Mental Health Awareness Week in the United States began on Sunday, October 6. Every year since 1990, the first full week of October is spent raising awareness of mental health and disorders, as well as encouraging people to get the help they need.
To promote self-awareness among my residents, I made signs encouraging people to "take what you need." Thinking back on my sophomore year of college, I considered all of the less-than-tangible needs I couldn't always find or formulate for myself and made them a little more within reach.
Within less than 24 hours, all of the tabs from each of the four posters I hung were missing. To say that the response I witnessed was powerful would truly be an understatement; through four sheets of white paper and a few words in black typeface, I learned more about the people around me than I had during my last month with them. And while, initially, I experienced feelings of sympathy as I noticed words like "love" and "hope" had gone missing, those feelings were replaced in very little time by a sense of accomplishment. As one of my residents later said to me from behind a calculus textbook, in between sips of coffee, "Time isn't something you can go buy more of when you run out of it. Hope isn't something you can pick up off the street. But the other day, there was patience, hanging up on the wall."
Patience, confidence, healing, change, a bit of luck, a new start--these aren't the kinds of things that are things. You can't always find them. More often than not, they find you.
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