The mental health issue

Are we out of the woods yet? 🌲

It’s 1989 (Taylor’s Version)’s world and we’re just living in it.

It’s a rainy-ish Sunday in Brooklyn, and here’s what you’ll find in this newsletter:

1. From the heart: probably best described as “a cry for help.” This is about depression & suicidal ideation, so take care of yourself and don’t read if it’ll hurt you to do so.

2. From the camera roll: I mean, it’s pictures, lol

3. From the page: writing my depression: the good, the bad, the triggering

Love y’all!

From the heart 💗

TW: depiction of depression, suicidal ideation

It feels like my insides are crumbling.

I feel like I’m being crushed by a huge weight on my chest, can’t breathe, can’t even think, all I can do is feel.

Feel the sorrow and the heaviness and the horror and the depression and the heartbreak. Feel the exhaustion that haunts me every second. Feel the overwhelm and the fraying tethers holding me on Earth. Feel out of control, spinning out entirely, wiping my face of tears and cracking a smile, making a joke, whipping out a distraction, so that you won’t see how devastated I am.

Maybe my perception is wrong. Maybe you do know how devastated I am, because I’m not good at faking it. I like to think I’m good at faking it, but you’d know better than I.

But that’s not the point. The point is I’m fracturing. Everything is so much, and I don’t know how to handle any of it, much less all of it. I feel like I’m being eroded from the outside in and from the inside out. Buffeted by heavy winds and salt water and every little piece of me is slowly disappearing.

I’m desperate for help and at the same time so aware that no one can save me.

Every day I wake up and a heaviness settles on my shoulders and I make my coffee and a pit grows in my stomach and I sit on the couch to read my newsletters and there’s a yawning in my chest, a black hole swirling and threatening to suck me in. I wake up okay and that lasts for about 30 seconds until my consciousness catches up to my brain and reminds me that life fucking sucks, man.

By the time I’ve finished my coffee I’ve given up for the day. Every ounce of anything I do after that — whether it’s reading a book, writing, laughing with a friend — is wrung out of a depleting resource pool. The well is empty and I don’t know how to refill it.

Like I genuinely don’t know how. Reading? I’ve been doing that. Watching TV/movies? That takes more energy than it gives me. Hanging out with friends? There comes to a limit to how much I can ask of those around me. Writing? I’m trying.

God. I sound so pathetic. I’m not going to delete any of the above, though. Because I’m racing toward rock bottom and I’m terrified of what happens when I hit it, and maybe, just maybe, getting this off my chest and into your inbox will help me.

I’m so sorry to do this to you. To put my pain and heartbreak in your inbox and use you in this way. I’m so fucking sorry to need you. But while I’m asking things…if you see this, and you want to, can you just. Give me a reason to keep going. I want to collect them like Ariel’s forks and statues. I want to hoard them like a dragon. I want to feel connected and I don’t, right now.

From the camera roll 📸

From the page ✍️

I was going to write something different here, but after writing the “from the heart” section, I just felt like there’s nothing on my mind more than my mental health and why I write about it.

I’ve been writing about my mental health as long as I’ve had poor mental health. It started with journals and poems and, in college, grew to op-eds in the student newspaper. Since then, I’ve written about it for almost every publication I’ve written for: from Bustle to VerywellMind to a two-part series I wrote for OC87 Recovery Diaries in 2016. I have written mental illness into my novels, too. And I write about it in this newsletter.

There have been themes throughout my years of writing about depression and mental illness. For much of college and the immediate years after, I had a catchphrase that showed up in every poem: I am a zebra and my stripes are stained red. I’ve written about suicidality, self-harm, anxiety, depression, and just about every experience I’ve had with mental health.

It’s almost a compulsion, to write about it. And I want to know why.

There are benefits to writing about it, of course. There’s a sense of relief, like lancing a wound, that comes from letting it all out. As someone with a history of self-harm, I’ve often described the act of hurting myself as that of removing the lid from a pot of boiling water. The release it offers turns my emotions from a boil to a simmer. Writing about it has a similar effect, with the benefit of not leading to literal scars and physical harm.

Writing about my mental health helps me process. It gives words to the feelings swirling around inside me. I’ve also always felt like my writing was a natural extension of my extroversion; I crave connection with people, all the time, all the people, and writing is a way to translate what’s in my head to others. Because I’m always writing with the intent to share, whether with just my therapist or with anyone who’ll read.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if there are drawbacks. If writing about it is keeping me from escaping it. If writing about it is triggering or traumatizing to others1.

Ultimately, though, I do think the benefits outweigh the dangers. The benefits to me, yes, but also the benefits of hearing from others who relate to my words and have found comfort in them2. So I guess all this to say: I’m gonna keep writing about it. And I hope you, too, will write about what’s on your heart — if it helps you.

Alla prossima 👋

Let’s take a break from my own mental health and speak about what’s going on in the world. There’s still a genocide happening in Gaza. This weekend, communications went down and Palestinians in Gaza were bombed all through a blackout.

The US is supporting these actions, in words and actions. I urge you to contact your Congress people and the president and demand a ceasefire and a cessation of sending money and weapons to Israel. A super easy way to do so is by going to this link for emails and this one for phone calls.

Sending love to all of you. Take care of yourselves.