I’ll be honest: for most of my adult life, Mental Health Awareness Month, which has been around since 1949, was something I acknowledged the way you acknowledge a highway exit sign. Noted, passed, and forgotten. I need to get to my ultimate destination.
That changed this May.
Early in the month, a woman and a man at work shared their stories during a call on the subject of mental health. They had lost loved ones in difficult circumstances, more than one, more than most of us carry, and still, they were there. Present. Generous enough to be vulnerable in a virtual room full of colleagues. Brave enough to say, “this is what I’ve been through, and this is how I found my way forward.” I’m not sure if each of them fully realized what they gave us. This reminded me, in the way only a real human story can, why any of this matters. Their stories were raw, authentic, and heart-wrenching. And touched everyone in the room.
Every May, the messaging arrives like clockwork. “Check in on your friends. Practice self-care. You are not alone.” All of it is true, though none of it is quite enough.
The conversation we keep having about mental health tends to stop just short of the most uncomfortable question. The one that sits quietly underneath the wellness tips, the awareness campaigns, and the gentle reminders to breathe.
“When did you last honestly assess your own life?”
Not your symptoms or stress levels. But your life. The choices you’ve been making. The values you’ve been honoring or quietly abandoning. The version of yourself you’ve been showing up as, and whether that person still feels like you.
Most of us skip this step. Not out of laziness but perhaps out of fear. Because an honest look backward requires us to sit with things we’d rather keep moving past. There is the good, the bad, and the things we’d rather not address.
What I’ve come to believe is that honest reckoning isn’t a threat to our well-being but rather the beginning of it. It’s not easy, but it’s a practice I’ve kept for years now to check in with myself at least once a year to assess my life, no matter how painful or cringy it may be.
Mental health, at its deepest level, is not just the absence of struggle. It is the presence of alignment between who we are and how we’re living. Between what we value and what we’re actually doing with our days.
That alignment requires the one thing our culture least rewards: the willingness to stop. To look backward with honesty. To sit with what we find there.
In The Janus Plan, I call this Step 1: Ponder the Past. And then, only then, to step forward with purpose.
This May, I hope you’ll take one quiet moment to ask yourself the question most wellness campaigns leave out: “Is the life I’m living still the one I’m choosing?” You don’t have to have the answer. You just have to be willing to ask.
And if you’re lucky, the way I was lucky this month, someone will stand up and remind you why it’s worth asking at all.
The Janus Plan, arriving September 15 from Weaving Influence Press, is a framework for exactly this kind of honest beginning. Print pre-orders are open now at joberteabueva.com