This post comes on a heels of a similar post I wrote recently called “I Am Not My Depression” (you can check it out here!). A big part of my mental health journey is the way I’ve noticed that language has built up the stigma surrounding mental health, which means I’m constantly trying to find ways to break down that stigma. And just like in my recent post, I want to share why instead of saying that I’m more than my anxiety, I explicitly try to reinforce the notion that I am not my anxiety – and here’s why.
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When Bad Habits Hide in Plain Sight
When it comes to marking moments and memories in my life, I tend to reflect whenever a significant marker comes around. I think about what the world was like in that moment being marked and how I fit into that specific moment. Sometimes I pick and choose what to reflect on, which is what happened last week. Though I haven’t quite sat with the March 2022 of it all (yes, that’s two years of pandemic for us in the States), I’ve come to realize that in those past two years, I’ve created many habits. While some of them have been positive, I’ve also developed negative habits as a result of the pandemic that have increased my anxiety and fear. With the massive way the world has changed in recent years, how can we make sure our habits help us and not hurt us?
Continue readingFinding Mental Wellness During Uncertain Times
On Tuesday, I wrote about what my approach to mental health has been like during the pandemic – an approach that includes a bit of pessimism, an emphasis on focus and a willingness to let out my emotions when I need. The more I wrote about these things, the more I reflected on how I’ve been able to maintain mental wellness as often as I could during the past year-plus of this pandemic.
One of the more difficult things I’ve come to terms with is that as long as we’ve been living this way, I still haven’t truly processed what we’ve gone through, and what we’re still going through. Truthfully, I’m slightly nervous of what that will look like for my mental health. But the bigger question on my mind is, how do you process something when you don’t know when it will end?
Continue readingI Can’t Always Do More – And That’s Okay
In a surge of excitement earlier this week, I decided I’d go get a haircut in-person for the first time in more than a year. The pandemic and my anxiety are the main reasons I haven’t done so already, and while I didn’t regret that at all, I got excited because I found a place to go that I might feel more comfortable in, that wasn’t as busy and didn’t have as much going on. But then things shifted.
Continue readingManaging Mental Health in a Pandemic
Back in March, I wrote my first post about the coronavirus pandemic. Like most of us, I had some naievete about the situation (to be fair, what’s happened in the United States isn’t very surprising, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing). Regardless, my first post about mental health during this pandemic was focused on how you define success at this point in time. I hadn’t thought about it in awhile but after hearing a friend recently bring up feeling like she was in a COVID slump, it clicked. Those questions still remained. What does it mean to be successful during a pandemic? How do we define what it means to be productive? I didn’t know much at the time, but there’s one thing I knew then that remains to be true: finding those moments during a pandemic continue to matter, especially when it comes to our mental health.
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My Brain's Not Broken 