Tay Lautner’s The Squeeze Offers a Safe Space for Mental Health Conversations
For most of us, the COVID-19 pandemic was defined by a constant effort to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. However, for special people like The Squeeze host Tay Lautner, a higher calling was at play—the desire to help others.
When the pandemic first started, her husband, actor Taylor Lautner, discouraged her from leaving the house because of her asthma. But after completing her studies to be a registered nurse in 2019, she was thrust into the front lines of the pandemic of 2020, working in a cardiac unit that focused on those suffering from COVID-19.
“I had so many patients look me straight in the eye and ask me if they were going to live, and many didn’t,” she recalls. “I had a job to do. I had to help save people, so I wasn't really thinking about myself.”
A Needed Wake-Up Call
Fueled by the same desire to help others that first drew her to nursing, Tay’s traumatic experiences during that trying and unprecedented time placed her on a path to an entirely new set of challenges.
“I've been around mental health issues my whole life, but never struggled myself until after working through COVID-19,” she explains. “It was actually my husband who one day was like, ‘Hey, are you OK?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I'm fine. I just worked three nights in a row. I'm tired.’ And he was like, ‘No, how are you doing?’
She continues, “I had never really checked in with myself, because at that time it was fight or flight. There was no time to think about how I was feeling because people were dying.”
She says, when she finally took the time to check on her mental health, she realized she was not doing well. That discovery had opened a path for her own mental wellness journey.
Lemons, Love and Learning
Before long, she decided to pursue an entirely new direction in her life and career—one that could help herself and others in an entirely new way.
“When I left the hospital, I really wanted to use my platform to have that human-to-human interaction, so I started this blog called Lemons by Tay,” she says. “I remember having a bunch of different random names written down on this piece of paper. And then it hit me—life is actually chucking lemons at me non-stop, so that kind of feels fitting.”
Tay’s blog quickly gained steam, prompting her to expand the concept and create The Lemons Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness about the mental health challenges that many people face every day.
She and Taylor also co-host The Squeeze, a weekly podcast that delves into many of the same issues while interviewing mental health experts and other personalities. With the show gaining more fans with every episode, Tay believes that they both benefit from it just as much as their audience.
“My husband and I say that the podcast is free therapy for us, because after every episode, every conversation we have, we walk away and we're like, ‘I learned this about him,’ or ‘he learned this about me,’” she smiles. “I love real conversations with people and getting to know who they truly are, so this podcast has really just been an extension of that.”
Community Connections
A safe space for hosts, guests and listeners alike, The Squeeze has become exactly the platform that Tay envisioned when she set a new course towards creating an open and honest community and tackling mental health challenges together.
“I'm emotionally drained after some episodes because some of them can be pretty heavy,” she admitted. “It's just really cool that people feel safe enough to open up to me about what they've been through in their life. That can be really scary, and the fact that we have guests that come on and have enough trust to have those conversations with me—it's still something I'm so excited about, even two and a half years in.”
After years of ignoring her own mental health struggles, Tay now relishes the opportunity to encourage others to speak up about their own challenges.
But how should someone start that intimidating and vulnerable process?
“Find that safe person, whether it's a family member, a friend, a coworker, maybe it's a counselor at school,” she says. “We have these amazing hotlines now, so if you don't feel like you know someone, there are trained professionals out there to have a conversation with you. And there's even text ones where you don't even have to talk.”
She continues, “I know when I'm holding something in, and I open up to my husband, I feel so much better after getting it out. You learn that you're not alone again. We are all struggling with something. Sharing it makes it a lot less scary.”
Photography by Courtney Chanelle Whitacre
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