It's NOT a Sign of Weakness
Having open and honest conversations about mental health is key
In my last story, I discussed the topic of mental health and Boston Red Sox player Jarren Duran. Duran exchanged words with a Cleveland Guardians fan during a recent game, which the fan responded with an insensitive remark, referring to the outfielder's suicide attempts in 2021 and 2022. I condemned that fan for his actions and should face some sort of punishment from MLB and/or the Guardians organization. Duran has previously been open about his struggles with depression. He has full support from his fellow Red Sox players and the organization. He's not the only player who has been open about their mental health. Dansby Swanson of the Chicago Cubs recently revealed on a podcast that he also had difficulties with alcohol on top of his mental health issues during the early stages of his career. Last year, I watched an ad from MLB about in times of difficulties, there's always people that will support you unconditionally. People tend to forget that athletes are regular individuals, too. I never put anyone famous on pedestals, because you never know what they're going through. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, which has been observed in the United States since 1949. Athletes, celebrities, and everyday people like me are sharing our stories in order to let others know that they're not alone. One of the misconceptions that I dislike the most about mental health is that seeking help for it or discussing your struggles with it means that you're a weak person. This will only make people reluctant or hesitant to seek help. That's the reason why there's so much stigma behind it. Just because someone is depressed, it doesn't mean that they're less of a person. Someone asking for help when they're feeling down should be commended, not chastised. If you know someone who is suffering from mental health problems, support them unconditionally, because they need all of it.
In the case of Jarren Duran and Dansby Swanson, I commend these two for being open and honest about their struggles. Even if I'm not a fan of the teams that they're on, admitting that things are not alright with you is a huge step. Life isn't always beautiful or perfect. Regardless of your income or fame, mental health doesn't discriminate. It's necessary to talk about our mental health, because it might help someone else get through this thing we call life. Expressing your true feelings is a way of reminding everyone that you're a human being who goes through tough times in life.
I grew up in an abusive and toxic household. Being the oldest of three children meant that my now estranged parents set unrealistic expectations of me. For example, going to a four-year university after high school. This made me feel depressed, because mentally, I wasn't ready to be on my own yet. I didn't have a plan of what I was going to do after my high school years were over. However, they didn't understand my pain. They thought that yelling and screaming at me would motivate me to become independent. It only led me to become increasingly isolated from everyone. I eventually moved out after almost four years of living under their roof and they refused to let me attend a Job Corps Center less than an hour away from home, so they kicked me out of Texas, which is where I grew up and where I had lots of friends, and ended up attending a Job Corps Center somewhere in Arkansas. I didn't have a say in this decision, so they did this just to get rid of me. This is an abusive tactic that many parents do because they think their children are troublemakers, which I was not. Sure, I butted head with them at times, but I wanted to go to the school of my choice and make my own decisions. Had they respected my decisions and supported me, they thought that sending me to Arkansas was for the best, in reality, I never wanted to be here in the first place. I wasn't officially diagnosed with depression and anxiety until February 2012. Around that time, I was on medications to treat those problems, but it only made things even worse. Several years later, I had an mental breakdown towards the end of one of my shifts at one of my previous jobs. I worked Monday through Saturday and hardly had a Saturday off. I worked at a call center at the time and at that job, I would work 11 to 12 hours a day. After the aforementioned shift, I went home and never returned to that job. I ended up being evicted from my apartment and was homeless and jobless for about six months. I didn't trust anyone and expressed on social media several times that I would be better off dead than dealing with more pain and disappointment. I would sleep outside many nights, but sometimes, I would stay at a motel or with friends temporarily on and off. I eventually got off my feet and accepted a job, plus moved in with a roommate. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, I got my own place and settled in a new town. The feelings of sadness and loneliness crept back in and on several occasions, I wanted to take my own life once again. I still had my job and was getting paid every two weeks but was out of the office for nearly a year and a half before returning in June 2021. Since then, I've been more vocal and transparent about my struggles with mental health on social media. For years, I didn't want people to know I had these problems, fearing that they would perceive me as "crazy". Also, I was reluctant to ask for help, but one day in the summer of 2018, I finally had the courage to see a therapist. I would always lie and tell the people I loved and cared about me that I was fine, when in reality, I was suffering. Pretending the be okay when you're not will only make your life even more difficult. Being honest about yourself is more authentic and genuine.
I know this sounds cliché, but I always believe that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Being depressed doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't mean your insane or unstable. Having a strong support system is important to help us get through the trials and tribulations in our lives. Your life is not over, because you have dreams, goals, and aspirations that you want to achieve. Living life to the fullest is a positive mindset everyone should have. It's okay to not be alright. It's okay to cry and go through pain. Never give up on yourself, because there's no such thing as a perfect life. You may not believe that people don't care about you. There's people who really do and are willing to support you no matter what. Don't be afraid to ask for help if you need it. If you're reading this, I hope that your life is filled with happiness and peace. If you ever need to talk to someone, I'm always here to listen. You can reach out to me on social media anytime. We all need each another in difficult times. I believe in you and I pray that you have people in your life who supports and lives you. Be strong and stay blessed.
If you or anyone is suffering or struggling with mental health problems and need emotional support, please call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by texting 988.
About the Creator
Mark Wesley Pritchard
You can call me Wesley. Former cosplayer, retro gaming fanatic, die-hard Texas Rangers fan, and nostalgic freak. Need I say more?
Threads: @misterwesleysworld
Instagram: @misterwesleysworld
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More stories from Mark Wesley Pritchard and writers in Psyche and other communities.
My Thoughts About Jarren Duran
Mental health---let's talk about it. As of 2025, nearly 800 million people globally have been diagnosed with mental disorders. During the global pandemic in 2020, individuals like me were isolated and increasingly desperate to be with our friends and loved ones. Through it all, celebrities and everyday people like us shared their personal stories about mental health. It has a stigma behind it, because there are those who are too afraid to open up about their mental struggles, fearing judgment from others, which is completely understandable. I've been open about my struggles with depression and anxiety for years, especially during the pandemic. Not only that, but I've had several suicide attempts.
By Mark Wesley Pritchard 9 months ago in Psyche
Why Smiling Can Feel Like the Hardest Thing
The Unbearable Weight of a Smile: When Your Face Refuses to Lie Anymore "Just smile," they said, as if my face were a light switch I could simply flip. As if the muscles required to curve my lips upward hadn't become so heavy that lifting them felt like deadlifting my own despair. As if smiling—the simplest, most automatic human expression—hadn't become the most exhausting performance of my entire day. I'm standing in line at the coffee shop, and the barista is making small talk. "How's your day going?" she asks, cheerful, genuine, expecting the standard response. My jaw tenses. My face feels like stone. I know what I'm supposed to do—smile, say "great, how about you?", participate in this basic social ritual that I've performed thousands of times without thinking. But I can't. My face won't cooperate. The muscles required to form a smile feel paralyzed, or more accurately, weighted down by something too heavy to lift. I force it anyway. The corners of my mouth move upward mechanically, but it doesn't reach my eyes. It doesn't feel genuine. It feels like I'm wearing a mask that doesn't quite fit. "Fine, thanks," I manage, and the barista's smile falters slightly. She can tell. Something's off. My smile is wrong somehow—too tight, too forced, too obviously fake. I take my coffee and leave quickly, exhausted by the thirty-second interaction. My face hurts from the effort of that brief, failed smile. And I still have an entire day of this ahead of me. When Your Face Becomes a Traitor I used to smile easily, automatically. It was a reflex, an unconscious response to humor, kindness, joy, social situations. I never thought about it, never had to try. Now every smile is manual labor. Every upward curve of my lips requires conscious effort, deliberate muscle activation, sustained energy I don't have. My face has become resistant, like it knows I'm lying and refuses to participate in the deception. In meetings at work, I'd notice other people smiling, laughing, their faces animated and expressive. And I'd try to match them, to mirror their expressions, to look like I was engaged and present. But my face wouldn't cooperate. It would freeze in this neutral, flat expression that read as either bored or angry, even though I wasn't trying to look either way. I just... couldn't make my face do what faces are supposed to do. "You look upset," my boss said after one meeting. "Is everything okay?" "I'm fine," I said, and tried to smile to prove it. But even I could feel how wrong it looked—this grimace that pretended to be a smile, this contortion that fooled no one. "If something's bothering you, you can talk to me," he pressed. Nothing was bothering me. At least, nothing specific. I wasn't angry or upset about work. I was just... unable to smile. Unable to make my face perform the basic signals that tell others I'm okay, I'm engaged, I'm a functioning human being having a normal interaction. The Exhaustion of Performance Every day became a marathon of forced facial expressions. Wake up. Try to smile at my partner over breakfast. Fail. See his concern. Force a smile to reassure him. Feel my face muscles strain with the effort. Get to work. Try to look pleasant and approachable. Feel my face settle into that blank, heavy expression despite my best efforts. Force periodic smiles during conversations. Feel exhausted by 10 AM from the sheer effort of manipulating my own face. Lunch with colleagues. They're laughing about something. I hear the joke, understand it's funny, know I should be laughing too. Try to make my face do the laughing expression. Produce something that's almost a smile but not quite right. See them notice. Feel them pull back slightly, unsure how to read me. By the end of each day, my face would actually ache. Not from overuse, but from the constant tension of trying to force expressions that wouldn't come naturally, of fighting against muscles that wanted to remain flat and unresponsive. I started avoiding situations that required me to smile. Stopped going to social gatherings where I'd have to perform happiness I didn't feel. Turned down invitations to celebrations, parties, events where smiling would be expected and my inability to do so would be conspicuous. My world shrank to environments where I didn't have to pretend—mostly my apartment, alone, where my face could rest in its natural state of heavy neutrality without judgment or concern. Understanding the Impossibility "Why can't I smile?" I asked my therapist, genuinely baffled by this loss of what seemed like the most basic human function. "I'm not trying to look miserable. I just... can't make my face do it anymore." She explained it in a way that finally made sense. "Depression doesn't just affect your mood—it affects your motor functions, including the facial muscles. The neurotransmitters that allow for spontaneous emotional expression are depleted. Your face isn't refusing to smile. Your brain isn't sending the signals that create smiling." She showed me research about something called "facial feedback"—the way our facial expressions both reflect and influence our emotional state. When you smile, your brain registers that feedback and generates corresponding positive emotions. It's a two-way street. But in depression, that street is blocked. Your brain can't generate the positive emotions that produce genuine smiles, and forcing smiles doesn't trick your brain into feeling better—it just exhausts you with the effort of manually operating machinery that's supposed to be automatic. "It's not laziness," she emphasized. "It's not attitude. It's a literal neurological impairment. Your brain has lost the ability to generate spontaneous positive facial expressions." Knowing this didn't make it easier, but it helped me understand why something so simple had become so impossibly hard. The Social Cost The inability to smile carries a staggering social cost that people who've never experienced it can't understand. Humans are wired to read faces. We make split-second judgments about people based on their expressions. A lack of smiling reads as unfriendly, unapproachable, angry, or unstable—even when that's not what you're feeling at all. My relationships deteriorated. Friends stopped reaching out because interactions with me felt flat, heavy, unrewarding. I wasn't fun to be around anymore. Not because I was actively negative, but because I couldn't reflect back the warmth and positive energy that social bonds require. My partner grew increasingly frustrated. "You never seem happy to see me," he said one night. "I come home and you just... look at me. No smile, no warmth, nothing." "I am happy to see you," I insisted. "I just can't make my face show it." "That doesn't make sense," he said, hurt and confused. "If you're happy, why can't you smile?" How could I explain that happiness and smiling had become disconnected? That I could feel some small sense of gladness that he was home, but that feeling couldn't translate into facial expression? That the pathway between emotion and face had been severed? I couldn't explain it in a way that made sense to him. And eventually, he stopped believing I was happy to see him at all. The Judgment and Misunderstanding The worst part was the constant judgment from people who didn't understand. "You should smile more!" Random strangers, usually men, felt entitled to offer this advice, as if my face existed for their viewing pleasure. "Cheer up, it might never happen!" People would joke, assuming my expression meant something bad had occurred, when really it just meant my face was resting in its default depressed state. "Why are you so angry?" I wasn't angry. I was just unable to smile. "You need to work on your attitude." My attitude was fine. My face just couldn't show it. People assumed my lack of smiling meant I was rude, unfriendly, hostile, or miserable. They couldn't see that I was simply exhausted from trying to operate machinery that had stopped working. Even well-meaning people hurt me with their attempts to help. "Just fake it till you make it!" they'd say. "Force yourself to smile and you'll feel better!" But forcing smiles didn't make me feel better. It made me feel like a fraud. It highlighted the gap between what my face was doing and what I was actually feeling. It made the depression more obvious, not less, because the smile never reached my eyes, never looked genuine, never fooled anyone including me. The Breaking Point The crisis came during my niece's birthday party. She was turning five, excited, adorable, having the time of her life. She ran up to me with a drawing she'd made, her face lit up with pure childhood joy. "Look what I made for you, Auntie!" I looked at the drawing—a colorful, enthusiastic rendering of the two of us holding hands. She'd drawn me with a big smile. And I couldn't smile back at her. I tried. God, I tried. This innocent child showing me something she'd made with love, and I couldn't produce even a small smile of acknowledgment. My face remained flat. Heavy. Unresponsive. Her face fell. "Don't you like it?" "I love it, sweetheart," I said, my voice breaking slightly. "It's beautiful." But she'd already seen my expression—or lack of it. She walked away, confused and a little hurt, and I stood there holding her drawing, hating myself for not being able to give this child the one simple thing she wanted: a smile. That night, I called my psychiatrist. "Something's really wrong," I said. "I can't even smile at a five-year-old. What's happening to me?" The Medical Reality My psychiatrist adjusted my medication and explained what was happening. "What you're experiencing is called 'psychomotor retardation'—a slowing down of physical and emotional responses. It's a core symptom of major depression. Your facial muscles aren't responding normally because the neural pathways that control spontaneous expression aren't functioning properly." She also mentioned something called "anhedonia"—the inability to feel pleasure—which often comes with an inability to express pleasure, even when you're trying. "The medication we're adjusting should help," she said. "But it takes time. Six to eight weeks, possibly longer, before you notice a difference." She also recommended something unexpected: facial exercises. "Research shows that deliberately practicing facial movements—even without the corresponding emotion—can help retrain the neural pathways. It won't cure the depression, but it might make the physical expressions easier." So I started doing these bizarre exercises. Standing in front of the mirror, manually moving my face through expressions. Lifting the corners of my mouth with my fingers to simulate a smile. Holding it. Releasing. Repeating. It felt ridiculous. I felt ridiculous. But I was desperate enough to try anything. The Slow Return The medication took seven weeks to start working. Seven weeks of forced smiles, exhausted facial muscles, and social situations I couldn't navigate properly. Then one morning, my partner said something funny at breakfast and I felt it—a real smile, spontaneous and genuine, breaking across my face without effort. It lasted maybe three seconds before fading. But it was real. It was mine. It happened without me having to manually operate my face. I started crying, which alarmed my partner until I explained: "I just smiled. A real smile. I didn't have to force it." He looked at me with such relief and sadness. "I didn't realize how hard it's been for you," he said quietly. After that, smiles came more frequently. Not all the time—I still had days where my face felt weighted and unresponsive. But the genuine smiles started outnumbering the forced ones. The effort required diminished. My face started cooperating again. Living With the Memory A year later, I can smile relatively easily again. Not effortlessly like I used to, and not constantly. But the heavy impossibility has lifted. My face has mostly remembered how to express what I'm feeling without requiring manual operation. But I haven't forgotten what it was like. That period when smiling felt harder than anything else, when my face betrayed me every day, when the simplest human expression became impossible. I'm gentler with people now. When I see someone with a flat expression, with a face that doesn't smile easily, I don't assume they're unfriendly or angry or rude. I wonder if maybe they're fighting this same battle. If maybe their face is as heavy as mine once was. I also don't take smiling for granted anymore. Every genuine smile feels like a gift, like evidence that my brain is working properly again, that the neural pathways are transmitting signals the way they should. The Truth That Needs Telling If you can't smile right now—if your face feels like dead weight, if forcing expressions exhausts you, if people keep telling you to cheer up and you want to scream that you're trying but your face won't cooperate—please know this: You're not broken. Your face isn't defective. This is a symptom of depression as real and valid as any other symptom. Your brain's ability to generate spontaneous positive expressions has been impaired by depleted neurotransmitters and disrupted neural pathways. This isn't attitude. This isn't choice. This is neurology. And it's treatable. With the right medication, therapy, and time, your face can remember how to smile again. The heaviness can lift. The effort can diminish. The genuine smiles can return. Don't let people shame you for something you literally cannot control. Don't let them tell you to "just smile" as if you haven't been trying. Don't let them mistake your depression for rudeness or hostility. Your face will cooperate again. The pathways will reconnect. The expressions will come naturally once more. Until then, be patient with yourself. You're not failing at something easy. You're managing something impossibly hard. And you're doing better than you think. When smiling becomes the hardest thing, it's not because you're ungrateful or negative or refusing to see the bright side—it's because depression has literally disconnected the neural pathways between emotion and facial expression. Your face isn't betraying you out of spite. It's malfunctioning because your brain chemistry is disrupted. The effort it takes you to produce a smile is the same effort it would take someone else to deadlift a car. You're not being difficult. You're being incredibly strong, showing up to social situations and manually operating facial machinery that's supposed to be automatic. The heaviness will lift. Your face will remember. Until then, please stop judging yourself for not being able to do something your broken neurology has made nearly impossible. --------------------------------------------- Thanks for Reading!
By Ameer Moavia6 days ago in Psyche
Comments (14)
I liked the content you wrote. Just like we subscribed to your channel, can you also subscribe to my channel?
Your assertion that vulnerability is not synonymous with weakness reflects a profound understanding of inner strength. Embracing our imperfections requires a disciplined mind and a resilient spirit. It prompts me to consider: in what ways does acknowledging our limitations empower us to transcend them?
I understand you.. I think that there are several psychological illnesses that need to be reconsidered in their pathological and diagnostic structure, especially since modern science has clearly stated that some brain chemistry imbalances have organic and nutritional causes, and are undoubtedly affected by some neurotransmitters and sensory, either by increase or decrease, such as the body's hormones, if they increase or decrease they cause a certain pathological symptom, and if the organic cause is treated they go away and disappear. This is not only to relieve the patient of embarrassment, but also to correct some misconceptions within society, and for things to take a natural course without suspicion... We are suffering in silence and I think the matter is not easy, and as they say in a popular proverb in my country "Ask those who have experienced it, do not ask a doctor"... I have an experience that I am still living and one day I will recount it.
Hi Mark- I’ve seen pieces of this story in a plagiarized article…. Not the one by Ayesha (which just plain stole it and published it) but sandwiched into another. I’m commenting so you know it has been plagiarized at least once and I suspect twice
Very nice
Completely agree! We need to take care of our mental health just as we do our physical health. Sometimes it can be so easy to neglect our mental health.
Read my story
Very nice
Very good work, congrats 😊👏
nice work
nicee..you can also readmy stories .hope you will learn something
Nice
Thank you for sharing! I think too it’s a very good thing to make less of a taboo out of mental health. It should be handled like talking any other health issue, with compassion and without judgement of the person. Also always nice to see, how people struggling with depression and loneliness have the greatest courage to offer support to folks with similar problems. Wish you all the best!
Not a day goes by.... ...& yes, there are those who say they are here for me. Aside from paid therapists, I've yet to meet one. Thanks for writing & sharing this, Mark.