When Someone You Love Is Struggling
You can see it happening, and that may be the hardest part. Someone you love — a partner, a friend, a grown child — has gone quiet in a way that worries you. You want to fix it, and you can't, and so you hover, or you back off, or you lie awake running the same helpless loop. Loving someone through a hard stretch is its own kind of ache.
Marcus Aurelius knew that we are not built to stand apart from one another. In his private notebook — the Meditations, written to himself while he ran an empire — he reminded himself, in George Long's public-domain translation, that "we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth." To show up for another person is not meddling or weakness; it is the most natural thing a human being does. That instinct to reach toward someone hurting is old, and it is right. Trust it.
But here is where the emperor steps back, and where this column has to be honest with you: care and presence are gifts, and they are not treatment. You can sit with someone. You cannot be their clinician. So here is the line. If the person you love has seemed withdrawn, hopeless, or not themselves for most of the day, most days, for more than two weeks — if it's reaching their sleep, their eating, their work, the things they once cared about — that is the point to gently encourage them toward a doctor or a therapist, and to help them get there if you can. And if you ever hear them speak of not wanting to be here, or you're afraid for their safety, don't wait and don't keep it a secret between you. Reach out for help tonight.
You don't have to have the right words. You mostly have to stay, and to help them find the person who's trained for the rest.
You can't carry it for them — but you can walk them to the door, and you don't have to do that part alone.
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.