Rainbow walk

I’m finishing up the final installment of the ACEs series, but I realized I haven’t told you about the rainbow walk yet.

I began using this exercise with clients when I was a wee intern–as part of the PRP program, we were required to do a certain number of “off-site” classes, so finding creative ways to get the clients out and about was a challenge. The rainbow walk is a great way to pair mindfulness with physical activity and fresh air, if you’re able and comfortable with going outside. If not, you can also do this from the comfort of your own home.

Essentially, you just…go for a walk. And as you’re walking, you pay attention to your surroundings and name all the red things you see, all the orange things, and so on. It’s kind of like that road trip game where you count all the blue cars, except better because you’re not actually stuck in a car. The point of the exercise is to bring yourself back to the present moment and focus one-mindedly on a task–in this case, using just one sense to observe.

Anyway, just a quick little bonus post so you’re not completely lost when I post ACEs Part 4 tonight. See you then!

I Aced the Test! Part 3: The COWs are out to pasture

Disclaimer: Growing up in the Midwest, I never encountered any actual stories/incidents of cow-tipping. But my god, I wish I had.

In 1959, Carl Rogers coined the acronym “COWs,” or Conditions of Worth. According to the man himself:

“The self-structure is characterized by a condition of worth when a self-experience or set of related self-experiences is either avoided or sought solely because the individual discriminates it as being less or more worthy of self-regard. … A condition of worth arises when the positive regard of a significant other is conditional, when the individual feels that in some respects he is prized and in others not. Gradually this same attitude is assimilated into his own self-regard complex, and he values an experience positively or negatively solely because of these conditions of worth which he has taken over from others, not because the experience enhances or fails to enhance his organism.” *

TL;DR: We crave unconditional positive regard from our caregivers pretty much from the get-go (example: “I will love you no matter what”). Unfortunately, a lot of times, you end up with a child receiving the message (whether overtly or through subtext) “I love you if/when you ___” and/or “You’re bad/undeserving of love/etc. if you [insert thing that caregiver/person of influence has determined is bad].”

That’s radically different than the message of “I love you, you’re safe, I’ll take care of you” that we instinctively need. Again, the pleasure principle applies: We’re hardwired to gravitate toward what feels good and avoid what feels bad. 

Ironically, it’s the uncomfortable things that stick in our minds. Think about a time you received a critique at work or got into a fight with a loved one. When you think about that day, what do you remember most–the critique/fight or everything else you did within that 24-hour span?

That negative little voice in your head–whose is it? A parent? A friend? A romantic partner? …

Yourself?

This is where core beliefs come into play, but that is an entirely different discussion for another day. In the meantime, take a look at this worksheet for more info on core beliefs and how to identify yours.

This is one of the reasons why those pesky ACEs are so persistent, even years later. We may be designed to move toward the comfortable, toward stasis, and yet we’re awesome at making ourselves miserable.

The next post in this series will focus on the biology of chronic stress and how ACEs can be a risk factor for certain illnesses. In the meantime, readers, take a moment to reflect on the following questions about your own inner monologue/critic. 

 

* Rogers C (1959) ‘A Theory of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersonal Relationships, As Developed in the Client-Centered Framework’, in Koch S (ed) (1959)

I aced the quiz! Part Two: That face.

Okay, so now that we know what ACEs are, let’s get a little more personal.

To begin, I’d like to share with you two pictures from my childhood.

1993, age four

1994, age five – kindergarten photo

Are these the same child?

Yes.

In the photo on the left, I am dolled up and mugging for the camera. I’m not sure who took me to get my photo taken that day (probably at Sears). If it was my biological mother, she was having an exceptionally good day. The reality is that one of my aunts probably arranged the whole thing. But I look happy, round-cheeked, grinning at the camera with a twinkle in my eyes.

In the photo on the right, taken roughly a year and change after the first, I am posing for my kindergarten photo. I was grumpy partly because of that damn cowlick, but also because my home life had basically gone to hell in a handbasket in the space of a year. My mother was drinking again, heavily. She would often leave me alone in the house at night to go out to bars. One of my earliest memories is waking up alone and wandering through the darkened house. I walked outside and paced the sidewalks for what felt like hours, watching as the lights in the houses lining the street flickered off, one by one by one.

Readers, that is the loneliest I have ever felt in my life.

If we ignore the backstory and focus only on the images (lighting and photo quality aside), what remains is this: The girl on the right has lost all the baby fat from her cheeks. Her eyes are huge, dark, and sunken. She is trying to smile but her teeth are gritted. She does not look at the camera, but rather past it, as if trying to see something in the distance. You know, that old chestnut–the Thousand Yard Stare.  Still a cute kid, but not the type of child you’d look at and go, “Oh, yeah, she’s doing well.”

Chronic stress changes the body in a myriad of different ways. I’ll touch on the biology of chronic stress (behavioral medicine is a fascination of mine) in the next post, but for now, let’s focus on face.

They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. If we peeked through your windows, what might we find? I’m looking forward to hearing from you, readers!

We need to talk about “Dork Diaries.”

Dear readers,

I have not been this angry and unsettled about a piece of pop culture since the Fear VR: 5150 Knotts Berry Farm debacle of September 2016. This afternoon, I happened upon a post made by one of my Facebook friends regarding a book series called “Dork Diaries,” which is aimed at children (particularly girls) aged 8 to 14. The protagonist is a 14-year-old girl named Nikki Maxwell and her life as a middle schooler.

Before I get into the meat-and-potatoes of this post, I want to warn you that the following images contain extremely discriminatory language that some readers may find upsetting. All images were provided via a good friend of mine on Facebook who is also a mental health advocate and fights like hell against the stigma. I respect her deeply and am grateful to her for bringing this to my attention.

Below is the first image I saw regarding this series. 

Let me begin by stating that I have not read any of the books in their entirety and had no idea they even existed until just a few hours ago. I also hate that by writing this post, I am giving this author more attention. However, I cannot let this issue go unaddressed for a number of reasons. For the sake of brevity, I’ve made a list:

 

• Stigmatizing language hurts all of us, and we need to knock it off. Seriously
• The age range AND gender at which the books are targeted is highly disturbing, given the nature of the content. I’m not talking about the whole “celebrities being seen without panties but not phones” bit that many reviewers have cited as problematic.  

 

 

I’m talking specifically about the use of phrases such as “totally SCHIZOID!” etc. to describe the narrator’s peers. (I am also not 100% sure what the author means by “acting schizoid,” and I don’t think she does, either.)

Dropping “RETARD” (please note the caps), even as a self-descriptor, is unacceptable. Come on, people. I thought we were better than this. The sad part is, the author could have gotten rid of the problematic language without negatively affecting the rest of the content. Cutting it would have actually made the book better. I’m wondering where the editor was in this process, if there even was one. I’m wondering why we still live in a world where this kind of thing manages to slip by largely uncontested.

 

• Where did the narrator (a 14-year-old girl) learn this language? Why does she think it’s okay to casually throw around such hateful, derogatory terms? Why isn’t this addressed in the book? And more importantly, why did the author think it was okay to write this in a children’s book without any sort of disclaimer?

Kids don’t come up with “you’re trash because X/Y/Z” on their own. They hear it from somewhere else, accompanied by the implication that it’s acceptable to dehumanize others for being different and perpetuate that toxicity ad infinitum. And this is a powerful reminder that none of us exist in a vacuum.

We can’t bubble-wrap our children, nor should we. There will always be bullies. There will always be stigma. But what we can do–what we must do–is educate ourselves and our children about the glorious range of people who share this planet with us. We must teach them accountability and respect. We must teach them that they are okay just the way they are and that the limitless expanse of diversity makes the world a far more beautiful, interesting, and magical place to live.

I am not in favor of censorship. What I am in favor of is self-awareness and recognizing when you’re about to fly off the rails and discriminate against an entire group of people in one broad stroke. Anyone who steps into the public eye has a duty to ensure that they are not causing harm to others. Context is also important. While this type of language would be a bit unsettling in a book written for adults (though I would take less issue with it given the audience and their assumed level of maturity and awareness), it is absolutely disturbing when it appears in a book written for children.

As a writer, an advocate, and a budding therapist, this sickens me. It’s lazy writing designed for shock value, to laugh at and “other” people who are living with mental illnesses and disabilities. Rachel Renée Russell’s writing is irresponsible at best, though I would go so far as to describe it as dangerous because these attitudes are dangerous. These attitudes have gotten people killed.

The one silver lining I can see is that a parent could pre-read the book, then use it as a jumping-off point for a discussion with their child (or children) about why such language is hurtful and not okay to use when describing another living, breathing, thinking, feeling human being.

Here’s an easy way to tell if you’re about to say something awful about another person. Take whatever adjective you were going to use–let’s say “schizoid,” for the sake of continuity–and replace that word with a group that has been historically discriminated against (but that society has collectively acknowledged was abused, stigmatized, and worse).

For example, the above passage would read “OMG! MacKenzie was acting totally JEWISH.” [Or “Black.” Or literally any other group that, when used as an adjective in a negative context, would make you look like a terrible person.]

That sounds bad, right? Does it make you feel really gross? It should. We may think we’ve conquered racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, all the other -isms…but we haven’t. We’ve barely even addressed them. All we’ve done is move on to another scapegoat, another bogeyman, another substitute that is slightly more socially acceptable but still conveys the level of disdain as older, more taboo slurs and epithets.

And what about the kids reading it who happen to have any of the conditions Russell has singled out in her books as targets of derision and malice? What happens when a child who has some form of mental illness or disability? How is a parent supposed to help heal the damage done when the hatred is right there in black and white for the child to see? The message sent by these books is that it’s acceptable to make people feel less-than because of something they cannot control.

And readers, you should never let anyone make you feel like less than you are, period. You are beautiful. Your brain is beautiful. You are strong. And we all deserve better than this.

With love,

One of those so-called mentally ill “weirdoes”

— J

 

It’s okay not to go home again.

For Thanksgiving, we flew back to my hometown in the Midwest to visit my remaining family–my mother, the aunt who was my legal guardian when I was a child, and another aunt who lives about an hour away from said hometown but visits regularly.

As I told my therapist this afternoon, “I don’t want to say it sucked, but…it sucked.”

I don’t want to get into any of the messy details, but I realized a few things during our brief Thanksgiving trip.

The first is that my grandmother is dead, like, for real-real. My “mom” is dead. Full stop. It’s not that I was pretending otherwise, but being in her house without seeing her there drove the point home in an unexpectedly painful way, and I had to hold it together while I was there because I knew if I lost it, so would everyone else, and then it’d be this whole terrible thing that I was just not equipped to handle.

The second is that it’s not normal to spend the week up to your flight being anxious and trying to brainstorm ways to defuse any potential arguments. It’s not normal to be five minutes from landing in your hometown and freaking out because you have no idea how many fights there will be this time or how bad they’ll get.

The third is that it’s simply not healthy for me to go “home” again. My therapist agreed with this assessment–there really is nothing there for me anymore. I’m 28 and am building my own life, my own family. If anyone wants to visit me, they know where I am. There are several large airports nearby. I never turn my phone off, though I have become more selective about when I answer calls–if I’m emotionally exhausted and have nothing left to give that day, I let the call go to voicemail.

It’s not like I’m unreachable. I just don’t want to make the effort anymore. I’m tired of throwing myself out into the wilds of my family-of-origin and hoping I come back in one piece. I’m tired of having to tell them, “Hey, I flew all the way here, can we all just get along?” I’m tired of having to put a dog into the fight. I’m tired of there even being a fight.

I went back “home,” and all I got was the flu and three days of crippling anxiety and depression.

Readers, it’s okay to set boundaries. If, like me, you’ve finally hit your breaking point, please try not to feel guilty about it. You need to take care of you first. You can’t pour from an empty cup, and life is too short to spend it with people who make you miserable.

Dichotomy

Is it possible to simultaneously be the most troubled and the most well-adjusted person you know? The deeper I go into my counseling program, the more this question pops into my mind. On the one hand, my demons are legion. On the other, I keep them very well-controlled and they all have little color-coordinated leashes.

Am I well-adjusted because I have to be? Does being well-adjusted look the same, or mean the same thing, for people who have backbreaking loads of trauma and those who don’t?

I used to worry a lot about whether my personal mental health history meant that I can’t be a therapist. I still worry about that, though thankfully not as much. Tonight in class, we were discussing self-disclosure and one of my classmates brought up that exact question–how are our clients supposed to trust us if they know we have our own set of problems?

I guess it’s one of those situations where what you have doesn’t matter as much as how you handle it. I get up every day and even though I do a fair amount of yelling at the intrusive negative thoughts, I still manage to accomplish everything on my to-do list. (Well…most things, anyway. I’m human.)

This has been on my mind for most of the day today, probably because I had intake with my new therapist yesterday and was thinking about the wall between my thoughts and feelings. I depend so heavily on that wall to keep it together, and I’m a bit worried–or, okay, a lot worried–that once I start really delving into the trauma and trying to merge my thoughts and feelings that there will be this monumental change and I’ll basically fall apart. I can’t remember the last time I was able to feel an emotion on an actual deep, meaningful, emotional level for more than a flash before cognition takes over and the brain reasserts control over the “heart.”

I know that’s unrealistic and that no one can do a total 180 in terms of functioning, but the unknowns are scary. As horrible as it is to know certain emotional things but not be able to feel them…better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, right?

I haven’t had self-doubt like this in quite a while, but getting the thoughts down on this little blog has helped a bit. It’s funny how writing about your troubles takes away some of their power, isn’t it? I’m also going to hit the self-care pretty hard tonight because tomorrow I have a phone interview with another prospective internship site–yay! That search is pretty terrifying, but I have a good feeling about the last couple of sites I’ve contacted, so fingers crossed.

Until next time, readers, remember to take good care of yourselves. I will, too.

 

News Day Tuesday: Acronyms! (Or: MDMA for PTSD)

Good morning, readers!

School started last week and there’s been a lot going on in my life on the personal side–my 93-year-old grandma, who essentially raised me as her own for most of my childhood, has been ill and I’ve once again been dealing with anticipatory grief.

Anyway, on a happier note, here’s some news for you about PTSD. (And it’s literally happy–it’s about Ecstasy!)

In a nutshell: those lovable FDA officials just granted MDMA “breakthrough therapy” status as a potential treatment for PTSD. Clinical trials will (hopefully) be easier to come by now, and I am very much looking forward to seeing how this develops.

Important distinction: MDMA isn’t FDA-approved, but this is a huge step in a very promising direction.

Right now, PTSD treatment options are super-limited. My brand is pretty wicked, but my only option for dealing with the symptoms is lorazepam/Ativan. I count myself lucky that I only have depersonalization/derealization, anxiety around crowds, and the occasional nightmare. It could be a lot worse. I’ve written extensively in the past about my experiences with dissociation (hence the name of the blog), but like most things, you get used to it.

But it’s not something anyone should have to “get used to.” None of us should have to accept the symptoms as our “new normal,” and for many, the symptoms are debilitating. That pretty much goes without saying (though of course, I decided to say it anyway).

I recently completed a research proposal for one of my summer classes, and while it was a painful process for someone who’s not a big research fan, it was definitely eye-opening. There has been shockingly little research done on depersonalization/derealization; most of what I encountered deals with “dissociation” in broader terms and the individual disorders are either not specified or are all lumped together in a mass that ultimately provides no insight about the actual conditions.

Anyway, that’s a post for another day. What I’m getting at is that PTSD is an incredibly complicated beast. While some symptoms are consistent, it never looks the same in two different people. Anecdotally, the symptoms can look different at various stages in a person’s life.

Seven years ago, I was having flashbacks (not the dramatic Hollywood kind where you’re literally in the memory–the kind where you sort of space out and the memory plays out in your mind’s eye while you’re pretty much unresponsive to the real world). Then, in 2012, the flashbacks stopped and the depersonalization/derealization got its hooks into me and has been hanging on for dear life ever since.

Like I said, you get used to it. The pain fades. You adjust to never really feeling “real,” to being in this perpetual dreamlike state. When it spikes, I try to welcome it as a new adventure and pay attention to what feels different without getting anxious or judging it as “bad.”

Still, it would be nice if there was something out there that could help just a little. I’ll be keeping my eye on the MDMA  breakthrough and keep you posted on further developments.

In the meantime, readers, what helps with your symptoms? Grounding exercises are one of my favorite things to do if I start to feel anxious. It’s less tedious than counting things.

News Day Tuesday: BLOOM by Anna Schuleit

Hey readers! This week, we’re doing something a little different for News Day Tuesday.

I stumbled across Anna Schuleit’s beautiful BLOOM project from 2003 (yes, I know I’m super late to the party). Today, I want to celebrate that project.

In 2003, artist Anna Schuleit installed 28,000 (28,000! Yow!) potted flowers throughout the psychiatric ward of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC).

Anna Schuleit’s installation project was created within the entire building of MMHC, on all floors, inviting former patients and employees, staff, students, and the general public, to re-visit the historic site once more before its closing. There was also a symposium at a nearby venue, and an open forum on the front steps of MMHC, during which the patients were invited to tell their stories. The events were dedicated to the memory of the thousands of patients of MMHC, and included as many of them as we were able to contact, as well as the doctors, nurses, support staff, researchers, students, and the general public. The project was a non-profit effort run entirely by volunteers and all of the events were free and open to all.

Source

As people living with mental illness, some of us with more than one, we know the therapeutic power of telling our stories, of having a voice when we’re so often voiceless. Mindy Schwartz Brown wrote some beautiful poetry about her experiences at MMHC, which you can read here. One poem in particular, “Asylum,” touched me deeply.

ASYLUM
(for Anna)

How did this edifice become “home” to its inhabitants-
the renowned multiply degreed,
the haplessly homeless dually diagnosed,
the walking wounded,
the worried well,
the happy go lucky who cleaned floors,
cooked lunches,
took blood pressures.

How could it contain all of the
the egos,
the disintegrated, the inflated,
occupying one space in parallel play?
MD, SPMI
Ph.D, BPD
MSW, DBT
Tell me in this soup, where does one find one’s ME?

DSM IV, Anybody going for V?
What’s the code for those who close hospitals
then open prisons for the sick?

We all feel so much better now,
knowing our brains are
faulty and we are not.
Structural errors ,
neurotransmittor deficits,
viral origins,
genomic misconfigurations.

So now can we all be friends?
Can we do lunch?
Just as we would with a diabetic?

October 3, 2003

Mindy Schwartz-Brown © 2003

The pain of not being recognized is one we know all too well. The lines “We all feel so much better now, / knowing our brains are / faulty and we are not” struck a chord with me that resonated all the way through my body and down into what some people call the soul.

We are the ones who are forgotten. We are the ones who are hiding in plain sight, not out of our own desire to be invisible, but of the desire of others to make us invisible. We make others uncomfortable, particularly when we don’t outwardly fit the mold of the “mentally ill person.” Whenever I reveal that I have bipolar I and CPTSD to someone, I am typical met with one of two reactions. The person either recoils–the discomfort in their eyes is stark and harrowing–or they tell me how “brave” I am.

I am not brave. I simply live. What choice do I have? I do not want to die, though there are plenty of people who view living with a mental illness as a fate worse than death–and I find that more disturbing than anything going on in my attic. There have been countless times when the hauntings have gotten so noisy that I feel as though my mind may literally split in two. Still, I live. Our lives have worth. We have worth.

I’d like to end by including a few photos of Schuleit’s installation. I spent a great deal of time yesterday perusing the photos and reflecting–not on my own experiences, as I have never been inpatient, but on what others’ experiences might have been like as they lived out their day-to-day at MMHC.

All images above copyright Anna Schuleit.

Tell me your stories, readers. It’s important.

News Day Tuesday: BiAffect App Links Keystrokes with Bipolar Episodes

Greetings, readers!

It was a bit of a challenge to find an article for this week, but I finally stumbled upon something that could make a huge difference in how we track our moods. There’s a new app called BiAffect that uses your keystrokes, frequency of texting, and social media app patterns to track manic and depressive episodes.

To find out whether a user might be experiencing a manic or depressive episode, the app tracks typing speed, how hard keys are pressed and the frequency of the use of backspace and spellcheck.

–chicagotribune.com

I know there are a lot of people who dislike the idea of being tracked in any sense, which is totally fine. However, I feel a bit more comfortable with it knowing that it comes directly from a research group. It’s only available for iPhone, which is kind of a bummer because I’m a die-hard Android user.

I wish something like this had been around in 2013, when I was deep in the throes of exhausting rapid-cycling episodes. I was newly diagnosed, but the challenge of finding the right combination and doses of medication, the loss of my job (probably due to my cycling), and the overall disintegration of my marriage had more or less temporarily erased any benefits or relief I found from my diagnosis.

One of my long-time friends mentioned that he noticed I was posting a lot more on Facebook when I was manic than when I was depressed. Like, a lot. Even now that I’m stable and successfully medicated, I still pay close attention to what and how often I post. When I’m more energetic and feel like interacting with others, I find myself wondering if it’s because I’m manic, hypomanic, or just…not depressed.

When you’re living with bipolar disorder, it’s a constant question of Column A, Column B, Column C, or a bit of each. You learn to analyze your moods and energy levels, and this tracking can quickly become obsessional.

I see this app as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it would save those of us who pay attention to our moods a ton of work. On the other, those of us who are prone to preoccupation and overall obsessional thinking could end up checking in a lot more often than usual.

If BiAffect is released for Android, I’m for sure going to jump on it, at least for a trial run. It seems like it could be a useful tool for mental health care providers and patients alike–rather than having to drag in pages and pages of mood diaries, we could pop open an app and have the data right there at our fingertips (literally). And, at least in theory, it seems like any sort of self-report bias would be removed, or at least mitigated. I know I’ve been guilty of fibbing a bit in my mood diaries due to the shame that comes from realizing just how sick I am.

What do you think, readers? Would you give something like this a spin, or do you find it intrusive? Let me know! I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

Until next time, stay safe and remember to be excellent to yourself.

News Day Tuesday: Sick Days

Hey readers! I’ve gotten really bad about posting regularly and as we all know, structure is crucial when you’re living with a mental illness (particularly bipolar disorder). I made myself a super-nifty planner before I started school in January and am actually going to start using it to keep myself on track. What this means for you is that hopefully, I won’t disappear for weeks at a time!

Anyway, today’s article addresses the stigma against physicians taking sick days for mental health. While it focuses on doctors in Australia, the topic is extremely relevant to anyone who has ever taken or needed a “mental health” day. According to the article, doctors (unsurprisingly) feel uncomfortable taking sick days for self-care, even when they begin to feel burned out and can’t deliver their usual level of care to patients.

“I’m completely supportive, but I’ll admit I’ve never been brave enough to take a mental health day,” one doctor said, adding, “How can you dump your workload on a colleague who is going through much the same things as you are?”

– abc.net.au

I find this extremely relatable because I’ve always felt awkward calling into work or needing to leave early because my brain has decided that doing anything other than crying in bed is just not going to happen. It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve always felt the need to claim another reason–usually migraines, which I used to get several times a week–because we’re conditioned to believe that depression, anxiety, and other disorders of the mind are not a valid reason for absences. We’re taught to believe that we need to suck it up and get on with our lives, even if that means hiding in the bathroom to cry or have a panic attack.

Naturally, this poses a huge problem for anyone in the workforce, but it’s especially problematic for health care providers. It’s something I’ve often thought about as my clinical practicum draws closer. How can I best serve my clients if I’m experiencing the same symptoms as they are?

I also fear that even in a mental health facility, where one would expect supervisors to be a bit more sympathetic, I’ll come across as weak or unsuitable for the job because of what’s going on in my brain. There’s an indescribable level of self-loathing and shame that comes with mental illnesses, and I’m sure all of you can relate. It’s the feeling of being less-than, the feeling that you don’t deserve to have a job because some days, you just can’t handle the world. You begin to question everything about yourself–am I being weak or overly sensitive? Am I doing this whole “adult” thing wrong? The fear of losing your job is a constant presence, which only makes things worse.

So what can we do about it? Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer to that question. One would hope that with increased media exposure, employers will become more understanding, although every boss is different and there are zero guarantees.

When I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I loved my job. I was working as an editor at a translation company, but my symptoms were so severe that I actually had what I called my “Oh shit, I cried at work!” kit, which I kept in my desk so I could patch myself up after crying jags. Some of the items included eye makeup, because it’s embarrassing to have streaked makeup after crying (even though I became very good at crying without messing up my face). Although my employer was aware of my struggles, I still lost that job due to absences, which sent me into a horrific downward spiral that took over a year to break.

Since then, I’ve become quite anxious about divulging any information related to my mental health to anyone at any job…and that’s problematic by itself. Why should we feel ashamed of something that’s beyond our control? The answer lies in the stigma.

It’s going to be a long, uphill battle, though the fact that today’s article even exists gives me hope. Exposure and time are the only things that are going to remedy this issue. It’s an unhappy thought, but I sometimes find myself wondering if mental health issues will ever be considered as legitimate as something as simple as food poisoning when it comes to work absences.

I’d like to end on an up note with another quote from the article: “If we can’t help ourselves, how can we help others?”

Self-care is so important, readers. The Compassion Project offers a list of self-care activities that you can check out to build a plan for yourself. Here are some of my favorites.

• Reading
• Baking (I’m a huge stress baker, though I haven’t done it in a while)
• Knitting or embroidery
• Crafting
• Cuddling with a pet
• Going for a walk (which you can even do at work–take a five-minute break to stretch your legs)
• Doing a crossword puzzle

What are some of your favorite self-care activities? Let me know–I’m always looking to add to my list!

As always, readers, stay safe and I’ll see you next week.