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Illustration by Alex Chen
The waiting room is quiet in that way only waiting rooms manage. Not silent. Just muted. A television hums with a morning show no one is watching. A receptionist types with the confidence of someone who knows exactly where the printer jam is going to happen next.
I am early. I am always early. When you’ve spent most of your life managing appointments tied to your brain, punctuality stops being a personality trait and becomes a coping strategy. Early means prepared. Early means control. Early means you might get home before your thoughts decide to take the scenic route.
The chairs are arranged in a semicircle that suggests conversation but discourages it. Everyone is together, but no one is connected. We all sit with our coats folded neatly on our laps, pretending not to measure each other. Pretending not to wonder who is here for what. Pretending not to wonder how visible our own reasons are.
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Mental illness has a strange relationship with public space. It’s private, until it isn’t. Invisible, until it leaks. I’ve lived with serious mental illness long enough to know that most of the work happens quietly, between appointments, between conversations, between moments that never make it into policy discussions or funding announcements. This is the part that doesn’t photograph well.
After the waiting room comes the bus ride. Public transit is a masterclass in how society handles discomfort. There are rules, unspoken but firm. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t take up too much space. Don’t be strange unless you’re entertaining enough to justify it. Mental health exists here too, wedged between backpacks and coffee cups, but it has to behave itself.
I’ve watched people decide, in a split second, whether someone’s distress is acceptable. Whether it’s medical. Whether it’s inconvenient. Whether it’s someone else’s problem. These decisions are rarely malicious. They’re practical. Reflexive. A city learning to keep moving.
Once, a driver waited an extra minute while someone gathered themselves. Once, a stranger offered a seat without making a production of it. Once, someone looked at me like I was a person and not a potential delay. These moments don’t trend. They don’t scale. But they stay with you.
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Support, I’ve learned, often arrives sideways.
I’ve spent years advocating for clearer, more humane conversations around serious mental illness. But the moments that have changed me most were never on any type of soapbox. They were in places where no one is trying to be inspirational. Places where the work is simply to get through the day without disappearing. Places like a warming centre, which has its own rhythm. Coffee first. Then quiet. Then stories that circle the room without ever landing. People are careful with their pasts here. They offer them the way you’d offer change. In small amounts. Just enough to get by.
There is a version of mental health discourse that treats lived experience like a credential you flash to gain entry into a conversation. I understand the instinct. Proof matters. But I’ve come to believe that lived experience is less about authority and more about attention. You notice different things. You listen differently. You understand how fragile dignity can be and how resilient.
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I’ve started a podcast to talk about coping with mental health issues. Mental health is often framed as a crisis and sometimes it is. But most days, it’s quieter than that. It’s procedural. It’s logistical. It’s deciding whether today is a day for eye contact or headphones. It’s learning which doors open easily and which ones require explanation.
What I wish we talked about more are the small choices. The receptionist who uses your name. The driver who waits. The stranger who doesn’t stare. These are not solutions. They are gestures. But gestures accumulate.
Communities are built from systems, but they are lived in moments. If we want to understand mental health, we might start there. Not with grand promises but with the ordinary care we extend when no one is watching.
Sometimes support looks like red tape and a pile of forms. Sometimes it looks like a chair that faces the window while holding a hand.
Brandon W. Hahn lives in Bowmanville, Ont.