Amazingly, I have gone through life undiagnosed with any mental illness, but if one were to know me, they’d know that this doesn’t necessarily mean much at all. As a young teen, I struggled with food issues that turned into anorexia and bulimia that lasted until my 20s. I was also a cutter and had [...]
My fourth decade is only just around the corner and every day I pinch myself not quite believing that I lasted this long, and that I go about my daily life with most people never suspecting that I’m anything other than a happy popular woman leading a nice “middle-class” existence. You see I’m a survivor [...]
Can you imagine saying to someone who has cancer that you “don’t believe in cancer?” How about telling someone with a mobility impairment that they just need to apply themselves and “try harder” to walk? Would you ask someone who was born Deaf, “don’t most kids normally outgrow that?” Well, those are the kinds of [...]
Living with Mental Illness is Brutal; let me be clear. It’s a full-time job on top of every other responsibility there is in one’s life; kids, work, relationships and debt. It’s not for the weak or faint hearted. The misconception people living with a mood disorder can’t cope or don’t have strength to overcome life’s [...]
I consider myself a well-educated woman, but postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety blindsided me. I am a planner by nature. If I had known that I was at risk, I would have prepared myself, my husband, and my family. As a lover of words, I devoured everything that I could get my hands on regarding [...]
Having an eating disorder is often like living a double life. One in which I am a functioning member of society, viewed as perfectly normal and completely sane. The other is the secret world in my head, that I can’t escape, that is anything but sane. I am an over eater. I have been for [...]
“Fatty Fatty Two by Four….Can’t Get Thru the Bathroom Door”…I was 12 when I first heard those words from a family member. The way we perceive beauty and our own image starts with our own family. Right? The torment I experienced of being called “fatty” by family members and even being “oinked” at will forever [...]
The Contract of Your Birth “It was just before sunrise at the electric blue hour I had come to appreciate in the week since I had given up sleeping,” writes Max in the opening chapter of Walks on the Margins: A Story of Bipolar Illness. Max was twenty and a junior in college when he [...]
My first suicidal plan occurred in college when I was a freshman. I’d had a break up, self-medicated with alcohol for 1 ½ semesters, done poorly in my classes, and felt like a complete failure. I wanted to jump out the window of my dorm room. At least by ending my life, my roommate would [...]
The first memory I have of that knot of anxiety in my stomach was in bed on a school night at about nine years old. I lay awake wondering why I felt so scared but I couldn’t be sure, was it because we had sports tomorrow? Was it because I had homework due in? But [...]