I've never been one to embrace limits, but in the past few years I've learned that doing so is a matter of maintaining emotional stability. Recently, I was asked to accompany my best friend to his sister's. I hesitated because I'd been subjected to three incidents of hair-pulling in a 48-hour period by his teen-aged [...]
More than anything, I want to help other people around me. Ever since I was young, I always helped others before helping myself. I was under the impression from a young age that if you gave yourself self-love, or self-care that you were selfish. This is unfortunately the conditioning that we receive at a very [...]
My story begins when I was around 8 years old, I’d been ill with nausea and vomiting. I’d never knowingly been sick before. I remember feeling frightened. I remember feeling a total lack of control over my body. Over the following weeks and months I can remember becoming obsessed with making sure I wasn’t sick [...]
The Call of the Void "You know when you have so much stuff to do, but thinking about it makes you stressed out, and then that stress keeps you from doing anything? Well you have anxiety, you know what I'm talking about right?" My coworker asked me while leaning against the beige wall of my [...]
Misadventures in Therapy “Psychologists are just people who weren’t smart enough to be psychics.” – Gina Linetti, Brooklyn Nine-Nine The above quote sums up my esteem for professionals in the mental health field. I don’t hold high regard for purported psychics, which makes my feelings toward therapists all the more damning. Achieving mental health and [...]
The Monster in the Bed When anxiety rears its ugly head. I was always a nervous kid. When my classmates were jumping off the top of the monkey bars, I was worried about broken bones. I was cautious and timid. Really, I was scared. If anyone had asked me what I was scared of, I [...]
I was taken advantage of -over and over again- at points in my life that I needed to be supported and protected. Started with age three until eight, I'm raped and molested. Funny thing, PTSD. It does a great job at hiding the screams of the innocent child, stuffed inside the adult. I grew up, but screaming [...]
I was in Florida. This wasn't my home. My home was in Pennsylvania, but I left that home in search of something new. I told myself that I was going to Florida for a fresh start, but I was really running away from the dismal life I was leading 2000 miles to the north. When [...]
So, I was given the suggestion to write for Stigma Fighters from a contributor – who happens to be one of my closest friends. I have bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and I happen to hallucinate because of an accident. I am medicated, but sometimes the meds do not work. My coping mechanisms, one of which [...]
WRITE POETRY, HE SAID At age 38, I was dancing and singing at the top of my lungs in my second-storey apartment, while my two young children slept peacefully in their bedrooms. The year was 1984 and I had no idea my brain was rattling and clanging inside as I experienced my first manic-psychotic episode. [...]
