Dear Mamas Like Me: You are not alone Dear Mamas Like Me, You who struggle daily with mental illness, neurodiversity or past trauma. This is for you. Know you are seen. Know you are not alone. TW for abuse and sexual violence I want to speak up about what it's like to be a mother [...]
I thought I’d won. I thought I’d bested my anxiety. With the help of a little itty bitty capsule of Effexor and some strong willed thinking, I thought I’d put anxiety in its place once and for all. Not one to gloat, but I hadn’t had a full blown writhe-in-the-middle-of-the-living-room-at-2am attack in like 3 years. [...]
HOW I LEARNED TO LIVE WITH MY ANXIETY DISORDER I've been battling anxiety since I was young. Like many children, I was terrified of the dark and unable to sleep unless the closet light was left on. But during my early school years, my anxiety manifested into a deep fear of traveling to unfamiliar places [...]
When I was young, about seven or eight, I had “blackouts.” That was my word for them. Not because I lost consciousness or had holes in my memory. They were “blackouts” because it felt like I was blacking out from reality like the world was suddenly a bit more tenuous. Everything around me seemed to [...]
In 1997 I was 17 years old and I wanted to die; mindfulness meditation saved my life. If it wasn’t for Jon Kabat-Zinn’s body scan and sitting meditations, I would be dead. I was able to focus all my anxious and depressed energy into one singular place. My brain literally would not shut the fuck [...]
Anti-High Functioning I have been told many times that I am so high functioning for someone with depression. For a long time I not only did not mind this label but I embraced it. I thought I was fooling everyone, including myself with how I felt even though my cognition was rather disabled. I am [...]
1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 2000 - 500 - 60 - 30 - 400 = ??? Banana, 90. Pizza, 150-300. Apple, 100. Coffee, 0. For someone who hates math as much as I do, you would never know by looking at my life. In 2011 my life became a complete numbers game. Counting steps, squats, [...]
Dog pills. That should do it. I had been depressed for the longest time. It started a a malaise in my youth making yearly visits like a season. However as I moved through puberty and young adult life the depression came more frequently, like the rain. Then one day it started raining and didn’t stop. [...]
If I look back at all the times my anxiety has taken over my life, it’s hard to fathom. It started back when I was a kid. I often didn’t want to go to school and developed a stomach ache. It went undiagnosed for years. At age 19, I finally sought treatment, and now at [...]
When my wife, Ann, was officially diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, it was not the major revelation that one might expect. It was a label to the problem I had been dealing with since she left Silver Hill Hospital. I knew something was amiss. Despite the weekly double session therapy she’d been attending faithfully and her [...]
