Category: mental health
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Starlight Elegy
For those we lost to pain and suffering, in all its forms.
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Salt & Shame
A personal story of surviving shame, reclaiming hope, and learning to meet myself with empathy.
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The Election
It’s been a while since I have written a blog post. Graduate school, a full time job, and a new puppy has made my life feel like an overstuffed PB&J sandwich, kind of a gross mess, but also pretty awesome at times! I also started a fertility journey and I am doing some baseline testing;…
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Anxiety
It’s been a bit of a rough week. Between my first class for graduate school (masters in counseling) and work blowing up, my anxiety has been through the roof. Anxiety manifests in strange ways for me. It seems to come in waves. I can manage to get sufficiently distracted by work or whatever but sometimes,…
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A Human Guide to Emotional Regulation
My therapist once said, ‘You seem to have strong feelings about having strong feelings.’ He wasn’t wrong. For a long time, I met emotions like anger or anxiety with frustration, as if feeling them meant I was broken. It felt like these emotions were beyond my control, happening unpredictably. I thought I was overreacting to…
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Chilled by the Past: A Winter Reflection
In 2018 I moved back to Kansas City from the South and I’d like to say KC gave us a warm welcome but it actually looked more like the featured photo on this post. Icy, snowy, and cold. Ok, I’ll admit, also a little magical. It was the first winter my husband experienced here in…
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Parts of the Inner World – Art & Comics
When I first started working with a therapist, I was struggling to explain my own inner dynamics. My feelings were in flux and I constantly felt like I was being split into several different perspectives and directions. I found out later, that there was a reason for this – I was suffering from dissociative identity…
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Dense Fog
There was a yellow ring glowing gently around my Alexa Dot this morning. It indicated a notification. Hazily, I slapped the screen as I tried to shake off my sleepiness. “Dense Fog Advisory”. I rubbed my eyes and chuckled, that sounds about right, I thought to myself. Over the past several days, I had been…
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In Memoriam
The is one of the first large scale pieces of artwork I created and it was created for my brother a few months after he died in February of 2021. This was the second collage of this kind I have created. The other I made while I was in college, shortly before I dropped out…
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Don’t be a jerk. Yes, DID is real.
This is aimed at mental health clinicians who doubt the existence of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Okay, the title of this post probably makes you want to slam this tab shut. I apologize, deep breathes. I’m angry. It feels like the 100th time I’ve come across a clinician in a community forum who denies the existence…