I’ve been living with depression on and off since I was 13 years old. It’s a black hole that I haven’t been able to climb out of on my own when it reaches the clinical level. Everyone gets depressed sometimes, and a lot of people can get through it to the other side on their [...]
I Hate the Color Red “So, when exactly should one begin to feel comfortable at a new job, I always feel nervous?” I asked my boyfriend, now husband, at the age of 18. Hmmm, you should already feel fine, it’s been 6 month,” he said. This was the first time I knew something was wrong [...]
Eleven days before I turned 20, I was diagnosed with depression and bipolar II disorder. About four months later, I was also diagnosed with anxiety and mild panic. Those aren’t exactly easy diagnoses to handle. It’s not like being told you’ve got strep and this medication will make it better. Finding the right medication is [...]
Before I went public about the fact that I live with Bipolar Disorder type 1 last year, not many people in my life knew that I had been diagnosed with a mental illness at the age of 27. It wasn’t something that came up in casual conversation. But ever since opening up about how this [...]
Well, where on Earth do I even begin? If I was to look back on my life, it seems like one of those worst-case scenarios you’d hear about in a psychology class. While I might be 27 years old, it feels like I’ve already lived an entire life. Life has been chaos from day 1 [...]
Anniversaries. There’s good ones and then there are bad ones. Everyone loves happy anniversaries, they look forward to it every year, but what about the bad ones? The ones when you lost someone you love or when a relationship ended, you lost all of your belongings in a fire, etc. Those bad anniversaries no one [...]
“This too shall pass.” – Anonymous When most people think of anxiety, they think of being nervous on a first date, or seeing someone for the first time in five years. Not me. When I think anxiety, I think waking up every single day for the past fifteen years absolutely terrified for no apparent reason. [...]
When I was growing up, there was a magnet on my family’s refrigerator that said, “Our family puts the FUN back in dysFUNctional”. As the saying goes, no truer words… As a young child, I didn’t realize that what my family was abnormal. Mental illness was just a part of the landscape. It wasn’t until [...]
As you might or might not know, I battled depression for a long time. I still do, really. I began to write a comment on her blog post, and I just found that I couldn’t stop. I just kept writing and writing and writing. Before I published it, I paused. Was it really okay to [...]
It was March 8, 1982, the greatest day in history…the day I was born. It was a blizzardy, blustery night, with blinding snowfall, crazy winds, and chaotic natural danger. This was what I was born into; who knew it would be a metaphor for my mind the rest of my life? Allow me to preface [...]