I'm going to sit in a box for 20 hours and not say a word. Here's why that's actually pretty easy for me.
Here’s something most people don’t know about me. Put me in a room with 300 people and a microphone and I’m completely fine. Hand me a canapé and walk me into a party full of strangers and I can feel the anxiety rising before I’ve even found the cheese.
My partner Em is the opposite. She gets a genuine buzz from meeting 20 new people in an evening. So when I’m at a party, I find one person. I ask them a question. And then I listen, really listen, because I’m genuinely curious about what makes them tick.
Em has pointed out over the years that something shifts in people when I do this. Their guard drops. The “how are you, yeah good, you?” exchange gives way to something real. We end up workshopping their business idea, or they share something they haven’t told many people, or we’re deep in a conversation neither of us planned to have. I don’t know what that is exactly. But I think it matters. Because too many of us never get there. We put on the everything-is-fine face, and we wear it so long it starts to feel like the truth.
Suicide is the leading cause of death for Australians aged 15 to 44. It accounts for more years of life lost than any other cause of death in this country. And only 2% of the funding goes to stopping it before it starts.
The closer reason
At times, my 4 year old son Huxley struggles with anger. Not in a scary way, in the way that little kids do when they don’t yet have the words for what they’re feeling inside. A lot of our energy as a family goes into encouraging him to name it, verbalise it, understand it before it becomes something bigger. It’s slow work. But it’s working.
“Asking for help isn’t giving up. It’s refusing to give up.”
From The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse - technically one of Huxley’s bedtime stories. Turns out the author was writing for the grown-ups too.
I want my three kids to grow up with something most of us had to learn the hard way, if we learned it at all. A real awareness of how they’re feeling, why they’re feeling it, and what to do with it before it becomes something harder to carry.
A lesson from washing clothes
A few years back I volunteered for Orange Sky Laundry. Before I turned up, I’ll be honest. I thought, washing clothes, that’s not going to solve homelessness. What I didn’t understand was that the laundry is just the reason people show up. The actual work is the conversation that happens while they wait. It’s connection. It’s someone seeing them. That’s what breaks cycles. That’s what changes things.
20Talk works the same way. They go into TAFEs and universities across WA and run free, one-day Mental Health Maintenance workshops, for young people, by young people. The goal is simple and important: reach people before they hit crisis point, not after. Give them the language, the awareness, the tools. Because once someone is in crisis, the conversation is a lot harder.
What I’m actually doing
On September 5th, I’ll be sitting in a 2x2 metre square with 200 other people. No talking, no phone, and no distractions. Just a chair, a journal, and my thoughts for 20 hours straight.
I’m not going to pretend that’s the same as what someone navigating a genuine mental health crisis experiences every day. It isn’t. But it’s a small, deliberate attempt to understand a fraction of that isolation and, with your help, to make a meaningful impact.
Your donation, in real terms
$120 puts a young person through a full day workshop. $60 covers half of that. Whatever you can give goes directly into 20Talk’s Mental Health Maintenance programs, the courses running right now in WA universities and TAFEs.
One more thing you can do, and it costs nothing
Think of one person in your life who could use a real conversation. Not a “how are you, yeah good” one. A real one. Reach out to them today. That’s it. That’s the whole ask. If reading this made you think of someone, that’s not a coincidence.
Thank you for reading this.
Sam
