The presenter talked about community. Slides described the health benefits, Scriptural backing, ideas of how to initiate. I sobbed violently, head down on my desk, “I can’t. I can’t do it anymore. I’ve tried it all.”

I hadn’t slept through the night in a year – except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and when I had COVID. I had left Nairobi, Kenya, six months prior. I was crashing in my parents’ basement in Minnesota. I had taken a month of medical leave to attend this intensive counseling program for burned-out missionaries in Michigan.

At the beginning of COVID, people suddenly woke up to the fact that remote work was isolating and international students were stressed about keeping their visas. I thought, “Welcome to my life for the last four years.”

During the lockdown, my roommate married and moved out. I had a throbbing infection. It didn’t respond to antibiotics and moved into my blood stream. The doctor mentioned the risk of septic shock. I faced a terrifying thought: what if I went unconscious? The first person to realize would be my boss in Nashville several days later when I didn’t show up for a Zoom call.

Living like this could kill me.

Social instability

A friend said later, “I had no idea you were struggling. Why didn’t you tell me?” But that was exactly the problem. I didn’t know I was depressed. And I had no one in my daily life to notice if something was wrong.

I had no one responsible to look out for me. I lacked the structural support of a family, a husband, a mission organization, or in-person work. I depended on voluntary connections for support. The friends who were my first line of defense had to spouses or families as their priorities, and rightly so. No one was obligated to me, so I tried to shore up favors for when I would need them. Of course, I genuinely love supporting my friends, but this instability led me to overstep my boundaries trying to be the superstar friend.

In addition, many of my friends had serious mental health and relational crises. Why was that? It turns out I’m attracted to smart, driven, world-changers – genuinely awesome people, but we’re also more prone to anxiety and burnout. I feel connected to friends who can have deep conversations. I also had an insecurity that emotional support was what I had to offer in friendships.

I’d invest deeply in friendships, only to have to start over – and over. A few years earlier, I had a breakup, a friendship end, and my church fall apart – all within six weeks. In the aftermath, I relied on a friend group, but two years later, all eight of them had moved away.

In fact, my whole life was high turnover: students, expats, young adults. In four years, I had 8 housemates, 25 friends left the country, and a whole new set of classmates. I strove to stay one step ahead so I wouldn’t be stranded. As an extrovert who worked remotely, I needed the social interaction more than my friends did. I told myself if I needed it, I needed to initiate it. Another exhausting imbalance.

Early waking can happen when you are chronically stressed. Normally, your body releases cortisol to help you wake up. But if your baseline levels of that stress hormone are already high, you reach the wake-up level earlier.

Hormones like dopamine from pleasurable experiences help to mitigate stress. Without the dopamine from fun and social interactions, I would seek a thrill from surmounting crazy work challenges or perfecting creative projects. It only added an adrenaline rush – and crash. In lockdown, I’d post a great sermon and everyone would assume I was thriving. In reality, having to remind myself of Scripture’s truth was all that kept my soul afloat. Don’t forget to check on your strong friend.

I prided myself on being more than capable, but I had hit my limit. Between insomnia and chronic foot pain, I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t walk. I felt like a toddler. Without structures of balanced support, my body was bearing the weight instead. It was telling me, “I can’t do it anymore.”

It’s Not Just Me

I share my story because I’m guessing other people can relate to parts of it. When you’re in a mental health crisis, it’s so easy to feel, “Something is wrong with me.” It has been reassuring for me that almost anyone in my situation would have been depressed. I was experiencing symptoms of broader cultural trends. For instance:

In a recent Twitter conversation, many single people said the hardest part about being single is not having someone responsible to look out for you when you’re sick or dealing with mental illness.

During COVID, many people have realized the challenges of remote work and isolation and are wondering how to reengage or reconstruct social structures.

International students and people living abroad are always wondering when their visas will be renewed. Being far from your hometown, family, and extended family can often reveal how building support systems is the work of generations. Fellow foreigners are often easier to relate with but have high turnover. Local friends often have a web of other commitments.

People with a high sense of responsibility may have noticed themselves in my drive to be the superstar friend or feed my high with another accomplishment. Perhaps you too have hit the limit of your capability, but it’s hard to recognize because no one expects it of you – least of all yourself. It was hard to admit I was depressed, to reach out for counselling, and to try medication. But it was life-changing.

Around age 30, people often have a crisis of sorts, reevaluate life’s direction, and look to settle down into stability. It often spurs you to make big changes, whether personally or professionally. It’s just more obvious when it involves moving continents.

My story is especially relevant to single women in their 20s and 30s working for small charitable organizations (especially in another country). So many of my friends fell into this category. Young women excited about travel and with big hearts for doing good can easily move to places like Nairobi where there are fewer language and socioeconomic barriers. They sign up for a shoestring startup with a handful of employees. Functioning as cultural mediators, they work with local people on the ground and are supervised from afar by someone in the sending organization back in the US, South Africa, etc.

These organizations aren’t thinking about cultural orientation, psychological support, and issues like visas or social life. It’s not sustainable, so many people leave after a couple of years. Those who stay have often found other support by relying on parents (if they grew up there), getting married locally, joining a different organization, or being informally included in the support structures of a more established organization. More broadly, this can apply to people working with marginalized groups closer to home, who bridge between realities on the ground and nonprofit leadership.

Whoever you are, if you feel you just can’t do it on your own anymore, you’re probably right. The weight of the world is too much to bear alone. Perhaps partially for shock value, Pastor Jin S. Kim once said something like, “Self-care is a Western fallacy, and it’s just not biblical. In Korean culture and other communal societies, we recognize that we were made to care for each other, to be interdependent.”

I know what he meant, because I tried to be proactive about my social and emotional needs. But that blood infection showed me that my life depended on me being conscious of my own needs and able to reach out for help.

It was an unbearable weight, and I realized I needed to build some support structures to ease if off my shoulders.

Making a Move

Just a day before that presentation on community, I had made a list of all the ways I would connect with people when I went back to Minnesota. But the minute I pictured doing it in Nairobi, I panicked.

Nairobi, in my experience, hadn’t lent itself to a lifestyle with margin: its people are trying to save the world, uplift their whole village, attend family functions, work a job and a side hustle, survive traffic, then crash on the weekends. That’s the reality of city hustle in that economy.

If I went back, I’d need to change jobs, housemates, neighborhoods, churches, and join a gym – only to live in an expat bubble and on the edge of a visa renewal. To get the support structures I needed, I’d have to start over anyway. I realized I might as well start over closer to family.

A pastor friend suggested finding overlapping circles to make community more convenient; live in a neighborhood with friends who go to your church so you’ll run into them at the grocery store. Social network theory says people connect based on proximity and similarity. Proximity: your neighbor, desk mate, or the person you see at the gym. Similarity: a writing group, a fellow preschool mom, or someone with your religious beliefs.

Third culture kids like me defy these principles, I wrote in my sociology capstone. We live in cultures where we don’t fit in, so we define new in-groups of outsiders. People like us are far away, so we keep in touch. I hadn’t known another life.

But I needed one.

I explored housing options for staying in the US, not yet knowing whether I would need to give up my job. A potential landlord told me she knew someone selling a car. “I don’t need one yet, but maybe if it’s a Prius.” It was. If I was ready to shell out for a car in the US, I needed to know whether I could keep my job.

When I told my boss I wanted to stay in the US, he agreed – the ironic benefit of my remote work and the world now being familiar with Zoom. In my parents’ neighborhood, I reached out to a couple of college connections for walks, joining a Bible study, or going out to eat. Family friends offered to rent me their townhome, ten minutes from my parents’ house, twenty minutes from everything else, and no more than two hours from half my relatives. God also provided new housemates, this time with a year lease instead of month-to-month.

A close friend said she was looking for a job, so my mom sent her openings until she moved back to Minnesota. We found a church and carpool there together. I visit my parents each week. I’ve been sleeping well with medication for a year. After much perseverance, I found a counselor and a physical therapist.

I’m still looking for more social structures since I’m single and still working from home. But God has provided so much already, and I much feel lighter and hopeful.

I want this for you, too

This time has taught me that going solo isn’t sustainable without structures of social support. I hope we shift from self-care to asking for help and looking out for each other. For me, that looked like telling people I wasn’t OK. I asked them to pray, comfort me, hang out, listen, or recommend therapists or connections. I’m so grateful for everyone who played a part in this transition, and for God answering our prayers.

If you’re carrying too much, I hope you feel validated. I hope you find the courage to ask for help. Maybe you discover creative ways to build support structures into your daily life. To find those balanced, interdependent relationships.

I also hope we start to recognize the people in some of these vulnerable groups. Check in with that overachiever strong friend, make sure that girl going overseas has support, ask whether that single person wants to hang out.

We can’t do this alone anymore, and we don’t have to.