly.

I kept all of that behind the curtain because I had a role to play. Provider. Leader. The one who holds it together. Asking for help felt like breaking character — like admitting that the whole thing was, at least partly, a performance.

And performances are exhausting. Especially the ones you can never come offstage from.

What I Told Myself

Here’s the internal logic that kept me from reaching out for way too long. Maybe you recognize some of it.

Other people have real problems. This doesn’t compare.

That one’s a classic. Whatever I was going through, I could always find someone who had it worse. Which meant I didn’t have the right to struggle. Which meant I needed to push through and stop being dramatic about it.

If I tell someone this, they’ll see me differently.

This one ran deep. I’d built something — a reputation, a career, relationships based on a certain version of me. What happens to all of that when people find out you’re not as solid as they thought? What if they stop trusting you? What if they’re disappointed?

I should be able to handle this.

This might be the most insidious one. Because it sounds like accountability but it’s actually just cruelty dressed up as standards. It’s the idea that being a capable adult means handling everything internally, and that needing support is somehow a failure of self-sufficiency.

All of those stories felt completely reasonable to me at the time. None of them were true. But I lived inside them for years.

What It Actually Cost

Here’s the thing about white-knuckling your way through everything alone: the bill always comes due.

For me it showed up in ways I didn’t always connect to the underlying cause. The short fuse that came out of nowhere. The walls I kept around myself even with people I loved. The way I could be completely present for someone else’s crisis and completely checked out from my own. The exhaustion that sleep never really fixed because what I was tired from wasn’t physical.

And the loneliness. That one surprised me most. Because I wasn’t alone — I had people around me, people who cared about me. But there’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes from never letting anyone see the real version of what’s going on. You can be surrounded by people and still feel completely isolated if none of them actually know you. Not the real you. Not the struggling, uncertain, still-figuring-it-out version.

That loneliness is one of the heaviest things I’ve carried. And I created it myself, one “I’m fine” at a time.

The First Time I Actually Asked

I’m not going to give you a single cinematic moment where everything changed. That’s not how it happened. It was more gradual than that — more stumbling than turning point.

But I remember the first time I said something real to someone. Not the cleaned-up version. Not the “I’ve been a little stressed lately” version. The actual thing.

I was terrified. Genuinely terrified — not of the person, but of what it meant to say it out loud. Because saying it out loud made it real in a way it wasn’t when it just lived in my head. It meant admitting that I couldn’t just think my way out of this one. It meant being seen in a way I’d spent years avoiding.

And then something unexpected happened.

The person didn’t flinch. They didn’t pull back or look at me differently or confirm my worst fears about what this admission would cost me. They just listened. And then they said something like — yeah, I’ve been there too.

That was it. No dramatic resolution. No immediate fix. Just someone else saying I know what that’s like — and the massive, quiet relief of not being alone in it anymore.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot since. About how many years I spent carrying things I didn’t have to carry alone. About all the times I told myself that asking for help would cost me something, when the actual cost was in the not asking.

What I Know Now

Asking for help is not weakness. I know that now in a way I didn’t before — not just intellectually, but in my bones.

It’s actually one of the harder things a person can do. It requires you to admit that you don’t have everything under control, which cuts right against the story most of us have been telling about ourselves for years. It requires trust. It requires the willingness to be seen as you actually are, not as you want to appear.

That takes guts. Real guts. Not the performed kind.

The strongest people I know — the ones I genuinely respect, not just admire from a distance — are not the ones who handle everything alone. They’re the ones who know when they need support and aren’t too proud to reach for it. They’ve figured out that carrying everything yourself isn’t strength, it’s just stubbornness with better PR.

I spent a long time confusing the two.

If This Is You

If you’re the person who always holds it together — the one everyone leans on, the one who figures it out, the one whose honest answer to “how are you?” is never the actual honest answer — this is for you.

The strength you think you’re showing by handling everything alone? The people closest to you don’t need that from you. They need you — the real one, not the performance.

And the help you keep telling yourself you don’t need, or don’t deserve, or should be able to do without? It’s there. Real people, who’ve been through real things, who are not going to think less of you for being human.

The hardest part is saying the first real thing out loud. Everything gets a little easier after that.

I promise.

–Evan