What It Means To Love Someone With Depression And Anxiety
By: Lexi Herrick @huffingtonpost
1. It’s experiencing raw humility and friendship, as you face both of your deepest weaknesses and most exhilarating capabilities with one another.
2. It’s the ability to value human beings for their complexities, strengths and beautiful differences.
3. It’s a change that happens inside of you. This transcends past your intimate relationships and moves into your overall interactions and understandings of others. It makes you see people with your heart, not your eyes.
4. It’s giving someone’s feelings validity, even if you don’t understand them.
5. It’s a complete and utter release of social stigma. It’s realizing just how real mental illness is from a first-hand perspective, and choosing to respect that in every way.
6. It’s knowing when someone is so lost and irrational that they aren’t the person you care about at that moment. It’s forgiving them for that confusing and scary reality.
7. It’s understanding how small actions can so deeply impact those you love in a positive or negative way. It’s having those effects magnified and exasperated in a way that illuminates your power to do good and evil.
8. It’s being able to tell the difference between speaking to an episode and speaking to someone you love. 9. It’s understanding the trials of an illness. Illnesses involve medicine, lifestyle adjustments and a responsibility to take care of yourself in a way that others don’t understand. Loving someone with mental illness means honoring it the same you would another health issue.
10. It’s exercising patience, compassion and perspective.
11. It’s learning difficult lessons, like knowing when to give someone space and when to hold on with all you have.
12. It’s being conscious of your own well-being too. It’s being able to know your limitations, and when someone you love requires help from someone else too.
13. It’s realizing that mental illness comes in all forms and degrees. It’s respecting all levels of it.
14. It’s overcoming frustrating and painful roadblocks. It’s identifying solutions and having difficult conversations that can also teach you about yourself.
15. It’s knowing that the person you love is remarkable and irreplaceable, despite the pieces of themselves they fight the most. It’s embracing and adoring another human being the way they deserve to be loved. It’s strength, kindness, maturity, fearlessness and passion.
