We Are Who We Are: For the New Year, let’s get vulnerable together

By Lisa Sugarman

Hi, friends. It’s been awhile. And it’s exciting to be back behind the byline. For those of you who may remember me as the author of a decade’s worth of the It Is What It Is column, I’m rebooting my old column with a brand new name and a very different mission. 

I’m proud to announce the launch of my new column, We Are Who We Are, dedicated to normalizing conversations about mental illness and grief and loss and suicide and our overall mental health and wellbeing. As a three-time survivor of suicide loss, a crisis counselor with The Trevor Project, a storyteller with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and a grief group facilitator with Samaritans, I’ve spent the last couple of years advocating for change in the mental health community and working to end the stigma around mental illness. And We Are Who We Are is my way of helping us get more vulnerable with each other. So here we go. I hope you’ll join the conversation. 

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Alrighty, friends, here we are. Another brand-new year with lots of runway ahead and 365 whole days of limitless possibilities. So much excitement. So much potential. Good energy for sure. But, also, a lot of pressure to pick juuuust the right resolution that’s both impactful and sustainable to last us until December 31st. Always a challenge, isn’t it?

Now, I don’t know about you, but every year right around now, I typically spend a good chunk of time deep inside my own head trying to flesh out the New Year’s resolution(s) that I think will be the most meaningful as I dive headfirst into the new year. And I’m guessing you probably do, too. You know, commitments like fitnessing more or eating healthier or taking two-minute cold plunges every day. The standard stuff.

It feels good to be back behind the byline

I’m proud to announce the launch of my new column, We Are Who We Are, dedicated to normalizing conversations about mental illness and grief and loss and suicide and our overall mental health and wellbeing. As a three-time survivor of suicide loss, a crisis counselor with The Trevor Project, a storyteller with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and a grief group facilitator with Samaritans, I’ve spent the last couple of years advocating for change in the mental health community and working to end the stigma around mental illness. And We Are Who We Are is my way of helping us get more vulnerable with each other. So here we go. I hope you’ll join the conversation. 

The problem is, this year, I’m afraid that after the tumultuousness of the last three years (looking at you, COVID, among other things), and 2023 in particular, the standard-type resolutions just aren’t going to cut it anymore. I think we need to level up, for ourselves and for each other. We need to resolve to commit to better, more globally meaningful resolutions that will help change the collective consciousness, not just our own. Because, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re a world that’s recovering from some major league collective trauma. And we can’t navigate that kind of distress alone in our own private headspace. We need to help each other. And, more importantly, we need to be able to rely on each other.

Let me explain why…

According to the American Psychological Association (ASA), the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with global conflicts, racism and racial injustice, inflation, politics and climate-related disasters, to name just a few, are all weighing heavily on all of us. And it doesn’t matter what country you’re in or what color you are or whether you rent or own, people everywhere are hurting and the ongoing stress of all this shared trauma is taking a massive toll on the world’s mental health. People are struggling and we need to normalize that it’s ok to not be okay.

Not to be a complete buzz kill, but Mental Health America reports that over 50 million adults just here in the U.S. experienced a mental illness in 2023, with over 12.1 million of those people reporting serious thoughts of suicide. Oh, and that doesn’t even include the 2.7 million youth in this country who are experiencing severe major depression. No bueno, friends. No bueno.

We’ve got problems that need fixing and the first step in trying to deal with those problems is talking about them, which is something not enough of us are willing to do. And that’s precisely what I think needs to change.

But how do we resolve to change the narrative on talking about mental health enough to make a difference? Well, I truly believe the answer is two-fold and that it requires an equal combination of togetherness mixed with vulnerability. Because radical times demand radical resolutions. So, I think we commit to bringing the deep, dark, overwhelming stuff that we keep hidden inside our heads out into the direct sunlight. We get vulnerable. We start talking (to each other) and we don’t stop. We attach words to our fears and say them out loud so everyone can hear them. Because the more we do that, the weaker the stigma around mental illness becomes, and the more people will feel comfortable joining the conversation.

I’m convinced that this simple act of unapologetically expressing the good and the bad is how we normalize conversations around our mental health and our sadness and our grief and our loss and our substance abuse and everything else we try so desperately to hide so that those narratives lose their negativity and they simply become things we all just talk about. We give a voice to our pain and we quit judging ourselves, and others, as weak just because we aren’t always joyful. And we make ‘It’s okay to not be okay’ our new global mantra and we say it over and over and over again until we standardize that every single one of us is struggling with something.

So, while I think it’s never a bad thing to resolve to make any kind of positive changes in our lives, I think we should all be challenging ourselves to find and choose resolutions that benefit more than just ourselves. And to make the universal changes that need to be made around mental health, we need to adopt more of a we-not-me attitude and focus our energy on de-stigmatizing things like mental illness and talking about how we’re really feeling. Because it’s only when we normalize sharing the good alongside the bad that we’ll finally dilute the shame around what it means to be truly human.

So that’s my plan for the New Year and I really hope you’ll join the movement.

If you or someone you know is struggling, please call the 988 Suicide & Crisis Hotline and a trained lifeline counselor will be there to help.

Lisa Sugarman is an author, a nationally syndicated columnist, a three-time survivor of suicide loss, a mental health advocate, and a crisis counselor with The Trevor Project. She’s also a storyteller with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and the host of The Suicide Survivor Series on YouTube. Lisa writes the opinion column We Are Who We Are and is the author of How To Raise Perfectly Imperfect Kids And Be Ok With It, Untying Parent Anxiety, and LIFE: It Is What It Is, available on Amazon, at Barnes & Noble, and everywhere books are sold. Her work has appeared on Healthline Parenthood, GrownAndFlown, TODAY Parents, Thrive Global, The Washington Post, LittleThings, and More Content Now. Lisa lives and writes just north of Boston. Visit her online at www.lisasugarman.com.