Gina Moffa is a grief therapist and someone who has navigated grief personally, too. After losing her mother, she realized there was more she wished she could have told patients who had navigated similar experiences.
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I’ve been off the pill for almost a full year (this October) and there are so many things I wish I would have known before coming off. Unfortunately, wellness and women’s health in general are such hard topics to find information about on the Internet. I read a really great article in the New York Times this week that outlined just how poorly the healthcare system treats women and ways that anyone (but especially those who are oftentimes mistreated by the healthcare system) can advocate for themselves more forcefully.
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Our mental health is impacted by our mental wellness routines. Whenever we overload our routines or fill them with things that don’t serve our current circumstances, we do more harm than good. Working in the wellness space I’ve realized that many people and brands push a more is more approach. I’ve been writing these wellness routine recap since January and over these few months have realized that the routines that serve me best are the most simple ones.
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Starting to explore my mental health years ago was a humbling experience. I was a novice. Yeah, I’d learned the alphabet in grade school and with it I was taught to piece together sentences around subjects like biology, history, and every day conversations, but I was never taught the alphabet or dictionary of words that I would need to describe the world that lived in my head. For a long time, it felt unfair. I had an entire experience I lived through daily and that impacted my world endlessly, but no way to tell others what it felt like or how much it actually shifted the trajectory of my day.
I had to learn to use colloquial words — elephant, chest, treadmill, alphabet soup — to build visuals in hopes someone would understand, in hopes someone would throw a life raft so I wouldn’t drown in the soup.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about my mental health as COVID variants (like the Delta variant) have increased over the last few weeks. My mental health has been easily triggered since our move and while some of the triggers are things I can’t control (like a COVID outbreak), there are others I can (mostly my routines).
Since I got my vaccine back in April I’ve been treading lightly with my own re-entry into “regular” life or society. A big part of this is that we moved just two months after getting our vaccines, so we’ve been knee deep in adjusting to life back on the east coast anyway. But, an even bigger part is that I just wasn’t ready to commit 100% to regular life. I felt skeptical of whether others were taking their responsibility towards their community seriously or whether people were just really fed up with being home and needed to be out at all costs. While I can’t pinpoint other people’s motivations or know their vaccine status, I can control my own personal decisions, how I move in the world, and what I expect of myself.
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It has been a while since I’ve worked on one of these and I’ll admit that it’s because my mental wellness routine went out the window with our move. Since April I’ve been pulled between feeling incredibly overwhelmed and encouraging myself to try my best. Some days were better than others. I know through it all I ended up having to work through a lot of grief and overwhelming feelings that came with moving back.
Since my life changed so much so did my mental wellness routines. Naturally I went from having a ton of time to dedicate to my routines to not having much at all. The last few months actually inspired what will be my first month long course (look out for more on IG!) which will focus on embracing minimalism in your mental wellness routine.
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I have been in therapy for the last 8 years. I go weekly, every Monday, and sit with her for 45-minutes. During some seasons of my life, I’ve texted her in the middle of the week for extra help or support because making it to the next Monday felt impossible. During other seasons of my life, Monday would come around and we’d talk about the happiest and most inconsequential moments of my life because that was all I had to report.
I’ve learned since starting that the reality with therapy is that not every session is an unpacking of wounds and not every session will be interesting. There will be many “boring” sessions where you’ll leave wondering if you should even still be in therapy. The feeling will feel similar to the times you’ve walked out from the hardest sessions and wondered if you should even be digging up those wounds.
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After a year or more of playing, living, and working where we lived, two things are true — we got better and worse at setting boundaries. We aced keeping to our bubbles and saying “no” to outings or day dates that could expose us to COVID. We got rusty though when it came to the blurry lines between work and life at home. I can admit I’ve struggled a ton with setting those boundaries for myself or respecting the boundaries my partner has set. So, I think we’re all do for a refresher course on boundary setting.
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I’ve never been more afraid to get results back from a test. Let’s just start there. I also didn’t decide until after I got my results back that I would share that I took a fertility test in the first place.
Because I know conversations around fertility can be layered and triggering, I want to share upfront where I’m coming from, so that you can close the tab if this isn’t for you.
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Are you overpacking your self-care routine? I don’t think we ask ourselves this question enough. I’m editing an interview I did with Rainesford Stauffer, author of An Ordinary Age, and it’s one of the main topics we discussed. The economy around personal development has become so fruitful that everyone from big brands to smaller influencers (like me) are conscious of how much money comes in and out of pushing products, or lifestyle choices, or a routine that honestly may not really make sense for your real life.
I’m incredibly aware that the lines between self-care and consumerism are overlapping more than they ever have. It’s prompted me to revisit how and what I share with my community. I choose to embrace a less is more approach in my own life because less is more manageable, more intentional, and less driven by the comparison game. I rotate what my “less” is regularly because I’m always trying new things and that’s the process I’ve chosen to share with you all.
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I think I’ve lived with anxiety my entire life. I can remember being 7 years old and telling my mom that I had a really bad stomach ache and didn’t want to get in the car. She thought I was just feeling physically off, but looking back I know now that my stomachache was a symptom to a larger reality. My anxiety manifests in my stomach, in the tension in my shoulders, and in a looming fear over most things in my life.
I wasn’t officially treated for anxiety until I was 21 years old and started therapy. My long-term care routine for my anxiety has up until now been talk therapy. It’s helped me so much to have a dedicated space where I can work through the ins and outs of how (and sometimes why) my anxiety manifests. I’ve written before that this last winter re-triggered a lot of dormant fears and anxious reactions. It has been a time when I’ve especially turned to the small ways I can help myself manage.
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January was one of the hardest months I’ve had in the last year. I am definitely hitting my COVID wall. All I could think about these past few weeks was how much I missed the old routines that were so mine a year ago and now are nonexistent. It hasn’t helped that the days in Portland are so short right now. At its worst the sun was rising close to 8am and setting by 4pm. The grey cloudy skies got old pretty quickly and I missed the sun, warmth, and just a visual reminder that life didn’t look like how I felt.
The strain I’ve felt on my mental health is something I’m working to relieve. As a result, a lot of my February mental wellness routine is catering to where I actually am versus where I wish I was (in sunny Mexico and feeling like life was great and COVID-free). While part of me is frustrated because I wish the same things would work all the time, the truth is that my routines have to iterate to respond effectively to my mental health.
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I started taking yoga classes back in 2019. I only ever took one per week and the level was ultra-beginner. I loved it. My goals when practicing those yoga classes weren’t (and still really aren’t) about acing it, but instead about learning what “practice” actually means.
A bit of that intention was lost during lock-down. Since lock-down started last March, I’ve turned to YWA videos on days when I needed something specific, whether it was to stretch or to simply feel calmer, but I had a hard time sticking to a regular practice. I’ve landed on it being a perfection thing for me, something I’m actively working on in therapy. I grew up always striving for perfection, but now that I’m settling into my late 20s, I’m especially craving different things than what that perfection has ever offered.
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I’ve had a lot of big conversations lately about the importance of showing the process, not just of the extreme hard moments, but also of the moments when you’re building so that the hard moments don’t hit as hard.
Whether you’re navigating your mental health or grief, it can get hard. Days that randomly surprise you with all the feels usually aren’t the same days when you’re objectively learning what makes you feel better. Who has the bandwidth for that when you’re just trying to survive?
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I was only 11 years old my first holiday season without my mom. As a result of my family and the culture they were raised in, there was no real space made to help guide me through those first holidays. When I was 21 years old and lost my grandma, I had a deeper understanding under my belt of what grief was and what it demanded of me.
During that first holiday season without her in 2014, I tried my best to find solace in places that made sense for me. I’ve always loved to find myself in books. Harry Potter is one of my favorite series for that exact reason - it was life-changing to me to see someone whose grief actually made them both more human and more magical all at once.
While the below reads aren’t necessarily the ones that guided me during my go arounds at the first holidays, it is the list I wish I had.
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The anxiety was sitting in my throat, in my stomach and in the back of my eyes. I was choking on the words that would speak into existence what I was thinking - I was anxious because I felt guilty for being happy. I had unshed tears that spoke to the stress of being pulled in opposite directions — I was overwhelmed by the anxiety and sad that I felt this way in the first place. The pit in my stomach, this spoke to the reality that old habits die hard and the strong ties between my anxiety and my body were still there for however faint they’d been recently.
I was a conglomeration of feelings. In my mind was a woman with a shield in front of her face trying her best to ward the worst of this off. I journaled. I spoke positive affirmations at every threat to my happiness. I sought out manageability in all that felt unmanageable. I did what I know helps and then I ran out of things to do.
So, I sat.
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During a Q+A a few weeks back someone asked me what the difference was between mental health and mental wellness.
In an effort to have something tangible to answer, I shared that mental health is something we all have (same as we do our physical health), but mental wellness comes down to intention, routines, and trial and error. Mental wellness is everything we know to do on a bad day to help us cope but it’s also the routines we discover through therapy, reading, or getting to know ourselves better.
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We’ve officially been in Portland for almost four weeks now. Since then we’ve managed to buy so much and forget even more. I was making macaroni and cheese during our second week here and spent most of it jotting down all the kitchen items I’d realized I didn’t have to make mac and cheese with.
Given that this move is the first time I’ve ever left my hometown of NYC, for me it’s made up of a lot of firsts. It’s been a unique experience that it’s all also happening under the umbrella of a global pandemic because not only do we want to create a space that screams “comfy home”, but we also want to make it functional as a workspace.
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