I’ve been taking more baths lately. That can read as applaudable levels of self-care, but personally it’s actually one of my biggest tells. Taking a bath for me has always been calming, but when I’m doing it daily I know it’s a response to a hard season.
Baths become my own version of time out.
Read MoreI’d seen The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron on bookshelves for years, but had never picked it up. To be honest, I only picked it up in January because it was the main read of a class I had signed up for through Literary Arts. Sifting through their website a few months ago, I was drawn to the course because it said it was dedicated to helping students cultivate a writing habit, which is something I felt I was missing.
I could have never imagined what the first six weeks of the class - and of working through The Artist’s Way - would actually entail. True to its name, it is a recovery workbook and it weaves into more than just your creative life. I still have six weeks to go in the program, but I have already felt such a shift in my own process.
Read MoreJanuary 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.
Read MoreOur puppy struggles with anxiety. I struggle with a lot of puppy blues as a result.
Back in November is when we first had the “official” conversation with our puppy’s vet. Our biggest comment to her was honestly that we just wanted our pup to feel safer and more excited moving through life. Back then everything from a walk to a car ride felt like we were triggering his trembles and shakes. Leaving him alone hasn’t been an option for us since we got him and his stage-5 clinging makes it hard for us to work effectively at home. We knew that nothing would change over night, but we wanted to be on a better path.
Read MoreI’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?
Read MoreEvery year I approach the holiday season with trepidation. I have this feeling that settles in like I have been here before and have never been here at all. Mostly because each holiday season is different. Yearly my mental health toolkit acquires more tools on how I can cope with the month of December, but it’s any one’s guess if the old tools will work.
The one hack that has never failed me during the winter holidays, death anniversaries, or other hard grief day is this — make plans you can break.
Read MoreThe first time I noticed that “my holidays” were different from “the holidays” or “their holidays” was May 2003. It was my first Mother’s Day without my mom. In class, we were given the assignment to create Mother’s Day cards to give our moms that weekend. My mom’s death was fresh, she’d been gone 4 months at that point, and saying, “Hey, I don’t think I can do that,” didn’t fit into my 10-year-old lexicon, so I did it.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreDuring 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.
Read MoreWhen someone dies, you learn to fill gaps quickly. You learn to put something, anything, in the place of where that person was. It’s like a plug that fills the bathtub up — the water rising is warm and wonderful at first, exactly what you need it to be, but after a while, when you’re sitting there long enough, it gets cold and it overflows and it becomes less of where you want to be.
That’s how I can best describe a good chunk of my life until now. I wanted and tried so badly to keep the tub from overflowing and to believe that I was enjoying the cold water because I’d filled it with my own persistence, but I couldn’t and I wasn’t. I was drowning in an adulthood I stepped into too soon. I was drowning in a career I constantly had to hustle for. I was brought under water time and time again by a city that made me anxious and a role as the “responsible” one that made it impossible to breathe life into who I am when I’m not serving someone else or something bigger than myself.
Read MoreOur decision to move to Portland happened in between seasons. The days were getting warmer in New York City and by the second our space was slowly losing square footage to breathe. I’ve written about it before, but even though I knew that leaving NYC for a bit was in our future, I didn’t think Portland or 2020 were the when and the where. This move took us by surprise, but it also set me straight.
I knew it the moment we touched down at PDX and I saw all the green. It felt refreshing and revitalizing. On our drive into downtown, the roads were lined with trees that were so much bigger than I will ever be. I visited Columbus, Ohio once and loved it because when I stood amidst pine trees I felt human. I felt the most myself I’d felt up until then. The last few days, it’s been like I’m revisiting that feeling and also like I’m learning to keep it. Where New York makes you strive to be the biggest, shiniest human to ever be encountered, Portland humbles you in understanding that while you’re meant to grow, it’s also true that there will always be a tree that’s bigger than you and that’s okay.
Read MoreBack at the beginning of the summer my MacBook Pro’s screen randomly broke. I was in the middle of working on something when the screen went black, but I could still hear the computer itself running. I felt the anxiety, frustration, and stress work its way up from my chest straight to my throat.
I broke down in tears as my boyfriend tried to figure out what was wrong. Ultimately, there were solutions in place that would make it possible for me to not miss a beat when it came to work or life. I knew this and still I could not undo the spiral I was already stepping into.
Read MoreChauncey Mozzarella became our roommate a little over three months ago. He’s a four-legged burst of energy. He’s got the longest tongue in the world (we’re still checking in with the Genius World Record on this) and the tiniest legs.
He came into our world in the middle of a pandemic, so by default he joined the “quarantine puppy” club. We’d been holding a space in our heart for a puppy for as long as we’ve been dating. Any time we thought about maybe getting one, we’d come back to the reality that we traveled a lot, more than what would make sense for a puppy. But in the long list of things that 2020 has changed, it nixed our travel schedules. We were suddenly home all the time. We had space, the means, and the time to take on bringing a puppy into the fold.
Read MoreIn normal times I would start this piece with a rundown on what to expect when you’re walking into your therapist’s office for the first time, but given it’s COVID-times, this is both a rundown of my experience going to therapy in-person for the first time and what I’ve learned about doing virtual therapy for the first time.
The biggest caveat I want to introduce early on is that I started therapy over six years ago. It’s been a while since I had a first session with a therapist, but I can still remember the nerves I felt while sitting in the waiting room. I was the first person I knew who was going to therapy as an adult and the only other point of reference I had was a horrible experience I’d sat through when I was 11 years old and coping with my mom’s death.
From conversations with friends and strangers, I’ve learned that the two biggest hurdles to actually starting therapy at the beginning are finding a therapist and actually getting to the first appointment.
Read MoreI’m reading this book right now that’s taking me to church every time I open it. I’m being asked to look (and I mean really look) at my life and how I grew up. I’m being challenged to relive bad days and respond to them differently than I did when I was a kid. Instead of avoidance as a way of survival, it’s like this book is screaming to me — “you can survive actually feeling now, don’t avoid it.”
I keep wanting to scream back, “Are you sure?” A world where surviving and feeling go hand-in-hand is foreign to me. The idea of feeling the range of feelings that both hard and good days bring to my door is more than I’ve ever asked myself to do. I was so scared to pick up this book because I wasn’t even sure I could survive reading it.
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