#idk if i phrased this well i just really whish someone had sat me down as a teenager and told me something to this effect

[kaladin-sadblessed]

Look idk if I have any younger followers but I’ve been reflecting a lot on my teenage years and I just wanted to say that you do not have to hold the burden of your friends mental illness at that age.

I’m not calling your friend a burden, and I’m not saying that you can’t support them, but god, you cannot be their only support system. I know when you’re a teenager you feel like an adult that’s been trapped in a high school, but realistically, you’re still a child. You’re still learning and growing and developing. You’re still in your formative years. And believe me when I say that losing nights’ worth of sleep to play crisis counsellor at the age of fifteen will fuck you up for life.

It’s not your job to be a lifeline. It’s not your job to be the only person someone else can confide their deepest darkest secrets in. It’s your job to study for your GCSEs and experiment with weird makeup/styles it’s your job to let yourself grow up. If your friend is struggling with their mental health, especially if they’re considering hurting themselves, you need to tell an adult. It can be your parents, or your teacher, or your older cousin that let you stay up late when she babysat you. But taking on the emotional toll of looking after someone else when you aren’t even old enough to live alone isn’t okay for you. There are adults who are trained in these situations, who get paid to help in these situations who can actually anything substantial to help because they have qualifications- or at the very least some sort of life experience.

I know it feels impossible. I know it feels like their life literally depends on you answering your phone and to talk to someone else about it would be a massive betrayal, but that’s not a fair position for you to be in. It’s not okay to have separation anxiety from your phone or to chastise yourself for the time at which you fell asleep. And it can get super normalised in friendships like that, bc the person you’re spending the most time with has all sorts of emotional problems. And it’s easy to write off your own feelings bc “well I’m not mentally ill, so I can’t complain”. I guarantee that shit will leave you with boundary issues and a martyr complex.

If you’re school was on fire, you wouldn’t try to fight it yourself, would you? You wouldn’t take responsibility for being the fire marshal. You’d call someone qualified to deal with it: the fire brigade, the head teacher, right? That’s exactly the attitude you need to have with your friends’ (and by extension, your own!!) mental health.