What We Carry When We Say We’re Fine

There is a woman somewhere on this continent who has not slept properly in six weeks. She wakes up at 3 am with her chest tight and her mind already running — work, money, her mother’s health, the thing her partner said last Tuesday that she has not been able to shake. By 6 am, she is up, dressed, and functional. By 8 am, she is at her desk. If you asked her how she was doing, she would say fine. She would mean it, in the way that people mean things they have said so many times they have stopped questioning them.
She is not in crisis, exactly, but she is not okay either. The distance between those two things is where most of us live.

The internet always fills up with infographics and gentle reminders to “check on your strong friend,” and hotline numbers shared with the best of intentions, especially during mental health awareness month in May. All of it is well-meaning. Most of it sliding past the people who actually need it, because the framing is always the same — therapy, professional help, a diagnosis, a coach. Things that feel very far away from ordinary life, especially on a continent where a single therapy session can cost more than a week’s groceries and the nearest qualified professional might be an hour’s commute away on a good day.
However, what that framing keeps missing is that the idea that mental wellness belongs exclusively in a therapist’s office is a relatively new one. And it was never the whole story.

Long before anyone called it mental health, African communities had systems for exactly this. The elder you went to sit with when something was weighing on you, not for advice necessarily, but just to be heard by someone who had seen enough of life to hold your trouble without flinching. The aunt who could read a room and knew, without being told, that you…