If you are reading this at the kind of hour you would not admit you were awake, I am glad you found me. I have spent too many of those hours myself to write this for anyone else.
I do not know exactly where you are sitting tonight. But I think I know how you are sitting. Present, and not present. Having a conversation with the evil stranger in your head that has been talking to you for longer than you would like to count. You might be reaching for a drink you do not really want. You might be searching the internet for help and then closing the tab before you press send. You might be quietly planning your demise, not because you want to do it, but because you have started to believe that everyone around you would be better off if you did.
You are so tired. The smile you have painted on hides the rest of it, and the laugh you do on cue covers the pain. Your face says I am fine, and your inside says something completely different. Dark. Sad. And, most of all, afraid. But none of us are supposed to be afraid, are we. We are too old for that shit.
I am writing this to tell you that I have been there. I am also writing to tell you that I still go there. Not every day. Not most days. But more days than I would like, and probably more days than the people around me realise. I am afraid most days, not of spiders and snakes, but of something I cannot even point at. And I talk to the monster in my head more often than I would choose. So this is not a letter from a man who has it all worked out. This is a letter from a man still working.
A few years ago I was the sand in an hourglass. I could see it running out, and I could not stop watching. I was functioning. The world thought I was fine. Inside, I was running thoughts I would never have said aloud, the kind that wait in the dark for the easiest pull of a pin. I did not want to die. I just did not know how to keep being who I was, doing what I was doing, with no obvious way to step off.
I went to Kilimanjaro looking for a few minutes of escape. I did not think the mountain would fix me. I had stopped believing I could be fixed. I just wanted somewhere the demons would not find me, even if only for a few hours.
What I found instead was different.
The forest at the bottom of the mountain looked exactly like my head. Loud, tangled, no way out, one path through the dark. I slept in the noise of it for a night, with the roots under me and the dirt piled on, and I felt the truth of where I had been living without realising it.
And then I climbed. Up and out of the forest, along the ridge they call the elephant's back, into thinner air and bigger sky. I broke out onto the Shira plateau and the noise in my head started to drop with the trees. The next morning I walked through a field of boulders that have stood for millions of years, and somewhere on that walk, for the first time in years, my mind stopped processing and started to absorb.
The mountain became something I do not have very precise words for. A presence. Steady. Watching. The kind of presence that does not stop you doing what you need to do, but will not let anything reach you while you do it. She taught me to slow down. To breathe. To trust that this too shall pass. Things I had been refusing to do for years.
And then I came home. And the people who love me saw the old me walk back through the door. The man my wife fell for. The man my children looked up to. Not the shadow I had quietly become. Happiness flooded back into our house.
I did not understand what had happened on that mountain until much later. I have spent the last few years working out what it was, why it worked, and what was missing. What was missing was someone who knew how to walk me through those feelings while they were surfacing, instead of leaving me to make sense of them years afterwards.
That is why I built Summit Your Mind. Not as a business. As a mission. I have an amazing life. Every so often I see it clearly, in HD, the way the mountain showed me it could be. If I can give one other person a glimpse of that, then when my time is up, in many years time I would add, I will know I helped.
I want to build an army of us. People who have walked the dark path and come out the other side, helping the next person walk it too. Because the truth I learned on that mountain, and that I am still learning every day, is that the fastest way back to yourself is to help carry someone else's weight. You do not fight the monster alone. You build an army.
So I want to say a few things to you, sitting wherever you are sitting tonight.
You are not weak. You are not broken. You are not too far gone. The fact that you are still reading this at the hour you are reading it means something in you is still fighting, and I am proud of you for that, even if I have never met you.
You are afraid. So am I. And we are not too old for that shit, no matter what we were taught. Fear is information, not failure.
The monster in your head is a liar. The version of events it tells you, that everyone would be better off, that you are a burden, that there is no way out, is not the truth. It just sounds like the truth at 2am, when the noise gets loud and there is no one there.
And this, the most important thing I can say to you:
Do not give up. Do not listen to the monsters. Give me tomorrow. Just do that.
Tomorrow you do not have to fix anything. You do not have to climb a mountain. You do not have to book an expedition. You just have to be here. That is all I am asking. The rest, including the question of whether something like Summit Your Mind is for you, can wait.
If, when tomorrow comes, you want to talk to someone, talk to someone. A doctor. A friend. A helpline. Anyone. If you want to know more about what I have built, this whole website is here for you to read. There is no pitch, no funnel, no algorithm trying to convert you. There is just a mountain, an expert coach, an army being assembled, and a door that is open if and when you are ready to walk through it.
But none of that is the point of this letter. The point of this letter is just this. I see you. I have been you. And I am asking you to give me tomorrow.
I am here, and I want to be here, and I do not care who that does or does not suit. I want that for you too.
With everything I've got,
Graham.
(G to the people I love. And I want to love as many of you as I can.)
If you are in crisis tonight, please reach out. In the UK, the Samaritans are on 116 123, free, 24 hours, any day. Internationally, findahelpline.com will route you to the nearest service in your country. You do not have to be alone with this tonight.