Dancing Through Anxiety

With 12 days left until Christmas it's officially crunch time. If you have someone in your life who didn't make a present wish list you may be struggling to think of something they would like. I decided to make a holiday gift guide comprising of gifts I think someone who is fighting a mental illness may enjoy (or anyone else honestly). I know that finding the perfect gift for someone is my favorite part of the holiday season so, hopefully these ideas can inspire you and help check names off of your list! Books - Sometimes the best thing to do on a tough day is curl up with a good book and escape reality for a little bit. For anyone in your life who is struggling I highly recommend a book by Jenny Lawson. If you're just looking for a good book in general I would check out Kate Morton's books or A Southern Haunting Book Series. You can find book one  here  on Amazon.  Adult Coloring Books - These are honestly so stress relieving. It may seem silly at first sitti...

Wow I don't know about for you but for me it feels like FOREVER since I have posted on my blog! I super apologize! I was on vacation the week of Thanksgiving enjoying time with family and then after I came back I took a bit of a mental vacation to help ensure that I wouldn't fall into a post-vacation depression. So much has been going on these past couple weeks and still is, especially with Christmas coming up. I've had good days and bad days and everything in between but I feel like I'm overall in a pretty good place and have been making continuous forward progress. That's what I wanted to share today: two big things that have happened to me over this time that have really helped me understand just how far I have come and that my hard work is worth it. I have been working on both of these things since I started therapy a year and a half ago. You read that right, a YEAR AND A HALF ago and I'm just starting to fully understand and see those concepts come to li...

From the very beginning of my official diagnosis of anxiety, along with my other issues, I've always said the hardest thing is knowing that I'm the problem and the solution, but not knowing how to fix it. It's such a defeating feeling knowing that everything you need to overcome an issue lies within you, but still not being able to get better. Why am I stopping myself from being okay? Why am I self-sabotaging and telling myself I can't do something that I know I can? Obviously, over time I've learned that I'm not consciously telling myself to not be okay, but that's what my brain tells me. I have this image in my mind that it should be as easy as snapping my fingers to find the solution to my anxiety. I know I know, you can laugh with me on that one, because I know there is not a solution to my anxiety, it's more learning how to live with my anxiety and dance with it, creating a relationship. During my therapy session on Monday, we realized that I...

Happy November friends! November officially starts the holiday season in my mind and this is one of my favorite times of year. Between Thanksgiving, Christmas, and my birthday I enjoy getting to spend so much time with my loved ones and creating new memories. November especially is a time to give thanks for our lives and what makes them special. I'll be honest with you though most days it is very hard for me to focus on the positive and not the negative, but like I mentioned in my last post I am trying to focus more on what makes me happy and living in the moment. I think November and the holidays are the perfect time for this and am hoping the holiday spirit will help me be able to find the positive in all aspects of my life. I'm personally going to participate in the 30 days of thankfulness whether it's in my blog, social media, or personally in my journal. I really want to spend this month focusing on what I am grateful for and learning to appreciate even the smallest...

The other day I was talking to my therapist and she asked me something along the lines of what makes you happy? Later in the day, I was still thinking about this and thought maybe it would be a good topic to write about some day. That night, I started watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and in the first episode the main character changes her life after seeing an ad for butter that asks what makes you happy. After watching this, I knew it was a sign that this was a topic I needed to write about. So here we go. It's such a simple question, but at the same time it's such a difficult one to answer. As I think about it, I can think of many things that make me happy: reading, writing, hanging out with my family, friends and cat, cross-stitching, among other things. Then I started thinking, is this really what this question is asking? I mean all those things do make me happy, but it's an in-the-moment happiness that goes away when I finish the activity. Not that these things aren...

I know there are a lot of people like me out there who are still trying to process the tragic events that have recently taken place. From the Las Vegas shooting to the California fires, not to mention all the other things that aren’t directly affecting me, there is so much sadness in our world right now. I am really struggling with how to process it all, especially the shooting. I know we all process things differently but I’m still hoping we can help each other out, because I for one don’t even know where to start. How do you even begin to process something that doesn’t feel real? How do we process something that we will never understand why it happened? How do we process something we will never really have the answers for? How do we do it? I’ve been telling myself that I’ve been processing everything and handling it to the best of my ability, but honestly I’m beginning to think these are just empty thoughts. Thinking these things and fully feeling them with your body are two c...

I’m still, like so many others, trying to process what happened in Vegas last night. It seems so unreal that someone would want to hurt and kill so many innocent people. I was just hanging out on Sunday night when I opened my Facebook and saw a friend post that she was okay but she was next to someone who had been shot. I had no idea what was going on and quickly took to Twitter and turned on the news. I was immediately enveloped in fear, terror, and sickness. Why, why, why? How? I can’t grasp it. I stayed up for hours watching and reading coverage. My heart broke over and over again. It broke for everyone there who was part of this tragedy whether they were witnesses, injured, or tragically lost their lives. It broke for the loved ones of the concert goers. It broke for the city of Vegas. It broke for our world.  My heart also broke for the mental heath world trying to break the stigma. This was a terrorist attack plain and simple in my opinion. I write this blog proudly ...

So I'm not really a fan of the saying "trust your gut" because, well, my gut doesn't really seem like something with knowledge. I much prefer the saying "trust your instinct". If there is one thing that I have learned from therapy, and is something that I continuously have to work on, it's my ability to trust myself. Since I tend to have a lot of self-doubt, I also have a large inability to trust that my instinct is right. This is especially a problem when I'm going through a down period. When I'm suffering from my depression or my anxiety, part of coping is understanding that my brain is lying to me, but at the same time I need to take care of myself and trust my body enough to know what I need. How do I trust myself when I'm lying to myself at the same time? How do I know which thoughts are the positive helpful ones and which thoughts are the negative sabotaging ones? I tend to fight my instincts and what my body is telling me it needs...

I don't know about you, but when I am feeling down and anxious it is so incredibly easy to throw myself a pity party. It's not that I want to, it's just what my brain is telling me to do and I don't have the energy to fight it. My pity party always takes the form of "why me" statements. Just an example of a few: Why is this happening to me? Why do I need to stay home and work on myself while other people who have anxiety are leading normal lives? Why doesn't my progress always stay? Why do I have to fight the same battles more than once? These are just a few of the thousands of thoughts that cross my mind during one of my pity parties. They are so unhelpful, but yet when I'm already down I really struggle with fighting them. They consume me and then I start to believe that I am incapable of getting better and that I'm just incredibly unlucky. Wow, how annoying right? Even just writing this is embarrassing, because at this moment the...

When I first started out with my therapist I was pretty blind to what panic disorder was, well along with everything else I was going through. I simply thought that panic attacks were a part of having anxiety. I didn't realize there was a whole other being that made up panic disorder. To help me truly understand what it's like to have this, my therapist lead me to a site called Centre for Clinical Intervention . This site has different modules to help you understand your feelings and going through the panic disorder one was like a light bulb going off in my head. I highly encourage you to check out this website and go through the modules, especially if you are someone who suffers from these illnesses. In the meantime, though, if you don't have time to check out the modules for yourself I want to summarize some of my favorite takeaways to help better explain what living with panic disorder is really like. I think the most important thing to start off with is giving a ...

I feel like when I write my posts I tend to take on a positive tone even when I'm talking about my times of depression. I wanted to do something a little different and show you all what my thoughts are like when I'm really struggling. I don't want your pity or anything, I just want to show you how it is for me on my bad days. How depression is real, and how my thoughts turn negative when it's a rough day. I found some entries I wrote in my journal from some really bad days I have had and thought I would share them. I wanted to give an example of the true thoughts that run through my mind during the bad days to show you what people with a mental illness have to overcome on a daily basis. Just a disclaimer, this is really vulnerable and completely out of my comfort zone. I have an easy time sharing my progress and my good days or even reflecting back on my bad days but this is different. This is an inside look into exactly what my brain was going through during a de...

Wow it seems like forever since I've written. I was off enjoying a wonderful vacation with my mom, visiting a bunch of different family up in Northern California. Although I got back last week, I needed some time after my vacation to collect myself and try very hard not to slip in to a depression after all the energy I spent. I've been doing really good lately and making a ton of progress. I've been leaving the house more and even started driving again after a year and a half of only being able to handle being a passenger. The thing that is hardest for me in pretty much anything I do lately is keeping momentum. I'll be good for a few days and then will hit a rough patch and have a hard time getting back up on my feet. So to help work on getting to a place of regularity and continuous progress I've made some goals to help keep me on a positive path.   The hard thing for me is that I have so many things I want to work on and I want to fix all of them at once. One...

Or for us single people insert the word friends or family for boyfriend  Now that I've got my anxiety semi under wraps I've been focusing a lot more on my depression. This is also due to the fact that I can recognize now when I'm feeling depressed, whereas I couldn't do that in the past. The hardest thing though is that I don't want to focus on my depression. To focus on it is in my opinion to accept it and I have a very hard time accepting that I go through times of depression. I'm starting to realize though that I can't just push it away when it comes or try to ignore it, because then it is just going to become bigger and want more attention. Just like when learning how to deal with my anxiety, I had discovered I had to create a relationship with my anxiety instead of just getting rid of it, I need to do the same thing for my depression. To me though this is so much more difficult. With anxiety the worst that would happen is that I would have a ...

Having depression and anxiety is hard and it sucks. There are obvious reasons why mental illness is no fun, but one of the hardest things for me right now on my journey in fighting this is how selfish I have to be. I have to work on myself; because, whether I like it or not, I am the only one who can fight the monster that often takes residence in my head. I have to spend my days working on myself and checking in with myself to make sure I'm okay. Not only do I not get to do a majority of the stuff I want to do because my body has other plans, but I also don't really get to be the person I want to be. I used to pride myself on the kind of person I was, whether it was in the role of daughter, sister, friend, mentor, or so on. A relationship is two sided, full of give and take, where both people benefit. At this point in time, I feel like I'm failing at that. I feel like I'm a bad daughter, sister, friend, etc. I feel like I just take and don't have anything to...

From June 23rd to July 2nd I found myself in downtown Fresno for ten days of Miss California. It has honestly taken me this long to recover, and when I look back on that time my first thought is, "Wow! I survived," usually followed by, "How in the world did I do that?" Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun and I am so glad I went, but I would be lying if I said it was a walk in the park. I thought I would share with you all what it was like for me to be there and how I survived the ups and the downs.   When my mom and I arrived in Fresno on Friday, it was a lovely 109 degrees out and I immediately wondered what I got myself into. I knew it was going to be hot, but thinking about it being hot and then actually walking into this heat even for just five minutes is a completely different story. Shortly after we arrived in Fresno, we went on a trip to the local Target and this is the first obstacle I faced. We went to Target before we had the chance to unpack s...

Wow it has been a long time since I've written a post and I have really missed it these past couple of weeks! I have so much to share with you all especially about how I survived Miss California week but I'm just not ready. I would be lying if I said I wasn't struggling right now and I told you I would share the good and the bad with you so here's a glimpse into the bad. I feel pretty stuck right now. I'm struggling to see my worth. I'm struggling to convince myself I'm not pointless. I'm struggling to believe this is something I'll really learn to live with. I'm struggling to understand how I will ever manage to live the life I want to live. I'm struggling to see how I will ever again be the independent strong person I used to be. Im struggling to see how I will ever be a role model. I'm struggling to see how I'm not just wasting my life away and everyone else's time that has to deal with me. I feel it's important to not...

I have a mental illness. I am not defined by my mental illness but I definitely have one. If you've read any of my other blog posts you're probably thinking something along the lines of "are you really just figuring this out?". Obviously I know that anxiety, panic disorder, and depression are forms of mental illness. I even address them as my illnesses. The thing is I've never felt mentally ill until recently. When I was sick last week my defenses were down so of course my negative thoughts and inner critic were in full swing. This wasn't a new feeling for me but what was a new feeling is that I felt mentally ill. For the first time I could look at myself and think something isn't right in my mind right now. My therapist helped explain it to me so hopefully what she said will help me make more sense to you all. Previous times when I've been depressed or especially anxious I was so wrapped up in those feelings that they felt completely normal ...

So this past week, well starting Wednesday, I found myself sick once again or still. Honestly I don't even know anymore, all I know is that I was weak, felt bad, and spent most of my days sleeping. When I get sick my anxiety tends to come out to play and it usually likes to bring it's friend depression. I will sit there and throw myself a pity party about why am I sick again? Why can't I just have one thing go my way? Blah, blah, blah. I'm not the funnest person to be around, but at the same time I'm realizing that this is a time to re-set my motivation for when I am healthy again to help prove to myself that I am stronger than I think. I keep a quote journal for when times get tough that I can read through and have little reminders that where I'm at is temporary and I can get through this. When I'm in a really bad place I'll even have someone else read the quotes to me because I tend to not believe anything I tell myself and it has actually been really...