TODAY a friend asked me how I was.
This might seem trivial, but I don’t mean the whole “hey, how are you?” thing we do each and every day. That’s all very nice – it’s good manners and polite conversation – but a lot of the time you don’t expect anyone to say anything back other than “I’m good, thanks. How are you?” Today, though, a friend asked me outside the beginnings-of-a-conversation confines; and I didn’t realise until later how much I actually appreciated it.
Anyone who knows me particularly well will know I am one of the biggest worriers around. I suffer from various different types of anxiety and often let it ‘get to me’ too much. Plus, now that winter’s here, the miserably dark days are starting to have an effect on my mood again. The thing is, for various different reasons, a lot of people with anxiety and depression don’t want to talk about it. Some hide or bury it away, feeling like it’s not worth talking about; some feel that talking won’t make any difference, or that it’ll just make things worse. As a result, the condition can sometimes worsen as that ‘connecting to other people’ feeling is lost. So the fact that I was genuinely asked today how I’d been doing… well, I was taken aback.
I was about to answer with the “fine thanks, and you?” template, but as this clearly wasn’t small talk, I thought about it. As I thought, I became conscious of how much of an ‘up-and-down week it’s been’, so I was honest, and said this. Even just saying it made me feel better about it being out in the open already.
I spent a lot of time thinking about different acts of kindness to write about, when this idea popped into my head. A simple, ordinary action that – to someone like me – meant a great deal the more I thought about it. It was as if I’d had a sort of realisation about the power one small phrase can have. One phrase, one kind action of ‘reaching out’… it can feel as if a hand has suddenly taken hold of yours.
Words by Fiona Hardie, picture by Melissa Reid
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