World Mental Health Day: Traditionally My 2nd Least Favourite Day of the Year

Today is 10th October, and it's World Mental Health Day. Oddly, it has traditionally also been my 2nd least favourite day of the year for most of my life.

That's not because I have had some periods where my mental health has been, to say the least, below par, and that a day devoted to mental health reminds me that mine has often been shot to hell. It's because it also happens to be my birthday.

This year I feel better about my birthday than I have done in around a decade. This is in part because I've managed, finally, to convince myself that I have a small but perfectly formed collection of people who really, genuinely know I exist and actually quite like that I do.

Don't get me wrong: I have tricky days in which the black dog rears up and tries to take me back to the knowledge that actually, no, there isn't anybody there; but I've got a much better handle on it these days, and that's thanks in no small part to some fabulous people who have stuck by me regardless of some pretty full-on campaigns to push them away, and make it really very difficult to convince myself that the black dog is right.

But this post isn't really about me, I promise. The hope is that it's about someone you know. You see, one of the reasons behind my long-standing hatred of October 10th, my birthday, is that it has represented an influx of "happy birthday" messages as various of our social media* overlords command it, and then October 11th reverts to the state of play on October 9th: Alone.

The thing that's kept me going for the past decade or so, and helped me power through October 10th is not those once-every-365-days half-arsed, Big Brother sanctioned word-for-word messages of hollow hopes for one happy day out of a whole year. It's the random, unbidden, unexpected contact made on March 12th, June 4th or November 17th. Those are the attempts at interaction that mean the most; that make me feel that someone genuinely remembered I exist, rather than needing to be reminded by an algorithm.

What I'm trying to say here is that, unless something very strange is going on, most of the people you know don't have a birthday today. Is there someone you keep meaning to get in touch with, but somehow it always falls of the bottom of the list? Is there someone who you wonder about occasionally? Is someone coming to mind right now?

Don't wait for the algorithm. Do it now. Drop them a line, say hello. Invite them for that coffee, pizza, pint, walk, or wander down memory lane. Don't wait for the machines to tell you it's time for a half-hearted message; pick someone and send something from the bottom of it instead.

It may make all the difference.









* Or paper diaries, entries diligently and automatically copied from year to year with no real thought as to whether they should still be there.