Finally Moving Forward

Finally Moving Forward

I haven't written anything for my blog since April, but I'm back after several long months for an update.

A lot has happened since March. I spent most of the spring in a deep depressive episode, with a few random days of mania thrown in there and let me tell you, it was ROUGH. I actually wrote a blog post in late April about a medication change I was going through but never actually published the post because I didn't feel good about it. I'll give you a quick run down and then move on to the main point of the post.

Back in March and April I was on the medication Effexor, and saying it didn't work for me would be an understatement. Most medicines have side effects, but I have never had a medication effect me the way that Effexor did. Normally medicines will make me manic (antidepressants), tired, foggy, and a lot of them cause weight gain. But boy oh boy Effexor was the worst medicine I think I've ever been on. It caused me to turn into a person I didn't recognize when I looked in the mirror. I was angry ALL the time. I don't remember a period during that month and a half I was taking it that I was at piece. I was in a constant state of annoyance, irritation, or full blown anger or hostility. Most of it was directed towards my family, but I also internalized some of that anger and I had a couple close calls with almost self harming. I did not hurt myself and am going strong towards my 1,000 days goal. It took me a full month to get myself off of Effexor. It took a very long time to get the drugs out of my system and go back to normal. By the beginning of May I was finally off the Effexor and back to "normal," my normal state of being constantly tired, unmotivated, and depressed. Getting out of bed and facing the day was hard, going to work caused me to have anxiety, and my OCD was starting to get more out of hand then ever before. So basically March-May sucked.

At the very end of May, I saw my psychiatrist and told her what some of my concerns were. I told her that I was tired of always being tired. I was tired of being miserable, I was tired of crying, and I just wanted to be able to get out of bed without having a minor panic attack every time I had to leave my room. She had been looking at her notes and told me she wasn't sure what she wanted to do about my meds. It was a good step that I was off the Effexor since that REALLY did not work for me. She noticed a trend though. I would complain that I was miserable and sad and felt like crap, so we would try an antidepressant, but that 9/10 times would result in me going into a pretty severe manic episode. For those who aren't familiar with bipolar or mania, it is horrible. I would argue that mania is worse than depression. You can't sleep, you can't sit still, you can't focus, you can't eat, and for me personally, I have more hallucinations than normal and feel like I'm slowly loosing my mind. So I'd go on an antidepressant and get manic, so to get rid of the mania I would stop the antidepressant but then end up back in a depressive episode. That had been going on for several months and I was getting very tired of all of the mood swings. 

So my doctor told me she didn't want to start an antidepressant because after trying a couple different versions, nothing was helping. I don't always have the best reactions to all mood stabilizers, so she wasn't sure if she wanted to try that route yet, but she came to the conclusion that there was a medicine she thought could help. She prescribed me Adderall. Yes, the ADHD medicine, and let me tell you it is amazing. I don't have ADHD so I wasn't sure at first why she wanted me to try it, but thought it had great potential to help me wake up and have an easier time getting out of bed as well as finding some motivation to do things that normally would be unbearable. 

I've been on Adderall for a month now and it has changed my life. It did everything my doctor thought it might and I feel amazing. I can't put into words accurately how I'm feeling. I feel like I'm my old self again, the version of myself who was able to enjoy life, do things to take care of myself, hang out with friends, and just be a happy, normal girl. I haven't felt this "normal" since freshman year of high school. 

Instead of sleeping until 5pm or later and only getting out of bed for dinner (which was 95% of the time the first and only meal I would eat every day), I'm getting out of bed hours earlier than I normally would, and when I wake up, I don't have to hit snooze 6 times and have a melt down. I'm able to just get up, but more importantly, I get out of bed feeling well rested and ready to face the day head on. I can't tell you the last time I woke up feeling refreshed and like I had gotten a good night's sleep. Not only am I sleeping better and waking up easier, but my motivation is through the roof. After taking an 8+ month hiatus from writing the fantasy novel I was working on, I've gone back and revisited it and added new chapters as well as rewriting and updating old chapters that were sub par. I also started reading again. The newest shadowhunters book from Cassandra Clare came out in April and I am making time to read it and it's amazing. Both the book itself and the fact that I'm able to read again. Another thing that the Adderall is helping is my work ability. I'm still not at the point I can hold down an "adult" job like some of my peers can, but that's okay. Right now I'm nannying for two amazing kids twice a week. I only see them 15 hours every week, but the medicine is making a world of a difference in dealing with them. My energy level is up and I'm able to keep up with them so much better, which is especially helpful when I have to leave my house at 6:30am on Thursdays and don't get home until closer to 4-4:30 in the afternoon. 

Adderall is doing so much to help me. It's hard to describe to most people how I feel. My life for the past 5+ years has been either mania or depression. This is the first time in close to 6 years I feel genuinely happy just existing and living my life. I used to feel temporary "happy" moments during manic episodes, but it usually was just a result of me being over productive, or going on shopping sprees that destroyed my bank account. But now I'm just happy. I am learning to love and accept myself again. I have dreams and goals that I'm reaching towards, and it is just the most incredible feeling in the world, it's hard to describe. 

I've decided that now that I have time and motivation, it's time to pull myself together in regards to personal health and self care. I recently reached out to a friend of mine who went to school to become an esthetician who helped me come up with a skin care routine that I'm hoping will help clear up my skin. Friends and family that live near by and see me every now and then will know that I have bad skin since middle school. Once I graduated high school and started college, I think my acne actually got worse. My constant stream of break outs plus weird pigmentation on my skin from acne scars has been a major source of self esteem issues over the past few years. But honestly for years I was too tired to make a proper skin care regimen and stick to it. I also didn't know what products would help my skin. I would just go to the store and look for anything that said "acne clearing" on it. Turns out the three products I had all had salicylic acid in them which was stripping my skin of natural oils, and that lead to my skin over producing oil which would clog my pores and cause more break outs. (At least that's what I understand to be happening). So now I have a multi step skin care routine that I can do every night to treat my skin as well as give me some time to focus on myself to make me look and feel better. I also have plans to go visit my hair dresser this weekend and get a hair trim as well as talk about how to care for my hair. That sounds silly, but for 3 years I had a pixie cut and didn't have to do pretty much anything to it. Now that it's almost shoulder length, I need to find some good products to take care of my hair and keep it healthy. (Plus I hear that you're not supposed to wash your hair every day but I don't know what's best for my hair type. I'm almost 22 and don't even know how to wash my hair, lol.)

So that's what has been happening over the past few months. I wanted to share with you all the good news that I'm doing well now, I'm happy and healthier now than I've been in years, and I have big plans for the future. Thank you everyone for your prayers and well wishes over the years. It took a long time, but I'm slowly making a lot of progress in growing up and moving forward into my adult life.

Thanks for reading!
-Megan

Let's Talk About Cognitive Distortion

Hi everyone! So this week I want to talk to you all about Cognitive Distortion.

Cognitive Distortion is basically where you think things are different than they actually are.

I was watching a video that sketch vlogger, Thomas Sanders, put out on youtube earlier this week. The basic premise of the video was he went to audition for a role in a theater production and forgot the words to his song. He’s feeling really negative and down about the whole situation when two parts of his personality pop up. This is a really cool thing that Thomas does in his videos every now an then. He will have parts of his personality like self-confidence, optimism, logic, and anxiety be featured as tangible characters with names. It’s definitely a different and very entertaining way to visualize someone “talking to themself.”

In this video, which I will link at the bottom of this post, Thomas and two parts of his personality, Anxiety, and Logic aka Logan, have a debate. It’s very similar to something you would see on the news or in student government, except Anxiety is a jerk and doesn’t follow the rules during the entire debate. The debate is titled, “The 2017 Emotionally Compromised Debate.”

Thomas, acting as the moderator, gives four examples during the debate and lets Anxiety and Logan discuss their opinions on the topics.

The first situation is where Thomas is texting someone he has a crush on and after a while, they stop responding. In his turn, Anxiety tells Thomas this is because the person hates him. Logan replies saying that Thomas is jumping to conclusions, which is also know as Inference Observation Conclusion. Thomas isn’t taking into account that the person has other things going on in their life. He needs to remember that the person could be doing something, maybe they are with someone at the moment, or even that their battery could have died.

Next, Thomas tells the audience that he had made a list of things to get done to be productive, but he never finished completing the list. Anxiety tells him that that means everything he accomplished was a waste because he couldn’t even finish everything he wanted to do. Logan steps in to tell Thomas that he is using Mental Filtering to ignore the positives. He got quite a few things done on his list, and while he may not have completed the whole list, he still got a lot done and was indeed productive.

The third example Thomas gives is something I’m sure a lot of us have done at one point. He is ordering coffee and the barista is very charming and may have been a little flirtatious. At the end of their conversation, the barista tells him to enjoy his coffee to which he replies, “You too.” He is reminded here by Logan, his logical side, that he is Magnifying the situation, or in other words, he is taking one small bad moment and making it seem worse than it actually was. Sure things like this are embarrassing, but it’s not as bad you think.

Finally, Thomas brings up that he recently made a video that underperformed compared to the majority of the videos he creates. Thomas is Overgeneralizing, Logan states, which is where you lets one event speak for any and all future events. Life has its highs and low moments, but every low is followed by a high.

            After the debate is over, Thomas uses what he learned to take the situation where he bombed his audition and rework it in his mind so that it isn’t all-bad. He realizes that while yes, he forgot the words at first, he was given a second chance and did really well. And maybe he won’t get the roll, but it’s not the end of his career.

            Overall the video was extremely well done in my opinion. I highly recommend taking 12 minutes to sit back and watch the video. It has some very good information and is pretty funny and enjoyable to watch.

            You can find the video here on his Youtube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-z0Q8Y9rLI

I hope you all had a great week, and for those of you who are on spring break now, enjoy your week off!

-Megan

2 Years Without Self-Harm

WARNING: This blog post is about my history with self-harm. This could be potentially triggering to some people, so this is just a heads up.

2 Years Without Self-Harm 

 

Last Friday, March 24^th, I celebrated my two-year anniversary of being clean from self-harm. My parents and I went out and had a delicious dinner. I also got to try my first slot machine because I am officially and adult now. Then we came home and had some nice family time and drinks. (We did all of this because we were celebrating; this isn’t our normal Friday night.)

I shared a small post on my Facebook profile on the actual day, but I felt like I wanted to expand and tell my story more that I could in a simple status.

I started self-harming sometime around 14 or 15 years old. It started out small, I was mostly just scratching at my skin and over the next 5 years got more serious. I switched from using my fingernails to using the metal ends of pencils and eventually to much sharper things. My left arm from wrist to shoulder and my right thigh are covered in scars that I very much now regret.

For me and a few other people I’ve talked to that have previously self-harmed, it is an addiction. Everyone has different reasons for doing it. Sometimes it’s out of depression and desperation. Some people want their outwards appearance to match how ugly they feel they are inside. It’s different for everyone. For me, there were different reasons at different times. Most of the time when I went to self-harm, it was because I was having hallucinations or because I was feeling manic and I couldn’t turn my brain off. Self-harming for me was a way to calm down my thoughts. If I was focused on the pain, my thoughts would calm down and I was able to focus and sleep a lot better. There were other times where my bipolar caused me to be so angry and aggressive that I took all of my frustrations out on my body.

The issue was that this was not a real solution to my problems. It not only was a very temporary solution, it wasn’t a real solution and it was incredibly destructive to both my body and my life. I am now not only covered in ugly scars, but I also lost a 6 yearlong relationship with someone I really truly loved. I lost a lot of my friends too and caused so much heartache for my family and all of the people I loved. Looking back now, I can see how hard it was for all of my loved ones to watch me hurting myself, I was hurting someone they loved and that was incredibly difficult for them to have to stand by and watch.

But I’m not here to say “woe as me.” I want to tell everyone that it gets better. It took me over five years to pull myself out of the hole that self-harm put me in, but it got better. For those who are struggling, like me you have probably heard the different variations of, “it’ll get better one day, you just have to wait.” I know how annoying it feels to hear that over and over when it just honestly feels like you have never felt worse. It’s annoying, frustrating, and hard to believe. But I can tell you now with certainty that it does get better. It does get easier eventually, easier to get out of bed, easier to take care of yourself, and easier to face the day.

The other thing you have to know is that life will get better, but it takes work. There are no doctors, hospitals, or magic medicines that will make you better. They help significantly in your battle against your own mind, but it takes work on your part too. You have to fight for yourself. I’m not fixed, I don’t think I ever will be. I have accepted that I will have to have to take medications daily and have regular doctors visits, but when I started fighting for myself, everything changed. Some days are still really difficult. Some days I don’t feel like I can get out of bed or take a shower or eat, but I do because I need to take care of my body to also take care of my mind.

The past two years have not been a cakewalk. I still lie in bed some nights and think about how self-harming will help me focus on sleeping or help my mania to go away. But I don’t act on these thoughts because they are not my thoughts. These thoughts are horrible lies that my brain is telling me.

So if you're struggling, please hear this. It will get easier if you fight for yourself. Don't give in and don't give up. Take time to take care of yourself, reach out for help. Your problems now don't have to define you. Fight for yourself because you are worth it despite what the voices in your head are telling you. You are worth everything, you are loved, and you are stronger than you probably believe right now. The world is not better off without you; it is a better, brighter, and more beautiful place because you are here. So keep fighting and fighting and never give up because all of your hard work will pay off one day, I promise you that as one survivor to another. 

-Megan

If you are struggling with depression, suicidal thoughts, abuse, loneliness, bullying, or anything that is causing you stress and unhappiness, you can text CONNECT to 741741 to talk to trained crisis counselors. If it’s a crisis to you, it’s a crisis to them and they are there to help you.

http://www.crisistextline.org/textline/?gclid=Cj0KEQjwn_3GBRDc8rCnup-1x8wBEiQAdw3OAQx8cN6aUNAcIVUztLGIBW7PGIaANfmMgD-tcuHoKAkaAkHO8P8HAQ

You can also call or text the Hopeline : 919-231-4525 & 1-877-235-4525

            http://www.hopeline-nc.org/?gclid=Cj0KEQjwn_3GBRDc8rCnup-1x8wBEiQAdw3OAQazblOYzwlUyWPKqMx2uLJPp1AGkx0BYRp0_Al4zwgaAv2v8P8HAQ

Welcome to Megan's Mad Mind

Hello there, my name is Megan for anyone who doesn’t know me. I’m starting this blog to open up conversations about mental illness and mental health and hygiene. But before I dive into heavier topics, let me introduce myself. 

I’m a 21-year-old artist living in Central Maryland currently. One day I might like to pick up and move up farther north into New England, but for now I’m enjoying (or hating) the crazy weather Maryland has to offer. I am an avid collector of pointless things, an art snob, a huge anime fan, and just in general a wacky and sometimes eclectic individual. I enjoy the little things in life, a good sunset, beautiful color palettes, corny jokes, good food, and thought provoking conversations. I have a strange tendency to be more interested in the villains in movies rather than the heroes or protagonists.

As for what I do with my life, I’d say I do a lot of little things. Right now I’m working as a nanny/babysitter/chauffer for two different families with wonderful kids. I do a little house & pet sitting when people go out of town and need their critters cared for and their house to be kept tidy. I’m also an artist and I have three main mediums I work with. I am a photographer, a makeup and body paint artist, and a jewelry designer. I’m really good at those three things, but most other art forms I am kind of terrible at. Right now my photography work is mostly free-lance jobs and my makeup is basically a hobby and artistic outlet. But hey, if you need a face painter for a party or some prom makeup, hit me up! I am really serious about my jewelry business right now and I think if I get the chance to really make it in one field, I’d choose to become a full time jewelry designer. I’d really love to open a storefront someday, that’s currently my dream.

So that’s me in a nutshell basically. I’m a little quirky and different. I have goals and dreams and hobbies just like everyone else. But there is another part of me I don’t outwardly show to people, and that’s the fact that I have some pretty serious mental illnesses. I have three diagnoses, Schizoaffective Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and an Anxiety Disorder that at the moment is Not Otherwise Specified (NOS). They are all very different from each other, but it gets complicated because a problem with one can trigger a whole series of problems with another. For example, if my brain is telling me I’m not clean enough and I need to obsessively wash my hands again and again and again, that can trigger my anxiety because I’m just not clean enough. And then it can get even worse, I can start hallucinating if it gets too bad. So very long story short, things can get stressful and complicated pretty easily.

But the thing is, while life can be really difficult sometimes, my mental illnesses have shaped who I am today. They have made me a more mature and empathic person.  When I was diagnosed at 15 I had to grow up kind of fast. I had more things to worry about than my classmates did, but that’s okay because I’m stronger for it.

So I’m starting this blog because I want to open up conversations about mental illness. There is a ton of stigma around different mental illnesses and in a lot of cases it almost taboo to talk about certain things. I am hoping to break down some of the walls that are up right now and educate people. I posted about my struggle with self-harm on my Facebook profile yesterday and a lot of people said it was brave of me to post about mental illness and something so personal. I think it’s weird that we live in a world where it’s considered brave to talk about struggling with mental illness. I mean, if kids can talk about how “the struggle is real,” when it’s time for final exams, why can’t we talk about the real struggle so many of us face every day? So I say let’s talk!

I’m an open book about pretty much anything and everything. I don’t go around talking about my struggles with everyone, but if anyone ever has a question I LOVE to talk about it. The more myths we can debunk and questions we can answer the better. So if you have any questions feel free to ask me, let’s have a chat.

Right now my plans for this blog is to post once every week or two weeks depending on how busy I am, and how I’m feeling. Honestly it’s hard to get motivated during a depressive episode, but I’ll try to keep on top of it. I plan on doing a series of posts that I’m going to call “Chapters,” which will tell the story about my life with mental illness starting with my first symptoms, being diagnosed for the first time, and hospital visits. I’ll also do other posts that might be like rants or responses to other articles I see posted (looking at you and your nonsense, Buzzfeed), and some might be more like a journal entry. We’ll have to wait and see!

If you’re still here, thanks for reading! Like I said, if you have any questions, feel free to ask me, your question could be inspiration for a whole post. If you want to chat about anything, tell me a story, or if you need anything in general, I will try to be there and help as much as I can.

-Megan