If everything is blooming, why am I still in the dark?
Loneliness does not observe holidays. In fact, it tends to dress up for them.
The cruelest thing about a beautiful spring day is that it doesn't ask whether you're ready to enjoy it.
The tulips don't care. Neither do the longer evenings, the birdsong that starts just a little earlier each morning, the neighbour's dog who has rediscovered joy in the yard next door. Spring arrives — insistently, brilliantly — and somewhere in the gap between the world's cheerfulness and how you actually feel, something painful quietly takes root.
This Easter weekend, millions of Canadians will gather with family, share a meal, hunt for chocolate eggs with squealing children. Yet millions of others — the elderly man on the corner of your street, a seventeen-year-old who can't come out to their family, a woman who lost her husband last fall and is facing her first spring without him — will watch the weekend arrive like a train they weren't allowed to board.
Loneliness does not observe holidays. In fact, it tends to dress up for them.
The cruelty of "everyone else seems fine"
There is a particular psychological weight that comes with contrast. In the depths of winter, isolation is somehow easier to explain — even to yourself. The grey sky mirrors the grey inside. But spring dismantles that cover. It asks you, relentlessly, to be as blooming as everything around you. When you can't manage it, the shame compounds the suffering.
Psychologists sometimes call this contrast dysphoria — the distress that comes not just from how you feel, but from how differently you feel compared to the world's expectations. The pressure to match the season. To emerge. To be renewed.
For some people — including many of the most vulnerable among us — that pressure is one more wall between them and asking for help.
1 in 4 Canadians report significant loneliness~80% of mental health needs in Canada go unmet due to cost$150 - $250 is the typical out-of-pocket cost for a single therapy session.
Click through to read about three communities that fall through every crack.
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Consider the older adults in our neighbourhood — in apartment buildings, in seniors' residences, in the house at the end of the block where the lights are always on but no one ever seems to visit. Statistics Canada has found that more than one in four seniors report significant feelings of loneliness. Among those who have been widowed, the number climbs higher still.
Depression in older adults is both common and chronically undertreated. It masquerades as "just getting older." It is dismissed by well-meaning family members as stubbornness or withdrawal. And when an elder does reach out — when they finally name the darkness — they are confronted with a mental health care system that costs money many of them don't have on fixed incomes, and that requires navigation skills the system has never made easy.
An Easter Sunday with no visitors. A spring that arrives without anyone to remark on the magnolias. These are not small things. They are the texture of a suffering that is entirely preventable, if we choose to prevent it.
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Now think of a teenager at the local high school. Maybe their family is religious. Maybe their friends don't quite know — or do know, and have gone quiet. Easter is, for many families, one of the most tradition-bound weekends of the year, and tradition, as beautiful as it can be, has not always had room for queer kids.
The data on LGBTQ+ youth mental health in Canada is not comfortable reading. Young people who identify as queer are significantly more likely to experience depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation than their peers — not because of who they are, but because of the cumulative weight of environments that signal, again and again, that who they are is a problem.
A long weekend. A family gathering where you perform a version of yourself that isn't real. Spring arriving in full colour while you feel invisible. The gap between the world's brightness and your internal landscape can feel, at seventeen, like proof of something unfixable.
It is not. It is a gap that therapy, community, and genuine connection can bridge — if those things are accessible. And for a queer teenager without income, without supportive parents, without employer benefits: accessible means someone else has to pay for it.
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Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is one of the most misunderstood — and most stigmatized — mental health conditions in existence. People who live with it are too often described in clinical shorthand as "difficult," "manipulative," or "treatment-resistant." What that language obscures is the reality: BPD is characterized by an almost unbearable emotional intensity. Feelings arrive like weather systems, not passing clouds. The highs are dizzying; the lows are crushing. And the transitions — the sudden shift from feeling deeply loved to feeling utterly abandoned — can happen in the space of a single conversation.
A long weekend is, for someone with BPD, a minefield of exactly those transitions. Family gatherings carry decades of charged history. Unstructured time removes the scaffolding of routine that helps regulate emotion. And Easter's particular cultural weight — resurrection, renewal, the expectation of joy — can feel like a personal indictment to someone whose inner world refuses to cooperate.
Here is what makes this especially urgent: there is a treatment that works. Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), developed specifically for BPD by psychologist Marsha Linehan — who herself lived with the condition — has the strongest evidence base of any intervention for BPD. It teaches concrete skills: distress tolerance, emotional regulation, mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness. It does not ask people to simply feel differently. It teaches them, step by step, how to navigate the intensity they feel.
DBT is not a single session. It is typically a structured program of individual therapy combined with skills-training group work, running six months to a year or more. Which means it is also, for anyone without comprehensive benefits, extraordinarily expensive — often thousands of dollars that most people simply do not have. The cruelty is precise: the one treatment with solid evidence is the one that costs the most to access.
Many people with BPD wait years for a proper diagnosis — enduring misdiagnoses of bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety — and years more before encountering a clinician who even mentions DBT. By the time they find the door, they've often been told, implicitly or explicitly, that their suffering is a character flaw rather than a treatable condition. Funding access to DBT does not just pay for therapy. It pays for the first moment someone is told: this is real, it has a name, and you can learn to live well with it.
What your donation actually does
Let's be concrete about the chain of events a single donation to Step Forward Health Society can set in motion:
Your donation can cover the cost of a therapy session for a 71-year-old woman who has been putting it off for eighteen months because she can't afford it. She goes. She talks about her husband, her children who live far away, the spring she doesn't know what to do with. She goes again. Three months later, she has joined a grief support group and has a neighbour she calls on Sundays.
Your donation can cover enrollment in affirming group therapy for a sixteen-year-old who is struggling to find their voice. The therapist is queer-competent. The teenager doesn't have to explain or defend themselves; they can simply show up and be witnessed. The suicidal ideation that peaked in February has receded by May.
Your donation can subsidize twelve weeks of DBT skills group for a 29-year-old who has cycled through emergency rooms and waitlists for six years. For the first time, she has a name for what she experiences and a set of tools — not platitudes, not medications alone, but actual transferable skills — for when the intensity peaks. By autumn, she has gone three months without a crisis visit. She tells her caseworker it's the first time in her adult life she's felt like she had any control.
These are not extraordinary outcomes. They are ordinary ones, when access exists. The extraordinary thing — the scandalous thing, really — is how often access doesn't.
Why this weekend, specifically?
There is something to be said for giving when it's prompted. Hunger doesn't observe Christmas Eve — but Christmas Eve food bank drives save lives. Mental health struggles don't spike only at Easter — but the long weekend, the family expectations, the seasonal mood pressure — these things do create genuine inflection points for vulnerable people.
A donation made this week is also a donation made while you, the giver, are likely feeling the softening that spring brings — the generosity that comes with open windows and longer evenings. That feeling is a resource. It can be converted into something durable.
And honestly? There is something about giving toward other people's darkness during a season of light that feels right in a way that's hard to articulate. It is the acknowledgement that the bloom doesn't reach everyone equally. That your good fortune — in your health, your community, your ability to feel the spring — carries with it a quiet obligation.
The tulips don't care. But we can. That is, perhaps, the only real advantage humans have over tulips — the capacity to turn toward one another in the dark and say: I see you. Let me help you find the light.
Make the gap a little smaller
Please consider a donation to Step Forward Health Society this week. It’s a local charity based right here in Delta, serving residents of Ladner, Tsawwassen, North Delta, Richmond and Surrey. Your donation can cover the cost of one session for someone who cannot afford it. It costs less than a family dinner. It lasts considerably longer.
One session. One person. One spring that finally includes them.
If you or someone you know needs support now
Canada Suicide Crisis Helpline: 988 (call or text, 24/7)
Trans Lifeline: 1-877-330-6366