Member-only story
A friend indeed
A reader noticed that I was having mental health problems, purely through what I was writing. And he chose to help.
A few years ago, I was going through a bad time. I had just lost my best friend in a motorcycle accident. My father had been diagnosed with cancer. I was angry at the world.
Now, being a man, I didn’t tell anyone any of this. I still got up each day. I still went to work each day. I still chatted with and laughed with people, even though I desperately wanted to be left alone.
In the middle of all this, a friend of mine started to give me these tiny, little writing jobs to do. A piece for a local newspaper here. A piece for this website there.
They were all things he could have written himself quite easily and just as well. But, over a period of several months, these little jobs just kept on coming.
They were a welcome distraction. And it was only years later that I discovered that was precisely the point.
Even though I hadn’t discussed my mental state with anyone and even though I thought I had kept it hidden, he had spotted it in the tone of my writing.
Unbeknown to me, he had reached out to my wife to ask if everything was OK because my writing had become angry and bitter.
