You can do this. One day at a time. You get up, you get out of bed, you walk to the next room. You do what you have to do. You brush your teeth. You look in the mirror. You tell yourself what you need to get by. You are not alone. So many of us are struggling with things that threaten to take us down. Promises to tear us apart. Hangs over our heads with a thick sense of dread. It's okay, you got this. I don't know what you are going through. I don't know your demons. I haven't the faintest idea what issues are bearing down in your direction but I do know that nothing is impossible. There is ..read more

  I wanted to take a moment and talk about how we have to continue to go on. We have to continue to fight and be positive. We have to continue to believe that we are worthy, strong, and brave. A bravery that comes with having to get out of bed in the morning and face yourself in the morning. We have to know our worth. We have to hang on to the positive things in life. We have to be supportive of one another. We are worth so much more than we think we are. To give up is to let mental illness win. To think that we are only our diagnosis is to take away our sense of self. We have mental il ..read more

    I'm doing new things and I am scared. I'm scared of not being good enough, scared of the struggle, and scared of failure. I am terrified of not being able to do new things and yet, everyday I am doing them. I might not always get through the new thing I am trying but I have been working really hard to try.     This year, I have been taking some risks I would have never done before.  I am not going to lie, I am worried about not being able to do some of these things but I having nothing to lose. If you think about it, if I let my fear take over my life I am in the ..read more

We the walking wounded, the broken, the unhinged....we the forgotten, misunderstood, the ignored....we the sufferers, we are so much more than we give ourselves credit for. We are human and as such are certainly not perfect and yet we blame ourselves for not being exactly that. We degrade ourselves for having mental illness, for our issues, and for the things we can not do. We struggle to revel in what we can do, as if it weren't good enough. I am unable to work because of my mental illness but instead of beating myself up over it I choose to look at the things I am doing. I am still capable ..read more

XXX ....Warning Possible Eating Disorder and Self Harm Triggers....XXX      I don't know how to be healthy. How to grieve healthily. How to live a healthy lifestyle... I have no experience with letting go in healthy way.     I was never taught what healthy looks like.    My whole life has been surrounded by mental illness, overcoming obstacles, tearing down walls, building bridges that lead nowhere, and hurting myself.    I never cut myself or used razor blades for my pain. I starved myself. I binge ate until I was so full I wanted to vomit ..read more

Dear Katie Hopkins, In response to your article here, I would like to enlighten you a tad bit.      I am one in four.        The fact that I am willing to publicly say that I suffer from a mental illness is in huge amount to the people that have come before me. People that were braver than I am. People that even though they knew they would be ostracized and persecuted, still refused to be kept silent.          You see, stigma has always been an issue for us. An issue that has before now, gotten us locked us away in asylums, h ..read more

    My Grandmother was also a severe OCD sufferer. She was proud of my blog. She wanted me to keep going, to keep fighting, to keep reaching out to people. She believed in me, always. Since childhood when she would say goodbye to me, she would say to me to be a good girl. I have always responded with,"always". It was our thing and since she is no longer walking beside me here on earth I want to dedicate my blog to her. She believed that we should never live our lives in silence and fear. That we should always look to the light. That we should look out for each other and so because of ..read more

I have learned to hate lilies. The smell of them will always take me back to a small half darkened room in tiny nowhere Texas where my grandmother lay, her face puffy in death. A small room we drove fifteen hours,one way, to sit in and look at the one person in this world that made me a better person. I sat there in silence trying to understand how the world could go on when someone so wonderful had ceased to be with us any longer. How can people smile and go about their days? How does one prepare for this strange anomaly? That the world for some can be completely shattered and yet for the re ..read more

They are turning the machines off tomorrow, and I can not breathe. My heart aches. I wish I could be there to hold her hand. To kiss her cheek one last time. To whisper in her ear. As it is, I called and they held the phone to her ear and I professed my love, my thankfulness of her being in my life, I told her over and over again how much she means to me. They said she nodded and teared up. I did not cry to her because I did not want her to hear my fear. My overwhelming sense of loss. I did not want her to know how afraid I am to live the rest of my life without ever hearing her voice again ..read more

    If given the option to be willfully ignorant or willfully indigent, I choose to be willfully defiant.    I am willful. I am one intrusive thought away from becoming the hillbilly hermit, the troll underneath the bridge, or the creepy castle recluse in some antiquated children's book..... Sometimes, it takes pure will power to just live. I have to fight or this disorder will take over and I will be damned if I am going down without swinging.     Am I willful? You fucking bet I am. Willful, spiteful, ravenous.  with a stubbornness that burns stoic and i ..read more