When Someone You Love Is Struggling
You've noticed it for a while now — a friend, a sibling, a partner who isn't themselves. The calls get shorter. The plans get cancelled. Something behind the eyes has dimmed, and you can see it even when they insist they're fine. You want to fix it, and you can't, and the helplessness has its own particular ache.
Marcus Aurelius — emperor of Rome, and a man who spent his private notebook reminding himself how to treat other people — took it as a first principle that we are not built to weather things alone. In the Meditations, in George Long's translation, he wrote that human beings "are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth." And elsewhere he gave himself the plainest instruction for meeting another person's struggle: "Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them." To bear with someone — to stay, to keep showing up when you cannot cure — is not a lesser love. Often it is the whole of what you have to give, and it is enough to matter.
But here is the line, and it's an important one. Your steadiness is a gift; it is not a treatment, and you were never meant to be your loved one's doctor. If what you're watching has settled in and stayed — if it's stealing their sleep, their work, their appetite, their will to do the things they used to love, for weeks rather than days — that is the point to gently encourage them toward a professional, and to keep encouraging. And if you ever have reason to fear for their safety — if they speak of not wanting to be here, or of harming themselves — do not carry that alone and do not wait. Reach out for help the same day. The numbers below take calls about someone you're worried about, not only about yourself.
You cannot lift the weight off their shoulders. You can refuse to let them stand under it by themselves, and you can help them find the people trained to help carry it.
You don't have to have the answer. You just have to stay, and help them make the call.
Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), 24/7, free and confidential — or chat at 988lifeline.org. Prefer text? Text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line). In immediate danger, call 911.