There’s a story alt-comedy luminary and former head writer of The Simpsons Dana Gould tells about how his anxiety kept him from his job. It’s not a long or particularly detailed one, but it’s instructive. One night, Gould was set to go on stage, and he simply couldn’t. This was in the middle of his career, when he was already successful. He had been doing comedy since his late teens. Gould doesn’t elaborate, but you should know he tells another story about once doing a show with a mic in one hand and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in the other during a bout with the flu, stopping his act for a few minutes to throw up, and then returning to finish his set. He’s a pro; he didn’t skip out on his audience because he was feeling a little bit nervous. He was incapacitated. He left the venue, went home, and said to himself okay, I guess I need to deal with this thing now. Gould is fine these days, or as fine as an intensely neurotic comic who grew up in a household full of wailing Irish drunks can get. Therapy and Klonopin have steeled him. 

And there’s an interview with the esteemed feminist writer and activist Simone De Beauvoir in The Paris Review in which she talks about what she calls the swindle of her sheltered bourgeois upbringing, how coming into adulthood was discovering the pain of others and the immense unhappiness that persists in the world. Then she takes a thirty-thousand-foot look at her life: there is an emptiness in man, and even his achievements have this emptiness… I don’t mean that I haven’t achieved what I wanted to achieve, but rather that the achievement is never what people think it is… people imagine that if you have succeeded on a social level you must be perfectly satisfied with the human condition in general. But that’s not the case. 

These are the two great terrors of living, articulated by two decorated geniuses: the fear of not being able to do what you need to do, and knowing that even if you do it beautifully, it won’t matter. Things are too important and not important at all. You can’t get out of your own way and you don’t exist. Reckoning with the meaninglessness of your work is stressful, as is the actual work, as is nearly everything else: relationships, child-rearing, cooking, thinking, bodily maintenance, and sometimes merely sitting on the couch trying to figure out what movie to watch. It’s a wonder we get anything done, and there is always so much more that we haven’t. 

Tyronn Lue is taking a temporary leave of absence from his job as head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Good for him. Someone else can draw up out-of-bounds sets for a week or two while Lue decompresses. He said in a statement that he has struggled for sleep and experienced chest pains at various points of the season. Making a living out of your obsessions sometimes means taxing yourself in ridiculous ways, and pushing the limits of your endurance can be rewarding, but you have to know the difference between dedication and madness. The troublesome thing is that few of us can plot that line until we’re well over it, and hopefully, somewhere around madness’s fifty-mile marker, we realize there’s a problem and treat it with the seriousness it requires. Lue probably feels considerable pressure to rush himself back to the bench, but he should take care not to. LeBron James is going to be fine without him, and he’ll be happy to see Lue whenever he gets back. 

Lue’s disclosure is part of a broader, blessedly sincere movement within the basketball world to talk about mental health. Almost eight years after Metta World Peace elatedly thanked his therapist following his championship run with the Lakers, four years since Royce White washed out of the league in part due to his generalized anxiety disorder, three years since Larry Sanders quit the Bucks and checked himself into a hospital for anxiety and depression, the NBA’s players and coaches finally seem ready to open up about the stresses they endure. It’s telling that last month, DeMar DeRozan said some anodyne stuff about his emotional wellbeing—we all got feelings… all of that. Sometimes… it gets the best of you—and it was a big deal.

Because athletes rarely discuss this stuff. They don’t want to be seen as soft; they don’t want to complain about a gig that pays them millions. In other words, they don’t feel they have a license to be human in public. That’s changing now. Kevin Love published a Players’ Tribune piece about a panic attack he suffered last November. Kelly Oubre has said that he often gets overwhelmed: deep down inside, I am going through a lot. Hell is turning over. Stars like LeBron and Steph Curry have been enthusiastically supportive of their colleagues’ candor. 

It’s all going in the right direction, and this matters because sports are a massive cultural force and the developments within them impact other corners of American life. The Time’s Up movement has its roots in Hollywood, an industry in dire need of a moral power-washing, but the reason it’s nationally significant is that lots of people know who Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd are and they function as charismatic spokespeople and fundraisers for a cause that seeks to improve the lives of relatively anonymous women working in education and food service and retail. By the same token, it’s terrific that Kevin Love is in therapy, but the benefits of his widely lauded Players’ Tribune essay are manifold. Love’s fame lends him a louder voice than most, and he’s using it to destigmatize mental illness and encourage people to seek the help they need. Hell, if congress ever gets its act together and shows an interest in drafting legislation that makes mental health services more accessible and affordable, it’s not hard to imagine Love or DeRozan or Oubre advocating for it at a rally or in a subcommittee hearing. 

Ty Lue is well-equipped to come out the other end of his problem. He has money; he has resources. If he eventually determines that he needs to retire from coaching, it’ll be a tough decision, but he can probably find ways to work in or around the NBA, if that’s what he wants. The most consequential thing Lue is doing, by taking a break from his job and being honest about the reasons why, is sharing with the basketball-watching world a simple message of vulnerability. Essentially: I am having a hard time. This is an unusual thing to hear from a guy who played professional ball for ten years and won a title as a coach two seasons ago, and that lends his sentiment additional power and heft. Because a lot of people know what Lue knows but don’t say it. Maybe this will help them start.