Hey, framily. Life is a lot right now, isn’t it? If you’re feeling that heaviness, you’re not alone. The news has been hard this week, especially for those of us with depression and anxiety and mental illness in our medical histories. People like me. People like a lot of my friends. Maybe even people like you….
Mental Health
Waving the White Flag: This Is Depression
I’ve been here before and I know what it feels like and so I feel more than capable of declaring it, of speaking truth to my experience. I’m depressed. I’m waving the white flag and calling this what it is. Depression, even temporarily and circumstantial, is, for me, a complete ass. I thought it was…
The Social Media Narrative of Motherhood: How the Internet Responds to Tragedy
[This post may be triggering for some readers. YMMV.] It seems the media has been rife with stories of mothers who have harmed or fatally wounded their children this week. The social media narrative surrounding it all is about to make me crazy. A mom in Texas shot her daughters during a “family meeting” because…
Why I Climb | Climb Out of the Darkness 2016
We’re FOUR DAYS AWAY from the 2016 Climb Out of the Darkness. Four days away from the third year in a row where I’ll join postpartum depression survivors, locally and globally, to raise awareness of an illness which will affect 1 in 7 moms. If you want to know why I climb, there’s little else…
Depression Is…
There’s a Facebook trending news story that was cached in my list that is absolutely breaking my heart. A mother in North Carolina reached the point of taking her own life and her children’s as well. The comments (I know, I know…don’t read them) are breaking my heart. On the one hand we have dozens and…
Doing Hard Things
I have always felt that the phrase “we can do hard things” is a little…cheesy. True, but with a side of gouda. But today I did a hard thing that I didn’t even know was going to be a hard thing until I was staring down the barrel of a panic attack as the situation…
#MeditateOnThis: Why Talking About Medication Matters
I was going to come here today and whine all about the migraine I had yesterday and how now I have a migraine hangover and/or I slept really, really wrong and/or going on a Twitter rampage last night somehow tweaked my neck. There is for real a lot of whining and I’m not saying that…
Climb Out of the Darkness 2015
Last year, on the longest day of the year, I climbed a mountain. Stone Mountain, to be exact. It wasn’t Everest, but it felt like it. I thought about quitting half way up. I wanted to turn around and walk back down the mountain, content to have gone as far as I could, not caring…
What Living With Anxiety Feels Like
I spent the end of last week on the verge of an anxiety attack. It wasn’t spectacular, in case you were curious. Anxiety is weird. It’s weird to live with. It’s weird to explain to others who haven’t experienced it. It’s even weird to explain to those who have because no two people experience anxiety…
Be The Light
Some of you know that one of my freelance jobs is as an entertainment news writer. By now you’ve probably heard that Robin Williams died yesterday. He took his own life following a serious and prolonged battle with depression. When my professional and personal worlds collide like this, it’s hard for me not to stand…