Nobody checks on the happy guy: some battles are fought in silence

Michael Le · 31 August 2026 · 14 minute read

Late one night, sometime after the lockdowns, I sat on the edge of my bed with my thumb over the share button for longer than I want to admit.

The story was nothing. No face. Just the film clip for a Justin Bieber song, "Lonely," a kid singing to an empty theatre with one piano behind him, and a caption that hinted at how I was going without ever saying it. I posted it. A few people watched it. Nobody messaged. By morning it had expired, and life went on.

I was as alone as I have ever been, and I did not have the words for it, so I let a pop star say it for me at story volume and hoped one person would hear it. Nobody did. Not because they did not care. Because nobody knew there was anything to hear. I had spent years showing up as the happy guy. The one with the energy, the jokes, the full room, the "all good, mate." When that guy posts a sad song, people assume it is just a song. I had trained everyone around me to never look twice, and then I was hurt that nobody did.

Here is what none of them knew. I am going to tell all of it, including the part I have never said out loud, because I think a lot of blokes are posting their own version of that song right now. And nobody is reading it.

The question I asked every night

My marriage ended in the same stretch COVID landed. I have written about what it cost, so I will not run it again. What I have not written about is the part before the ending, because that is where the loneliness actually started.

The truth is the marriage was over before either of us wanted to admit it. Not because anyone did anything wrong. Because two good people had been carrying the weight of those years for so long that staying together would only have prolonged the pain, for both of us. And let me be clear, because it matters. This is not a story about my ex wife. She is a good person and she has my respect. Two people can both be good and still not be right for each other anymore. That is all this was.

The hard part was the months before we said it. I would lie awake next to someone I cared about and ask the same question until the birds started. Is this right? Am I giving up? Should we just keep going? And underneath that question was an older one. Because I already knew where "just keep going" led. I had watched it happen once before, when I was ten.

What a ten year old sees

My parents split when I was ten. Before they did, my mum held on longer than she should have. She held on for us, and I watched what it cost her.

Dad had opened the takeaway shop in Kingsgrove when I was eight. At the start he was on the fryer. By the time I was ten he was barely there at all, and the running of it fell to Mum and me. I was lugging twenty kilo sacks of potatoes out the back to make the chips, closing up with her at night, and watching her carry a shop, a home, a marriage and a kid on her own while the man who was meant to be beside her was somewhere else. It wore her down, month by month, in ways a kid can see but cannot name. Until one night it nearly killed her. I mean that literally. She tried to take her own life, and I was in the house.

I remember her lying there, not moving. I remember being so confused and so heartbroken that I could not make my body do anything. And I remember my father, and how he did not seem even half concerned. Nobody called an ambulance. The next day the shop opened and life went on like nothing had happened. That was the part that broke something in me. Not just that it happened. That the next morning, nobody said a word.

Not long after that, they divorced. I was ten years old and I was asked to decide who I wanted to live with. I chose Mum.

I have never written any of that down before. It is the start of a longer story about my father that I will tell properly one day, because it explains more about me than anything in the seven chapters. For now, what matters is this. At ten I learned what it looks like when someone stays past the point their heart can take. I learned that the person holding everything together is the one nobody thinks to hold.

So thirty five years later, when I heard myself say "just keep going," I was not hearing a grown man weighing up a decision. I was hearing that ten year old. Pretending would have been lying to myself, and to her, and I had watched what that lie does to a person. We let it end. As kindly as two people can. It was still the loneliest thing I have ever been through. I came home to an empty house every night, lost, confused and alone. And every morning I still had to show up to the shop, smile at the patrons, smile at the staff, and act like nothing was wrong. The happy guy did not get a day off.

I thought that was the bottom. It was not.

The night Enmore switched off

Then the world shut. I had run Great Aunty Three for the best part of a decade by then, and I truly believed food was recession proof. Whatever happens, people have to eat. That was my whole theory of safety. It was about to meet March 2020.

It went dark overnight. One night the room was full, the pass was loud, the queue was out the door. The next, the street was empty. No cars. No foot traffic. No sound. Enmore looked like someone had switched it off at the wall. I stood in the doorway of a business built with my mother's last twenty thousand dollars and my grandmother's name on the sign, looking at a street I had fed for ten years, and I felt lost, confused and completely helpless. For a decade I had been the restaurant. With the lights off, I did not know who I was.

And I had just lost the one person I would normally have said that to.

The nights

I am going to say this plainly, because someone reading this needs to hear it from a bloke who, from the outside, looked fine.

There were nights in that stretch when I did not want to be here. Not a bad mood. Not a cry for attention. The quiet kind, the kind that turns up when you are alone in a dark house at 2am with no business, no marriage and no idea what comes next.

I knew exactly what those thoughts were. I had watched them nearly take my mum. So I did not get to pretend they were nothing. I had to fight them, every day, with everything I had. Some days choosing to stay was the only thing I got done.

I took up smoking again. I had buried that habit years before, one I picked up as a young teen, and it walked straight back in like it had never left. I could not sleep. Every night I sat on the window sill past 2am and went through a full packet a day. The room reeked of cigarettes and I did not care. I was consumed by loneliness. Nowhere to go, no one to call, and the streets below were a ghost town.

Then one day I started running. Not because I read it somewhere. Because sitting on that window sill I finally understood something: the only person coming to save me was me.

In lockdown, exercise was the one reason you were allowed out of the house. So that became my door. I picked a 3km course and I was puffed out every 50 metres. A packet a day will do that to you. I walked, I ran, I stopped, I started again. Fifty metres became two hundred. Two hundred became more. And then one morning, headphones in, that song on repeat through empty streets, I ran the full 3km without a single break. I stood at the end of it and I knew something I had not known in a long time. I was back.

I kept going. Calisthenics and body weight work at the local park in Pyrmont at the end of the morning run. Most days I was there completely alone, the streets still empty, and I showed up anyway, rain or shine, every single day. I thank God I found the strength to do that, because that is what pulled me out of the spiral. Nobody handed it to me. I found it inside myself, fifty metres at a time.

The running did not fix everything. It kept me here long enough for things to change. Some days that was the whole job, and it was enough.

I am not telling you this to be pitied. I am telling you because nobody would have guessed. I was still running. Still posting. Still answering "yeah, all good, mate." I looked like the last bloke on earth who needed checking on.

What is Justin Bieber's "Lonely" actually about?

"Lonely" is a 2020 song by Justin Bieber and benny blanco about having everyone know your name and having no one to call. It did not even start as a song. Bieber and the two people he wrote it with were sitting around talking about how lonely it would be to be him, and the conversation turned into something closer to therapy. Pushing feelings down. Being expected to act like a superhero. Then they wrote it down. Two and a half minutes. One piano. Nowhere to hide.

He nearly did not release it. He said the demo was "hard to listen to," and he asked out loud, "Should I be putting this out into the world?" He did, because he decided that being seen as strong made it more powerful to admit he was not.

The line that got out of his story and into mine was the one about everybody knowing your name and still having no one to call. I was not famous. I was the guy from the restaurant in the paper. A phone full of contacts, a full life on paper, and no one who actually knew how I was going. And there is a line near the end I still cannot hear without stopping. "Maybe when I'm older it'll all calm down." That is a kid's hope, sung by a grown man who knows it did not calm down. You do not grow out of it. You have to face it.

How many Australian men are lonely?

About one in four Australians said they felt lonely before COVID, and during lockdown it was closer to one in two, according to Healthy Male. The song was written before the pandemic, about one man's isolation. Then it landed in the one year everybody was isolated.

And men carry it differently. Half of Australian men say they do not have a real friendship, and men have reported more social isolation than women every year the HILDA survey has run since 2001. Most of them are not saying it. They are posting a song and hinting in the caption. They are the happy guy in your group chat. And you are scrolling past.

What the silence gave me

Here is the part I could not see at the time. The empty street was the first quiet I had had in ten years. No service, no roster, no orders, no excuses. Just me and the question I had been outrunning since I was eight years old behind a till in Kingsgrove.

In that quiet I saw the pattern. I was living the exact life my parents had lived. Working every hour. Building something that owned me. Staying in things too long because leaving felt like failing. And I was about to hand that same pattern down like a family recipe.

So I was left with a decision, and it was the hardest one I have ever had to make. Walk away from the thing I had spent ten years building, with my mother's money in it and my grandmother's name on it, and start again from nothing. Or stay, keep smiling at the door, and lose whatever was left of myself in the process. There was no option where nothing hurt. There was only the one that hurt and led somewhere, and the one that hurt and led back here.

I already knew what staying past the point your heart can take looks like. I had seen it at ten. I was not going to live it at forty five. So I walked away and I built again. Sometimes the right decision is the hardest one, and you do not get to know it was right until long after you have made it. You just have to make it anyway.

It took years, and I am still on it. But it started in that empty restaurant, in the silence, with that song on repeat. I call that chapter The Return. It is not the story of a comeback. It is the story of coming back to myself.

Fourteen years this Sunday

There is one more part of this story, and it is the reason the ending of this post matters more to me than anything I have ever written.

This coming Sunday is Father's Day. It also marks fourteen years since I lost my mum.

Father's Day 2012. Sunday, 2 September. Great Aunty Three had been open exactly one month, and I took the day off, one of the first since the doors opened, to spend it with my firstborn at Watsons Bay. All day something felt off. A strange shift inside me I could not name. The whole day sat wrong, and I put it down to being away from the shop. That is what busy does to you. It gets so deep into your body that when something is truly wrong, you assume the feeling is missing work.

A week later I found out what the feeling was. Mum had passed away over that Father's Day weekend. I am not a superstitious man, but fourteen years on I believe what I felt at Watsons Bay that day was her energy, reaching me on the way through. She found me on a Father's Day, on a rare day off, sitting with my firstborn instead of standing at the pass. If she had to say goodbye, I think she chose that moment on purpose.

She lived alone. We do not know the exact day she went, because it took days for anyone to realise. Her neighbours noticed she had not appeared for her morning routine and called the police. The woman who saved for years in a broken down car so she could hand me twenty thousand dollars to open the shop, the woman that whole room existed for, was gone for days before anyone knocked on her door.

And here is the part I have carried for fourteen years. Before we opened, I visited her all the time. Then the doors opened, and I was so busy showing up for work that my usual visits stopped. I saw her a few days before she passed. I was driving past her place, running late for the shop. I did not stop the car. I did not take one minute to say hello to my mother. I was one handbrake away from a last conversation, and I chose the clock.

She held everything together her whole life, and she fought her battles in silence too. So when I tell you to check in on the ones you love, it is not a line I read somewhere. It is fourteen years of wishing I had stopped the car.

The message I needed and never got

None of that is the point of this post. This is.

The strongest person you know is fighting something you cannot see. The mate who always picks up. The bloke with the business and the physique and the smile in every photo. The dad who never misses a game. Looking fine does not mean the battle is not there. It usually means they are carrying it quietly, and they have got very good at "yeah, all good."

So never judge anyone. Not the one who went quiet. Not the one who snapped at you. Not the one who walked away from something you reckon they should have stayed in. You have no idea what they are silently battling. I did not look like a man fighting for his life. I was.

Do this today. Pick one person. Not a group chat. Send a message they cannot brush off. Not "you good?" Try "Hey, I've been thinking about you. How are you actually going?" Then wait for the real answer. Then ask again. If the answer worries you, stay in the conversation. You do not have to fix anything. You just have to be the person who noticed. People watched my story that night and kept scrolling. One message would have changed it. Be the one.

And if you are the one fighting in silence, this part is for you. I know what 2am feels like when the house is dark and the thoughts are loud and staying feels like the hardest thing anyone has ever asked of you. I have been there. I am writing this from the other side of it, and I need you to hear this from someone who did not think there was another side. There is. It does not arrive all at once. It arrives one run, one morning, one kept promise at a time, and then one day you look up and the street has people on it again and so do you.

The bloke running empty streets with a Bieber song on repeat had no idea he would ever write this. He just kept going. That is all you have to do today. Not forever. Today. Then send the message. Do not post the song. Say the words to one real person. It is awkward every time, and it works every time.

Nobody checks on the happy guy. So check on him. Some battles are fought in silence, and you will never know which message was the one that mattered. Send it anyway.

This Sunday is Father's Day. Take the day. Sit with your kids. Call your old man. And if you happen to drive past your mum's place, stop the car. The work will still be there tomorrow. Some things will not.