The Many Sides of Mental Health: Agency & Happenstance

I live in Nebraska, where bootstraps are a real thing.

And we don’t just wear them, we pull them up. We muck in them. We get messy and dirty and in touch with the land, and ourselves, and God.

Until we have those hidden messes, the messes a little farther underneath our skin - in our brains, in our hearts, in our families — those we tuck deep inside where no one can see them. It’s like we think we can put the deeper stuff inside an envelope, seal it up real tight, fold it in half, and then in half again, and put it in a hidden internal pocket, then zip it, then put a tiny little zip tie on it. Then we bend down, slide a boot on, toe to insole, heel wedged against the shaft of the bootleg, and loop our finger through the strap and pull it up.

The problem is, this way of dealing with mental and relational health problems is not working and that is a truth for the United States as a whole, the world as a whole, not simply Nebraska.

Bootstrap responses to mental health look like this:

Suck it up.

Kids today need more resilience. They need to get over it.

You made your bed, now lie in it.

Set your mind to it.

I’m fine. We’re fine. We’re all fine.

And there’s some truth to all of these. We are all working on a journey toward resilience in life and it’s a journey for sure. We are doing pretty well sometimes and we don’t need to make drama where there is none. Growth mindset does change the shape of a problem, gives us insight for getting the hard things done, and ignites our internal understanding that we are capable beings, held by an incredibly capable God.

However, we forget the &.

This is the first & of our series on mental health &s –

Agency & Happenstance.

Agency is a fancy mental health word related to choice. We do have choices in life. We have choices in education, in jobs, in where we live, in who we spend time with, and in what we put into our bodies. Mostly. But agency takes into account the fact that there are things that impact our ability to make choices, internally and externally, like privileges of all kinds, gender, cultural expectations, family values, and societal structures like race and class. Agency is both the external reality of what is available to us, as well as the internal sense of that availability. Can you see how that complicates life? Agency is the grey reality of daily life, when we often want to see things in the neater black-and-white of choice.

Along with agency, we also need the concept of happenstance to change our views of mental health and to end the stigma: there are some things in life that simply happen. Some things might be genetic flukes. Some relationships might have impacts we didn’t see coming. Some decisions have ramifications no one could have invented even if they had a think tank of Nobel Prize winners at their beck and call. 

Agency reminds us, “I can control some things.”

Happenstance Identifies, “I cannot control all things.”

Sometimes … stuff happens. Or the less G-rated version of that sentence, because sometimes the stuff that happens feels like poop.

Bootstrap culture says that we control our destiny and every step along the way. I always picture bootstrap culture pulling up their boots and stomping through the field of their muddy problems, trying to get rid of them by sheer force of pushing them so far underfoot they’ll never be able to rise again from the muck. But they are still surrounded by muck. And then, the Whack-a-Mole starts. Stomping out your problems on your own is exhausting, and all but a few of them tend to come back up.

I picture the alternative – the same person in boots, standing in the field of muddy struggle – their own and humanity’s – with people all around them holding pieces of some gorgeous wooden flooring, taken from the histories and experience of all those who have gone before us in this place, with their struggles and their grace. That flooring also is made of treatment options and support and medicines and listening ears and words of encouragement and spiritual awareness, and more, so much more. Some of the people also have boots on … they’re local, they’ve lived the bootstrap life too. Some have Converse, some have hiking boots, and some have less than sensible shoes because they’ve never been near muck before in their lives. One of them lays down a board, and then another lays down a board, and then another. Laying this floor is hard work. It’s wild amounts of effort by everyone, including our hero, whom we found standing in the mud at the outset. But as the boards are laid, one after another, no one is left in the mud. And the mud is still there. It surrounds us. And there will be another field, another day, and more mud, but this lovely and much-loved member of humanity’s life and their struggle has been addressed, not by stomping the moles into the mud on our own, but by laying a new floor together.

You & me together.

Agency & happenstance.

This is one of the many sides to mental health.

Up Next - The Many Sides of Mental Health: Relationships & Self-Differentiation

In the Meantime - Tune in to the podcast for more on the &s of mental health. Look for our latest series - The Truth about Mental Health: It’s Complicated. This is a two part series. Listen to part one below or search for Life in Relationship with Heidi Goehmann wherever you get your podcasts.