My twenty-six-year-old daughter talks as I sit next to her on our host’s loveseat, its cushions designed to support my body in all the right spots. I steel myself in place instead, striving to listen. We’re at the monthly meeting of our writing group, one of the artsy activities we enjoy doing together. These meetings formed from a winter retreat we attended a few months ago and rotate through members’ homes, so this is our first time here. We’ve just finished mingling around the remodeled kitchen’s island laden with brunch goodies—homemade egg bake, miniature croissants drizzled with chocolate, fruit, and an array of tea and Keurig coffee choices. Now we sit in the family room addition with its three walls of picture windows displaying manicured woods about to burst into spring and a fourth wall emanating warmth from its custom hardwood cabinetry. Not the lived-in home with preschooler toys decorating the living room or the urban, garden-level apartment with a Bohemian vibe of our previous meetings. From the moment I walked up the curved front path and through the double-entry doors of this suburban two-story, I’ve wanted to leave.
My twenties, thirties, and forties were spent on fitting in. I’d struggled with undiagnosed anxiety and OCD in childhood, compounded by anorexia then binge eating in my teen years, body changes everyone saw but no one understood. No mental health vocabulary existed in my 1970s small town. After a suicide attempt and couple-week psychiatric hospital stay as a college freshman, my only goal was to be what those around me called normal. I transferred colleges, slowly recovered, and started over. Magna cum laude college graduate then a good job, good husband, good house, good children, good life.
Now in my sixties I want to be in spaces where I don’t have to force myself to fit in. My fifties were painful steps toward what my younger self might have chosen, if she’d thought she had a choice: leaving my 20+ year marriage, moving away from upper-middle-class life, changing careers, discarding the religious beliefs of my parents, even sharing more of my past mental health struggles with a few friends and family, especially my daughter. In this home, I feel only a space I thought I’d escaped. What I’m not aware of yet is I also fear I will let myself fit in, keeping parts of who I am silent.
Six other members sit in a makeshift circle with my daughter and me: three in a sectional with ample personal space, an armchair for one, and the floor by choice for two leaning against the custom cabinets, supported by throw pillows our host insisted on providing. Instead of workshopping, we start with sharing our writing process, which bleeds into our lives, emotions, and struggles, then end with prompt writing. It’s my daughter’s turn to share.
“I want to write. But—” she says. “My job, I was almost fired.” Her employer’s HR department doesn’t believe her chronic tardiness could be mental health related instead of just laziness (an unexpected development since her previous bosses there gave her high ratings on performance reviews). She avoided being fired by using Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) accommodations granted from her psychiatrist’s diagnosis.
The FMLA specifies eligible employers must grant eligible employees unpaid leave for “a serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform the essential functions of his or her job.” She could use this leave for those mornings she arrived late after failing to manage her ADHD and OCD. Her employer was forced to accept she was still worthy of being employed.
My daughter continues, saying she no longer wants to use up her energy masking her mental health struggles. Others respond, as we do with everyone. But I do not. She’s a young adult. I want to be not-her-mom here. She deserves to speak her truth. Even when I don’t like it. Not because I don’t understand. But because her words admit to what I’ve forever tried to protect her from: others thinking she’s not good enough. That she won’t fit in.
I hold my neck muscles taut ensuring my head remains inclined toward my daughter. I study the refrigerator’s gleam through the pass-through opening incorporated into the cabinetry’s design. I force myself to appear tied to the group with head nods and appropriate half smiles. Even though I’m impressed by my daughter’s honesty and vulnerability, I want her to stop talking. I don’t know if I can take a minute more. This isn’t the place to share this.
Ever since my daughter showed signs of mental health struggles in childhood, I promised myself I would use every tool possible to prevent mental illness from doing to her what it did to me. Tools like professional help and discussing her struggles (and mine as she matured). But I could not yet imagine a culture capable of truly understanding.
In the hours after my suicide attempt at eighteen, a curly-headed doctor came into my hospital room. He didn’t look much older than me. If I’d thought I was worth anything, I might have let myself think he was cute. Everything was white—walls, bedding, his scrubs. All made even whiter by the winter sun flooding the room. Maybe he will help. The room felt fresh and warm. Then, he told me these things can happen, the pressures of starting college can lead to depression, even a suicide attempt. He talked of releasing me. All while fiddling with the IV bag above my head.
Then silence. I could almost hear the IV fluid drip. He didn’t look at me, didn’t ask me why I took the pills, didn’t create the opening I desperately needed to share my pain of many years.
I shivered, wanting to scream at him. Don’t you know I’m not some pretty young freshman temporarily overwhelmed? What I said aloud I don’t remember, but it was enough to stop my release and move me to the psychiatric ward. He wanted to normalize what I’d done to solve it. What I needed was a way to manage who I was.
“And even with the FMLA,” my daughter continues to explain to our writing group, “they wanted to demote me.”
She called me at work that day, something she never does, greeting me with sobs. My heart pounded. Has she been fired? Will she be able to handle whatever’s happened? Can I handle it?
“Please. I only have a few minutes left of break. Please. Tell me what’s wrong,” I said.
“My boss. Called me in. To his office. HR person was there. They say I can’t stay in my job. That I have to— have to— they want to move me. To the job I was promoted from.” Like a marathon runner making a final push to the finish line, I grabbed the determination I’d used so many times before when I’d learned what she now knew. She’s expected to adapt no matter what her mental health struggles are.
Forcing myself, muscling through the mental pain. This is what I remember most of my own recovery. After the brief psychiatric hospitalization at eighteen, I returned for my second freshman semester hell-bent on erasing my failures, erasing the girl I’d been, pouring myself into the cast of normal. I started by reversing my academic probation, the consequence of my freefall into clinical depression the previous semester. In all those late-night hours while attempting to sleep, I laid in my dorm room’s twin bed imagining myself in cap and gown walking to the auditorium stage to accept my diploma with honors. In all those days of my classes and work-study job and watching my friends manage theirs while still having time for chats over delivery pizza, shopping mall excursions, dorm beer parties, and midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I scrambled to the library the minute it opened to secure one of their private study rooms, or went to the empty Saturday night dorm lounge after declining let’s-have-fun invites, so I could read aloud each textbook word, my desperate attempt to concentrate. I forced myself to relax each muscle from my head down to my toes in what seemed like vain attempts to stifle the worries swirling in my mind. When that didn’t work, I imagined throwing all my worries in a trash can. And when that didn’t work, I imagined my worries as a pile on the road being run over by a car. Over and over and over. Weeks, months, years passed as my mental torment gradually lessened then ended.
I was recovered. I was normal. What I’d been in my past no longer mattered. I was able to overcome and live a functional life. By the time I entered the professional workforce after college, I could meet the inflexible demands of a private corporation who instilled in us the value of never using our accumulating sick days. So, I kept reaching for benchmarks of fitting into this world of co-workers focusing on climbing the corporate ladder and padding their bank accounts, and parents of my children’s teammates and classmates and friends discussing nothing of substance beyond achievements, especially their children’s. I was rewarded with success, but also with a life I didn’t quite want, a life of sameness where people assumed others thought like them, wanted what they wanted.
The refrigerator’s gleam intensifies as rays of late morning sun reach its stainless-steel surface on this writing group day. I glance at my daughter as she continues talking. I wonder why she can’t see that with each word she risks becoming less someone they can relate to and more someone they can judge.
My daughter pauses. I exhale.
Our host responds the most, talking of her experience in the corporate world, and elsewhere. “I used to feel I had to softly share my opinion rather than just coming out and saying it. I self-filtered, suppressed my voice. But we need to shed those ideas of politeness imposed on us. Especially on us as women. It’s absurd to think expressing ourselves is rude. We need to be propelled by positive inner energy rather than validation from others.” I hear a maternal tone.
At the earlier winter retreat when I first met our host, I’d jelled with her, perhaps because we’re both mothers of young adults, mine already one and hers about to be. Or perhaps because she is open and kind. But now, even though her words hold truth and good intentions, I want to scream at her. Don’t you understand what you’re saying doesn’t match my daughter’s reality? She’s learning to manage her mental illness and trying to navigate a workplace that doesn’t understand it. We’re not talking about being effective in team meetings here. My daughter knows more about this than you do. I know more. Although I couldn’t identify this then, I felt again in that hospital room of so many years ago with the curly-headed doctor telling me my truth, rather than listening.
As our host talks, my daughter writes notes in her journal (her way of managing ADHD distraction). She seems OK with this conversation. No tensing up or edge in her customary pleasant, polished voice. We move on around the circle to others’ sharing then the writing prompt.
I watch each minute tick by on the clock above the refrigerator, nodding my head and half-smiling at the right times.
At the winter retreat, my daughter and I took a walk during a do-your-own-thing schedule break. We set out from the lodge, past the outdoor meditation circle’s stones peeking out through the snow, and into the woods. An adventure, a chance to imagine a world we would create, if we could. We came to a wooden sign nailed to a tree saying: Hermitage in Use. Please Do Not Disturb. A foot-worn path led to a small dwelling barely visible through the trees. Later we would read that the retreat center built it “to provide an alternative perspective to that of the dominant culture.”
“I’m coming back and renting this space,” my daughter said.
I looked at her. How lovely it would be if spaces like this existed in her everyday world.
Months before we attended the retreat, my daughter asked me to be one of her support people, a strategy suggested by her therapist. Of course, I already was one, had been for years. She’d asked me this before, earlier in her twenties, as she grew into a young woman taking more and more of an active role in her mental health. This time she wanted to call me every workday morning at 6:30 a.m. to hold herself accountable as she tried to correct her tardiness. I was all in.
I was convinced determination and coping strategies and counselors and medication, coupled with her intelligence and insight, would be enough. She’d researched and found a therapist specializing in OCD once her work with a previous therapist yielded this diagnosis. She’d stuck with the process of identifying effective medications without intolerable side effects, and with delays in prescription refills due to medication shortages. All this while also graduating from college summa cum laude and getting a professional job during COVID. Her resume was one of success, including publication in a state historical society journal, the Outstanding Intern of the Year award from her college, and supervisor of other work-study students at her college library.
I’m an early riser so each morning I sat in my second-story home office at my laptop, cellphone on the desk to my left, waiting for her call. Sometimes she called on time, sometimes five or ten or fifteen minutes late. Sometimes no call at all, so I called her. If she didn’t pick up, I kept calling, my voice edged with panic once she finally answered. I could not understand why she didn’t get up and get going, why she didn’t realize she would have even more problems if she couldn’t fix this. I knew her employer could still find ways to fire her.
I grasped on tight to those morning calls. She needed to find a way to fit in. I wanted to protect her from those expecting conformity, not realizing that I, too, was expecting it.
In the days and weeks following our spring writing group meeting, I shake my head, sigh, and clench my teeth every time I think back to that day. I try to remember our host’s exact words so I can prove how off-base she was. I google her address and find an old Zillow listing with real estate photos when the previous owner put it up for sale. Maybe seeing the home again will jog my memory. I want the world I was constrained by, the world our host’s home and words reminded me of, to be held accountable.
I ask my daughter if she disliked what our host said, if any of it seemed like advice. I want her to say yes.
“No,” she says. “I mean she talked about giving others grace and remembering everyone is human but I wouldn’t say I didn’t like that.”
“Huh, interesting,” I respond. “My perception is really different. I wish I could figure out what made me think that.”
I wonder how my daughter could have missed our host’s lack of understanding. I begin to wonder if I missed something.
Perhaps my daughter’s reaction to our host, so different from mine, parallels in some way how good I felt that long ago day when I told the curly-headed doctor my truth, so relieved to finally let it all tumble out, not caring it wouldn’t match his expectations. Maybe the point for my daughter was the value of voicing her reality, regardless of others’ responses. I’ll have to ask her sometime.
I will come to understand I was uncomfortable because, in choosing communication over silence, she was taking a risk I hadn’t. And, in her very different reaction, I sensed she did not even consider it a risk.
Silence was a tool I saw others use to handle mental illness. Even with the new language and improved understanding we have today, silence still exists.
A writing instructor’s recent feedback on an essay of mine exploring this silence was to tell me it no longer exists, except in the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers. Rather than encouraging me to develop my thesis of silence and explore if and in what ways it still affects our culture, he offered paragraphs of rewrites—but not in my voice. He boiled down a complex subject to quippy generational stereotypes. His well-written rewrites included truth, but only his truth. He didn’t imagine silence could still be present, in different and subtler ways.
In an MFA Creative Writing course, a twenty-something classmate’s reaction to my essay on my paternal grandmother’s hospitalization in one of 1940 Iowa’s state-run mental facilities (she would remain institutionalized for forty-nine years until her death at eighty-nine) was, “That’s it? We read all this just to find out she has schizophrenia?” How deflating as my essay not only underscored the damage done to her by inadequate care, but also the damage done to the generations following who don’t know what her diagnosis was. No family stories or medical records were passed down. But to this classmate, mental illness and the silence surrounding it didn’t qualify as trauma.
At the public library where I work, as we planned a book study on the recently published The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, another librarian said we would be more likely to draw people in because this book focuses on how social media affects youth, rather than directly on mental illness. “It’s a way to get at discussing mental health for people here who don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
I read Instagram memes daily proclaiming, “Strength doesn’t come from what you can do, it comes from overcoming the things you thought you couldn’t. Live. Learn. Overcome.” Although inspiring, this also communicates overcoming is the only acceptable option. You either succeed, or you don’t. It doesn’t acknowledge that recovery from mental illness is a process, or that not everyone is able to recover even when they try their hardest.
As I delve into statistics outside my own experience, I find other silences. According to a 2025 poll by NAMI (National Alliance for Mental Illness), 42% of American workers “worry their career would be negatively impacted if they talked about mental health concerns in the workplace.” In 2022, a lawsuit was filed against Yale University claiming school officials pressured students with suicidal thoughts to withdraw (leading to a settlement where Yale agreed to change medical leave of absence policies). My experience of sitting in my college advisor’s office explaining how my emotional struggles were leading to sinking grades and him abruptly ending the discussion and ignoring my tears is still repeating with students today. My suicide attempt came when I was put on academic probation weeks after that day in his office. Upon my return to college and my work-study job after my hospitalization, no one asked why I’d been gone. I was learning to not discuss it and to force myself to meet expectations. I carried this with me into adulthood, pretending as everyone else did that mental illness did not happen to us, to the people we knew, in the places we inhabited.
Weeks become months with that writing group day still gnawing at me in quiet moments of reflection. As my daughter continues navigating how to exist in her job, she begins searching for a new one. I ask her if the morning calls are helping, hoping for a yes but sensing a no, or a not enough. She admits there are still some days she’s late, even when she gets up after we talk, planning to get ready. As she explains how her disordered thinking paralyzes her, I try to recall my own. I rummage through storage boxes of college memorabilia and find a letter eighteen-year-old me wrote but never sent. On college-ruled spiral notebook paper, my starts and stops and crossed-out words stare up at me. I read my final draft.
I’ve been trying as hard as I can to just keep going, but it gets more difficult every day. I have homework that must be done and even though I work on it a lot every day (or try to at least), I just can’t seem to do it. I know that I’ve been acting selfish and stubborn and bad. Am I so strange, so different that no one in the whole wide world wants to bother with helping me? Everything is so messed up and the more I try to put it back in order, the more messed up it gets and the more messed up I get. I’m very, very scared.
I inhale, hold my breath, and stiffen, wanting to protect myself from the weight of younger me’s pain and shame. There it is, the confusion of my own mind.
But I don’t see yet that I also am silencing. Silencing my daughter by wanting her to fit in. Silencing myself.
One day I will realize I could have gently responded to our host on that writing group day without negating her words or my daughter’s. I could have said speaking up about one’s mental illness in spaces that don’t understand comes with more risk than being considered rude. I could have said I know this because of my past struggles as well as from supporting my daughter. Our host likely would have been open to this. By not talking I was doing more than just letting my daughter speak her truth. I was protecting myself.
My daughter was not fired but did choose to find a new professional job, one she has been in for almost a year. This job has a flextime option allowing a variation in start and end times provided employees work their required number of hours. So far, she hasn’t
needed to disclose any disability, has no FMLA accommodations, and has not been late. She does share some of her struggles with trusted co-workers. She also continues her work on mental health coping strategies, sees her therapist, and takes medication (and still deals with temporary lapses due to shortages). She’s making progress. It’s a process, a mixture of moments of discouragement and hope, struggle and success.
My daughter’s approach to recovery leads to complex questions without easy answers, including how to allow for this in the workplace. What are the responsibilities of both employee and employer? Can we achieve a balance of effort toward health on the part of the person with mental illness and acceptance on the part of employers, and society, to give both what they need? From my years of being a supervisor, I know how difficult it can be to do this. Expecting all my staff to follow guidelines made it easier to get work done and helped ensure equity. But, if employers give more support and over longer periods of time than many do currently, perhaps employees struggling with mental illness would become able to meet reasonable standards—even excel. Perhaps workplaces would become stronger, not weaker. My daughter is asking these questions, so I will let her talk.
It’s new for me, this daughter who just puts it out there, who assumes it’s possible for people to accept you even if you can’t overcome. I only spoke my truth as a past tense. That was me then. This is me now. Look at what I’ve become. Look at what’s possible.
About a year has passed since that writing group day. I’m sitting at my office desk. A bulletin board hangs above my laptop, and I stand to take down a note my daughter gave me a couple years ago when I was feeling defeated by my mom’s dementia, a job change due to a library merger, and quitting my beloved MFA in Creative Writing studies due to the resulting financial fallout. I’ve had this note pinned up as a special memory but haven’t really looked at it for a while.
I run my fingers over the words she composed on a typewriter she found at an antique store. It’s a letter encouraging me to keep on going, to not quit my creative writing even though I had to quit the MFA. I smile at the quote she included at the top from Batman Begins, the Christian Bale movie, “Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” As my daughter grew from childhood to her teens, I started sharing my favorite book passages with her which grew into our tradition of trading quotes: everything from Shakespeare to pop culture.
Sitting back down to catch more light from my desk lamp, I reread her closing words.
I have no idea what the future holds. But you’ve never stopped trying and have slowly but surely taken steps. The road ahead is daunting, and there will be many trials. But I never want you to forget the mighty impact you have had on those around you.
Setting the letter aside, I rest my chin in my left hand, my habitual trying-to-figure-something-out pose. The mom I was when I first read this letter was searching for ways to spark in her daughter the determination she’d used to recover. That mom was still the girl who believed there was no other choice but to push herself, then push her daughter, to fit into what others would accept.
I pick up her letter again and as I hold it under the light, I sense something new. I did pass my determination on to my daughter. And she is using it to become who she wants to be, on her own terms. I smile and nod my head, this time for real.
