Being a young grown-up is hard. Society expects you to work toward achieving myriad family, education, career, and financial goals - all at the same time. I've struggled for years to devise a system that allows me to get through the day, let alone work toward these longterm goals. After spending a painful amount of… Continue reading +10 Adulting Points

For the past three years, I've been experiencing dissociative episodes. These are periods of minutes to hours where my I claw my way through a set of unpleasant mental and physical symptoms that occur simultaneously. At its root, this is most likely a psychological phenomenon not unlike post-traumatic stress disorder: because I'm been traumatized before,… Continue reading Why I Dissociate

"I always run into the same issue when I fall down the rabbit hole of learning about schizophrenia: it scares the living hell out of me.
More than any other reason, that's because I can relate so thoroughly to its symptoms."

There are a lot of subtleties involved in growing up with a psychiatric illness that don't often get talked about. The news covers cases of severe psychosis when a violently ill person ends up in jail; the most apparent symptoms of depression (the "common cold" of mental illness) are gathering more and more attention on… Continue reading Miss Misery Mission Statement: Shatter the silence around mental illness.

When I was 12 or 13, I was misdiagnosed with bipolar II disorder. That label followed me through all of middle and high school. It determined which meds I was put on, and just as importantly, which meds I wasn't put on. It factored heavily into how my talk therapists treated me. And, especially because I was… Continue reading Your Treatment Is More Important Than Your Doctor’s Ego

I recently had a heartbreaking conversation about the American federal food assistance program. It was asserted to me quite confidently that when someone who “actually earned their money” is in line behind a poor person at the grocery store, they shouldn’t have to wait for the cashier to count out each individual food stamp with… Continue reading No, Being Too Poor to Eat Is Not a Privilege

The other night, my boyfriend and I had an interesting conversation about the best ways to escape from a bout of depression. He told me that he usually has to make changes to his environment to improve his mood when it's sliding downhill, because his problems tend to stem from his surroundings. "When I'm honest… Continue reading Internal Vs. External Depression