Category Archives: mental health

mental health

2020

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Wow…. I can see how well my mental health is based on the last time that I posted. I posted in September, when I thought I had a plan for my life and knew what the next few months had in store. Turns out I was completely wrong. I had to move suddenly when my roommate told me she needed to move back in with her parents, I got a girlfriend, dealt with the worst anxiety attack of my life, went on a PHD interview, and I am leaving my current job at the end of this week to start a new one. Life is crazy.

My mental health was in such turmoil during those couple of months. I stopped making lunch for myself and dancing around the apartment. I stopped putting make up on and having fun coming up with an outfit idea. That all being said, I feel stronger than ever now than destroyed like I did during my last major depression spell. I feel like in spite of what I was going through I was still moving towards my goals and making it a priority to take care of myself. And now, I have made the biggest step of all which is leaving my toxic and abusive workplace. I am very proud of what I’ve accomplished and feel like I have so much more to say about my journey of self acceptance, love, and discovery.

Now, I am pursuing some major goals by going to PhD interviews in New York for the fall. I am not sure what the future may bring but I am starting to accept myself for who I am now instead of forcing myself to be who other people want me to be. I introduced my girlfriend to my entire family during the holiday season and I am now out to the world as a queer woman. I don’t want to have to lie any more for the benefit of others. My goal for 2020 is to be unapologetically me.

mental health

Sex Drive on Anti-Depressants

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Let’s be honest, I am still dealing with Depression. Depression with a capitol D. Makes my brain foggy some days and makes me feel not worthy of even being seen outside. I have been on anti-depressants for over 10 months now and I have mixed feelings. On one hand I feel they pulled me out of my suicidal thoughts. But on the other hand I feel like they expose a weak part of me. If anyone catches sight of my pills, I feel like Depression is written all over my face. Any comments, even jokingly, about me seeming anything less than mentally stable, gets me triggered. I go to therapy regularly, which is so fucking hard, and I constantly worry about who I will be off of the anti-depressants. It feels like a dirty little secret. All of that is hard enough, but changes in my sex drive makes it even more confusing.

I definitely want to state one thing and that is my sex drive did not go away completely. I always used to read about people having no sex drive on anti-depressants, etc. But I realized that was not the case for me. When I found out I could still have orgasms, I thought I was in the clear… Meanwhile, the reality of the situation was that it was harder for me to get off “on command” or when I am with a partner. I feel like orgasms and sex was something that came so natural to me (no pun intended). I did not have to think, the movements just happened and my body would respond. Now, however, I have two partners who I regularly sleep with and sometimes I am all for getting down and other times I just want to pleasure them. They know I struggle with depression and anxiety and that I take anti-depressants, but still I am looking at a disappointed face in the bedroom when they can’t get me off.

They ask if I am still attracted to them and they talk about how we should just try some more. I know we are all young and dumb but there are times where I just don’t even feel like trying to get off because I know it won’t happen. There are also different things that get me off more than others now. Like a lot of my sexual triggers got all jumbled up. Like how I enjoy talking in the bedroom more than I ever have. All of this made me realized the changes occurring from my anti-depressants made me feel different in not only in my daily life but in the bedroom as well.

Maybe this is old news to everyone, maybe I should change my prescription, or maybe this is who I will be while on my medication. Having orgasms are getting easier the longer I am on the same dose so that is hopeful. And all that my horniness has done for me in the past is get me in a lot of trouble since my sex drive caused me to only look at people with rose tinted lenses. Even though my partners feel slightly disappointed from time to time, I feel slightly empowered.

I feel empowered to make choices about who I love not about how hot they get my groin. I get to see how they actually treat me and love me. Without that emotional barrier, I feel I can see what is in front of me better and make choices for myself that are sustainable. I am someone who still loves passion and making love spontaneously, but I also know that orgasms aren’t all there is to a relationship. My orgasms are still here, I am confident in that but them being quieter has given me unexpected freedom.

mental health

BiVisibility Day

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It’s been a year since I’ve finally accepted and explored my sexuality. I don’t know why I’ve always felt I had to deny one part of myself to fit into a community and feel like I belong on this world. Why did I feel I had to be 100% of anything to be worthy of love. Why do I have to hide in the darkness when there is so much room and warmth in the light.

During this past year, I’ve realized more and more how love and my relationships with others are the most important thing in my life. Opening this part of my life up has showed me to not only feel more open to love with a partner but my other relationships have been more open as well.

I can’t ignore the fact that it is hard. I’ve opened myself up to love but at the same time I’ve felt open up to hate. However, no matter how much hate I get, nothing could get me to go back in the closet. I feel free, I feel supported, and I feel loved by myself and capable to love.

I am here and I am queer. Happy BiVisibility Day.

mental health

Ready to fail?

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I am constantly fighting a lot of mental obstacles while trying to get anything out on paper (or on a screen in this case). I am very judgemental about what is written, even if it is just for me. I like my thoughts safe and tucked away in my mind, who would’ve guessed. Well, turns out if my thoughts end up on paper it would make them real, and scary. This is because being honest and real on paper truly reveals all of my insecurities and lays them out in front of me.. my biggest one being my intelligence. I’ve held onto trying to seem smart ever since I felt doubted for my intelligence in 5th grade after transferring schools.

I came from a private school and felt so clueless about how to navigate a public school setting. I felt I lost not only my common sense but my book smarts, as I studied slightly different things than my peers. I did not know what they were calling out in class and I felt it hard to follow along with everyone else. Though I was just a child, I remember being suddenly so aware about how I present myself. I was self conscious. I felt constantly belittled by my teachers and peers, a feeling that is hard to forget. Fast forward to now and I’ve almost killed myself defending what I felt like was my “intelligence” by fighting for every little thing in my academic/ professional life, even things that are out of my control.

Though I may be sounding too vague, I still hope someone knows what I am talking about. Anyways, the roots of the thoughts going through my mind lately is how difficult it is to write out the things that are going on in my life that don’t involve actions or explicit words. I am constantly figuring out a way to understand and bring words to the pauses between sentences occurring not only within myself but between other people. That communication is an aspect in all human beings that we do almost reflexively. I have realized how these reflexive tendencies manifest and show themselves communicate not only our own humanness but it also reflects how society shapes the mind. Maybe I am weird for staring at people in conversation and noticing these patterns among people. But, I can’t not notice it and honestly I need to write about it before I explode as it makes me fucking uncomfortable most of the time (in different ways).

Don’t you just get that feeling sometimes where you just want to scream about the “elephant in the room” during a conversation. A conversation where everything is supposed to be subtle but you just want to address the obvious. What are the situations that it is appropriate to let these nonverbal cues go, leave them as nonverbal, or address them? Does the communication that lies between sentences have to govern that much of our daily interactions? I would personally like to address them head on all the time but I also understand not everyone rolls like that.

Through all this thinking and going back and forth between why I stop myself from writing, to my childhood, to why I can’t come up with the words to write is that I need practice. I have been hard on myself every day since 5th grade but when is it going to stop? I have to start something to be good at it, or to fail, or to realize I love it, or I hate it…. I have to try. I do get overwhelmed often and I feel like I have to be perfect at everything, but I am trying to accept that I will be fine without being perfect. So I am going to try and just write what I want.. not things filtered so heavily by my ego.

Sincerely,

Finally ready to fail?? I think….

mental health

I wear the mask

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“We wear the mask that grins and lies… With torn and bleeding hearts we smile.”

Paul Laurence Dunbar

This powerful quote is from the poem ” We wear the mask.” Reading this really made me look deeper into not only my mental health and the mental health themes that affect my black community. As I looked deeper into these issue, I read some valuable information about mental health as it pertains to a specific community. First I breezed through the normal signs and symptoms of depression like “feeling sad or ‘blue'”… Then I went through a scenario of a person who keeps getting up every morning feeling like they just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. They forget to pack lunch the night before, they leave their coffee at home, they show up to a meeting late, and feeling all over the place. They then have a hard time calming down after the morning craziness but instead of going for an outdoor walk or taking a break to listen to music, etc., they lie their head on their desk in total exhaustion with their mind still racing with thoughts. They seem to have another series of unfortunate events that afternoon and the whole thing starts back up again the next day….

To be honest, this scenario felt like a normal day in my life growing up. Things were always extra chaotic and sometimes I felt like I could not catch a breath. Life has no breaths and it seemed like it was not supposed to have fun parts, like having to study or practice on the little free time I had outside of school to be “better” than everyone else. But this piece of literature was pointing out that this is a scenario where you should start to seek professional help before things get worse (or just talk to someone about what you are going through instead of closing yourself off). I could not believe that I always thought running around with your head cut off was the way life works. That I always had to be working and I could never take that time for myself. I underestimated how much of a person I am… What I was doing in the past wasn’t living, it was just survival.

This book also pointed out how differently people need to approach the black community about mental health problems due to the several layers encompassing this essential part of ourselves. Our mental health is something we have trained ourselves to hide and to add these layers on because we used to need it to survive. Now that all of these layers are on and have been for so long, it has become difficult to pull them back to let us breath and grow… because all these layers are doing now is holding us back.

None of this means we are weak but we are just misunderstood and we need more research on us. All of this made me think how I need to do everything in my power to stand up for my peers in the field of research. Tools are out there for us, we just have to make sure we are using the right ones. I think working on myself has revealed that my feelings have stems so deeper than I have ever imagined.

Though I am reading, learning, taking medication, and regularly seeing a therapist, I feel like I am stuck. I keep going through the same scenarios over again that were obviously traumatic throughout my life, and I’ve dissected them, and tried my best to re-write them. My self confidence is still continually improving but I still feel this need to always wear this mask when I don’t want to. I feel like a figurative mask is not all bad in daily life. I don’t want to curse out a random person in the grocery store, but it is not needed for times when I need to clearly communicate my feelings.

I don’t know why I always worry about someone else’s happiness over my own, but just a couple of days ago I about had it. Work has been its usual stressful but I had my management say and do things to me that I was not happy with at all. This went back all the way to my two week medical leave I took three months ago because of my depression and when I returned I was completely ignored by them. My seat was given away along (I was moved to a different floor) with my entire job duties and they claimed they were not trying to isolate me. I have been persistently asking management to meet with me to discuss but it had been pushed off for those months until HR got involved. The meeting happened the other day and I was told that I need to move past this problem.

Now, what does all that have to do with wearing a mask? I feel because I constantly wearing this happy face mask whenever I’m at work even if I am saying I disagree with something, I am being perceived as if everything is fine… even when shit was on fire. I always talk in therapy about how I am getting better at voicing to other people how I feel but I realized I also need to work on how I say it. And I also feel it is not wrong to express my feelings in a respectful manner without a smile on my face. My worst fears came true when my manager told me to move past the problem and to be honest I cried for a good 30 minutes after that meeting but I am still here and I am still alive. This invisible standard of “strength” I told myself to upkeep is doing nothing but tearing me down. Constantly wearing a smile on my face does not define who I am at my core. I am an emotional being and that is okay. We are all emotional beings and if I can have empathy for others why wouldn’t someone do the same for me?

This is going to be a long and tough thought to manage but I know it is possible.

mental health, Poems

Done staying silent

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I spent most of my life, holding all of my thoughts and feelings in. Thinking that I was what was wrong with the world. The psychic damage passed down through my grandparents and then my parents, left a gaping hole in my soul. They did not know how to help with mine because they had covered theirs up with a thin piece of cloth. They did not want to dive too deep into mine, as they were afraid of ripping open their old wounds. I looked around at all the paler faces around me. Their chests had no sign of emptiness. They were shielded from this pain, due to ignorance passed down from their grandparents and then their parents. Because ignorance is bliss right?

Because they had no hole in their chest like me, I wanted so badly to be like them. They seemed to admire me when I did so. My chest slowly began to get covered up by a thin cloth and for a while I felt okay. Then, I opened my eyes and recognized the invisible poison building up within me and around me. I panicked, moved too quickly, and ripped my cloth. Everything that was there before leaked back out again, except there was more. It consumed me. I was drowning.

I felt myself give up and sink to the bottom of the hole, heavy with my thoughts. I felt as if I would never be good enough, smart enough, pretty enough… Why bother trying to swim to the top, I asked. I will never measure up to everyone’s standards. Swimming to the top was too hard and I am too heavy. I felt the weight of my words on my back, holding me down.

In those deep waters, I saw a blurry reflection from above the water. She looked like me. She looked like a goddess with her dark brown skin and thick black hair. She was reaching a hand out. She looked so beautiful and at peace even from so far away. I could feel myself wanting to be up there with her but realized my thoughts were still holding me back. I started tugging at my weights. I twisted and turned in the water, fighting with myself. I started screaming, “I like who I am! I am worthy! I belong to myself! I owe it to myself! I have no limits!” The weights broke off and I began to swim to the surface. In the back of my mind I thought about how easy it would be to just sink to the bottom again, but then I remembered how agonizing it was, and swam even faster.

As I breached the surface, I was met by the warm sun. I floated on top of the water and pondered to myself. How did I get to that point? That hole was too deep to be caused by just my own pain? Who else helped to dig that hole?

All of a sudden, I realize the hole I had once been sinking in, has closed up. I am lying in shallow water. I sit up and hug my knees to my chest. I rest my cheek on my wet thigh. I am grateful to have made it out. I never figured out where the woman I saw in the water went, but I knew I had to share what has happened so no one else would be stuck in that place again.

mental health

Kondo-ing the mind

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You can run from your emotions and let them catch you or you can build the container you want it to live in

To not run from your emotions does not mean fighting them, but articulating your thoughts and emotions. Conversing with them. Not letting them take over your mind with their lies. Facing the reality of the situation, accepting it, and conquering it. This is a practice that I know will take a lifetime to master, but I am determined to build a beautiful container for all of my seemingly scary emotions, thoughts, and feelings instead of running from them. They can’t hurt me unless I let them. They are not me, but a product of me. I just need to handle them as they arrive and clean up my mind before it turns into a bigger problem.

mental health

Living in a fantasy

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I am done wishing my life away or wishing to know the future of my life. I am done wishing I was white or had straight hair. I am done wishing I got perfect grades, went to X college, and did X-Y-Z after college. I am done wishing I did not have a toxic relationship with my parents. I am done wishing my mother wasn’t a narcissist or my dad was not an alcoholic. For the first time in a while, I realized how much I was living in a fantasy world in my head. A world where I was perfect and I made everyone around me happy. I have been entertaining these fantasies since high school. It makes me feel good as I got my hit of dopamine thinking about these perfect worlds. But this is not reality.

The reality is I am an imperfect person living in an imperfect world. None of that is my fault and I should not blame myself for not navigating it perfectly. I needed to forgive myself. I forgave myself. I make up excuses and I am very forgiving of other people, understanding that life is messy and these small mistakes are okay… But for me, if I do not have a perfect morning routine, I beat myself up for the rest of the day. Or if I wake up later than I am supposed to. There is no use in ruminating about it, I forgive myself, and I am not going to let it control me for the rest of the day.

The intense shame and guilt I feel when I am making these “mistakes” are just feelings brought on by my upbringing and personal experiences. It does not mean I am a terrible person or I will never get anything right… this was just how I was treated in similar situations growing up, but I can change that thought pattern. I can break the cycle.

I am allowing myself to sense my feelings without resistance. Feel what they are doing to my body. And start taking note. I am getting curious about how my body responds to my thoughts, and if it is something I want to continue doing. Because after all, it is my body and I have a choice on how I act in it. I know I can make the choices I want throughout the day and get to where I need to be if I listen to my body and listen to my thoughts.

I want to start relying on myself. This does not mean I am going to refuse help when I need it, but relying on myself to cultivate the life I want. I am not going to rely on someone to make me more fit, or smart, or happy. Other people might provide me with the tools but ultimately it is up to me to pick and choose what I want, and I will do so consciously and willingly.

I want to bring positive thoughts to the forefront of my brain to tell those negative ones to fuck off. I want to put myself and my loved ones first. Before objects, money, jobs, etc. Also, I don’t expect to live a perfect life free of problems, but I want to live life on my own terms with problems that I am grateful for.

I’ve been living in a fantasy for too long. It started as childhood dreams but now it is holding me back. I am grateful for my current life and wouldn’t want to change a thing.

mental health

Showing up for myself

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For most of my life I was taught to not feel my feelings, to not express my feelings, and to not act on my feelings… probably like most of us. It was seen ideal if I stayed a cool “neutral.” If I was too excited or happy I was told by my elders to calm down, and if I was feeling sad and expressed sad I was told to cry in private or just to not even start crying. These regrettable actions were not just my parent’s wrongdoings but everyone around them who also taught them this as they were growing up. What I do think is strange that I don’t think anyone on this planet has benefited from trying to suppress their feelings. So I really do not understand why it is seen as okay to choose or teach anyone to ignore something that makes us fundamentally human.

For me, my feelings, such as shame and my self-judgement, and my mostly destructive behaviors go hand in hand. Whether they were behaviors where it is obvious how I deliberately self sabotaged myself or if they are the little every day decisions that I do to try and block out my seemingly harmful thoughts, my thoughts and feelings always seemed to control my actions. Because of this self-taught behavior, I thought I had to push down my feelings to act like a normal person in society. It took me years to find out that my feelings were like a beach ball in a swimming pool.. and the harder I tried to push them down, the faster and stronger they come up.

So all of these thoughts started making their way up again because I am facing a long-term bad habit of mine, being late. Now, the reason I want to change this is because not only is it something that I do not like about myself, it is something that I despised in other people… making me hate myself even more if I was late. My mother and several others in my family have this problem of being severely late everyday, like 2 to 3 hours late. My mom has forgotten me places as a kid or has been hours late picking me up from school. It drove me insane. I always get to a point where I am better at being on time for things like work, school, and social events, but I always fall off the wagon.

This morning as I woke up at 8:30am when I told myself the night before (as I do several nights) that I am going to wake up at 6am to meditate, do yoga, go for a morning run, save the entire world and make it to work before 8….I finally realized that I can’t possible do all of these things I tell myself, it is just not reality. I am just over these methods I have been trying to get myself to get up and out the door earlier. Just yelling at myself to just wake up earlier and setting an alarm was not working. Even going to bed earlier was not giving me the motivation to get up and start moving. But this was what I was taught my entire life. I should just tell myself to do something and do it right? I should’ve known even simple things like waking up earlier would take a different approach.

Well firstly, I started to admit that shaming myself into doing something is not motivating. Screaming at myself to just wake up earlier is not going to make me feel happy to wake up the next morning. All of these choices I am making are for myself, so I should take it at a pace that seems comfortable to me and not beat myself up for not going from 0-100. I realized I needed to take smaller steps in the direction I wanted to go. I needed to start actually relying on myself. I needed to be ready to fail but to not give up or criticize myself. I needed to realize that my life is changed by small consistent efforts. I did not become a vegetarian overnight or a runner overnight. I need to remind myself that I am capable of so much and every small step in the right direction will move me forward to the life I want. I also need to see that my brain is lying to me by telling me this should be easy and I should just get over it when really everything in life is just hard. Waking up early and consistently showing up for myself and no one else is hard. Building up my self esteem is hard. Building up that trust in myself is also hard. Basically I realized building up the relationship I need and want for myself is a lot of work and I should not be ashamed of my struggle. I want to fully embrace the struggle.

So how on earth am I actually going to change this habit of mine. Well the first thing I am going to do is separate myself from the habit. Just because I show up late sometimes does not make me any less smart or less of value than any other person. Just because I showed up late to two events in a row does not mean I am going to never be able to be on time in my entire life. It is not going to make me the person that is always late forever. It will take a consistent habit rebuild the trust in other people I may have been late for in the past, but change is always doable. I have already gotten how my past has influenced my opinions about lateness, but they are just opinions. I don’t have to succumb to those harsh thoughts about myself and I know I have the ability to change.

I am going to try waking up at my preferred time, let’s say 6:30am. And just getting out of bed. Even if that is laying on the floor, I think that will be my next step. I don’t even want to think about how I should be doing a thousand things because I know that will make me just not want to crawl right into bed. That is going to be my first goal to get myself out of this habit long-term. I want to be intentional with my actions and not let them be controlled by deep, repressed feelings such as anger, shame, or guilt. This is a simple example but I am hoping by tackling this seemingly small challenge first, it will launch me into forming more habits I want in my life. Because I am worth it.