After I left the psychiatric hospital, I went to mental health grad school. Every weekday morning I’d leave my newborn with my husband or a sitter, head across town and spend the morning in classes and groups with my fellow recoverees. 

We’d start the morning with an optional spirituality/mindfulness type thing, which I liked the sound of but generally missed because a) baby b) traffic c) not an early arriver. Then we’d head to a lecture given by one of the therapists on an aspect of mental health and recovery, at which I took pages of notes punctuated by stars when something the therapist-lecturer said really hit home. Stuff like, “Put your own oxygen mask on first” as a way to think about self-care, and “Stop should-ing on yourself” to stop burying yourself in piles of expectations about what you “should” do. 

Technically they don’t call this “mental health grad school”, they call it an “Intensive Outpatient Program”. Whatever we’re calling it, I was so into my first grad school/Intensive Outpatient therapy lecture that I was wholly unprepared for what came next. 

I wandered down the hallway away from the lecture hall clutching what I thought of as my class schedule, in search of room 301. It turned out to be a nondescript meeting room, empty save for a ring of mismatched chairs. I shrunk back into the hallway, afraid I’d come to the wrong place. But within minutes, people with sad eyes and coffee cups started to trickle into the room. “Is this Erin’s group?” I asked. It was, so I fell in behind them and took a seat. 

Erin herself marched into the room minutes later and took a silent census, her gaze resting for a moment on each of us. “You’re D’Arcy. Right. You’re new. And we need an extra chair.”

After a shuffling of bodies and furniture, our circle was formed. Erin fixed her signature intense gaze on each of us once again, making a slow sweep around the room. “We’ll get started with check ins. Does anyone want to tell D’Arcy the rules?”

A woman whose face was tombstone somber said, “We’re not allowed to say we’re fine.” 

“Or okay,” the woman beside her added. “We can’t just say, ‘I’m okay’ either.”

“Or, ‘I’m tired’” muttered someone.

Erin nodded emphatically. “‘Tired’ is not a feeling.”

I started to feel a vague sense of panic and Erin turned to me again. “You also need to share whether or not you’re having suicidal ideations.”

With that, we began check-ins that were slow, awkward and raw – the polar opposite of typical every day adult life check-in’s, where everyone is never anything but fine, okay or tired. 

A few months before my psychiatric crash, I’d been at a work retreat where the leader asked everyone, “How ARE you??” and made it clear that he was really, truly asking. The problem was, the way I’d gotten through most of the past several months was by steadfastly ignoring how I really, truly was. I’d begun leaking tears and been unable to compose myself, to the point where the leader handed me a book of poetry and excused me for the day. 

Now here I was, facing the same question, and even if I sobbed myself into dehydration Erin was not about to hand me some Wordsworth and let me off the hook. From my spot on the far side of the circle I listened to other group members speak, stumble and wince their way through this landmine of a question: the simple, somehow almost unfaceable reality of how ARE you?

When it was my turn, I attempted to talk my way around the question. “I’m D’Arcy,” I began, “and I just had a baby. I just got out of the mental hospital – well, I got out a few days ago, and my father-in-law drove me here….”

Erin let me ramble on for a moment or two, the newbie’s one-time grace card, before asking, “And how are you feeling, D’Arcy?”

Can I answer that question now? Can you? Right now, typing this in my backyard, I’m content, with undertones of anxiety and irritation. That day, shifting on top of my baby-just-came-out stitches, I was uncomfortable and scared. I think Erin mined that much out of me. Over the next few weeks in group, I got braver about looking inside and admitted that I was hurt, confused, disappointed, and angry. Really angry. When my husband and mother came to visit on family days, and I started to speak about these things, my real feelings of the uncomfortable variety, Erin pointed out that both of them had the same initial reaction – they both tried to cut off, comfort and soothe me. I was not the only one in my life that struggled to unleash the uncomfortable feelings and let them out into the world. 

I can’t tell you the stories of the people in my group. I can’t share with you their faces or names, because those are not mine to share. I can tell you that, as we learned to tell our unvarnished truths, without exception we were kinder to each other than we were to ourselves. I lost track of the times someone scoffed at their own struggles and in the next breath empathized with the person sitting beside them, or someone began a sentence, “I should have…..” only to have another group member point out “You couldn’t have known” or “you were only a kid” or some other piece of simple truth that evaded the self-judging storyteller. We all did this, judged ourselves against the razor of perfection, while showing grace and understanding to everyone else. It was like we could see each others’ reality without the harsh distortions we put upon our own. Maybe that’s why, as Erin liked to firmly tell us, “You will get better faster together.”

Mental health grad school doesn’t last as long as regular grad school. Less than a month after it began, it was over, me having been judged ready to resume regular life. I cuddled my baby, extended my maternity leave and reported weekly to my therapist. And, I became a regular connoisseur of support groups. I tried Co-Dependents Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous (which was only a little weird, because I wasn’t one) before finding my groove with Depression Bipolar Support Alliance, where I joined the circle every other week for about a year. 

I still join the circle every other week or so. Only now, the circle is my Sunday school class, aka my parenting support group. I’m not sure just how it happened, but somehow, a critical mass of my people with kids roughly the same age stumbled into the same inclusive little church at the same time, and we continue to do it every week, or at least, enough to weeks to make it count. Sometimes we talk about faith, but mostly, we talk about parenting and struggle and joy. We go around the circle doing Roses and Thorns, each talking through our highs and our lows at that moment in life, which is just another name for How ARE you, really?

My circles go on from there. My neighbors are a circle. My adult skaters are too. My friends, real friends, whether from childhood or just met them to anything in between, are in my circle. I feel the circle with my family, and tell them the truth in a way I didn’t think I could before my psychiatric crash. Really the only circle-making criteria is that we can be real together and feel better for doing it.

A circle can be longstanding or it can only be a few moments long. It can appear those moments when someone asks “How are you?” Sometimes you decide to step into the mess of full truth in that moment. Sometimes you don’t. But I hope, when you need to, you always, always know you can. 

Photo credits: airplane passengers by Juno1412, chairs by griffert, reading woman by Pexels, people in circle by rudamese and shoe circle by Laughing Raven. All from Pixabay