— Grief, Fog, and the People We Avoid
May is Mental Health Awareness Month
I escaped the heat in Arizona — and more than that, the pain and loneliness that had been swallowing me since the unspeakable grief of losing my anchor, my late husband.
In San Francisco, I found comfort in the cool air, the fog, and the breeze that softened the edges of everything. I simply lived — small routines, quiet walks, coffee shops, buses, and strangers. I stepped out of my “grief prison” and back into the real world, even if only briefly.
Yet almost every day, I encountered people visibly struggling with mental illness.
📌 The Suffering We Pretend Not to See
Not abstract suffering. Not in headlines. Not in statistics. Not the kind packaged for awareness campaigns or inspirational slogans. Real suffering. Public suffering. Right there on the sidewalk, on the train, at the bus stop. The kind that talks to itself on street corners at night. The kind that screams into invisible storms on buses while everyone else stares at the floor, pretending not to notice. The kind that wanders through the city, carrying realities no one else can see.
And still, part of me felt strangely grateful that the city’s beautiful, mild weather could offer them a kind of refuge.
👉 Fear, Distance, and the Human Reflex
This morning, the moment I stepped onto the bus, I heard a man in the back yelling nonstop to himself, arguing with someone who wasn’t there — or maybe with memories none of us could bear to hear. I didn’t dare look. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, and I didn’t want to. Part of me wanted distance. Safety. Escape.
That reaction felt deeply human — and deeply ugly.
Beneath my fear lay another feeling: heartbreak. Helplessness. Shame, even. I kept wondering what had happened to him. What sequence of losses, traumas, chemicals, abandonment, violence, bad luck, or loneliness had brought him to that moment? Nobody arrives there overnight. No child dreams of becoming someone the world avoids making eye contact with.
Mental illness is one of the few forms of suffering that causes people to lose empathy precisely when it is needed most.
📍 When Compassion Has Conditions
And yet our society often treats mental illness as a personal failure rather than as collective evidence: evidence of trauma, isolation, poverty, addiction, abuse, neglect, broken families, broken systems — a culture that praises productivity while quietly abandoning people who can no longer perform.
We say “mental health matters,” but only when suffering remains convenient, inspirational, or aesthetically acceptable. We are comfortable with anxiety that still goes to work. With depression that still answers emails. With trauma that remains polite. But the moment pain becomes disruptive, loud, irrational, or frightening, compassion collapses into distance.
Maybe the most unsettling truth is this: the line between “us” and “them” is much thinner than we want to believe.
🤔 The Fragility We Recognize in Ourselves
We romanticize mental health conversations only when they are digestible. We share quotes about healing and self-care, yet recoil from the realities of psychosis, addiction, paranoia, homelessness, personality disorders, and suicidal despair. Society loves the language of awareness more than the burden of responsibility.
Maybe that’s because severe mental illness forces us to confront something terrifying: the human mind is far less stable than we pretend. Most people want to believe sanity is a fixed trait — secured by morality, discipline, intelligence, or good choices. But psychology tells a far more uncomfortable story. Under enough grief, trauma, isolation, fear, humiliation, or chronic stress, almost anyone can fracture. The brain is not built to endure endless suffering without consequence. Sometimes it adapts in ways the world calls madness.
The frightening person on the bus is not evidence that they are different from us. They are evidence of what can happen when suffering exceeds the mind’s capacity to contain it.
That may be the real reason people look away.
What scares us about severe mental illness is not only unpredictability but also recognition. Somewhere deep down, we understand it all too well. The mind is fragile, and that identity itself is more temporary than we’d care to admit.
⁉️Awareness Is Not Enough
A society is often judged by how it treats those who make others uncomfortable. Right now, we are failing.
Not because we lack awareness.
Because awareness without responsibility and effective solutions has become another form of performance.
…………………………..
Lord, grant peace to troubled minds, courage to weary hearts, and compassion to those of us who look away in fear. Help us see suffering not as a burden, but as a call to love. Amen. 🙏
“Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.” — 1 Peter 5:7 (KJV)