Category: depression

Book review: The Mystery of Hollow Places by Rebecca Podos

Balzer + Bray, 2016

Seventeen-year-old Imogene Scott sets out around New England scouring for clues to find her mystery writer father with depression and bipolar disorder who recently disappeared on Valentine’s Day, and the mother (troubled waters) that abandoned her when she was just two years old. She does so using clues and tips from her father’s detective books as well as other mystery writers, scouring hospital records, and neighbor interviews. All Imogene knows of her mother is the bedtime story her father told her as a child.

The Noir like tone of this YA novel matches the backdrop of cold, harsh, New England winters. This engaging, suspenseful mystery bears testament to loyalty, perseverance, and love despite learning that the stories about her parents are fictional just like Joshua Scott’s medical mysteries. While she has little in the way of clues, between her wits and the assistance of her best friend Jessa she starts out on a path that will impact her life forever.

The masterful weaving of mental illness, resiliency, precise plotting, unexpected twists, dynamic characters, and a sensitive treatment of mental illness makes this YA novel shine.

Book review: I’ll Meet You There by Heather Demetrios

Henry Holt and Company, 2015

The protagonist, Skylar lives in a dusty California named Creek View where so far she’s beaten the odds of being a Creek View girl with a baby, in a mobile home, with no future. In a piddly three months Skylar can escape to fulfill her dreams. She has an art scholarship and is focused on moving. Just as she is about to leave, her mother loses her job and stays in bed all day, kicking off a chain of bad things.

Then she reconnects with Josh, a nineteen-year-old wounded warrior who escaped the only other way possible, joining the military. But Josh loses a leg in Afghanistan, and his jerklike attitude, and is also isolated in evolving ways that only Skylar may understand. They find each other at their seedy place of work, the Paradise Motel which becomes more of a home than his real home. Skylar also works at the motel, but spends her time dreaming about escaping the town.

These pained characters ultimately tell the hopeful tale of swimming against the tide in a tired town and of relationships that are complex and flawed. It’s a heartfelt, complicated, realistic look at love amidst poverty, PTSD, and depression.

Book review: Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

Viking, 2009

Wintergirls is a harrowing novel that follows eighteen-year-old Lia Overbrook as she comes to terms with her best friend’s death from anorexia as she struggles with the same disorder. This gripping novel about the eating disorders that make them compete to be the skinniest is a painful, powerful story that is ultimately about recovery.

After the news of her friend’s death, Lia begins to spiral into her eating disorder, doing her best to hide it from her father and stepmother. Throughout this, Lia is haunted by the ghost of Cassie. This book is very intense as it deals with difficult themes to understand and read.

This book was both a harmful and beautiful experience to read. It is definitely triggering, but also offers a sense of grounding in knowing that you’re not the only one out there who has these deathly demons.

It doesn’t embellish upon the thoughts that run through one’s mind, instead reveals the inability to process that the disorder really is as dark and disturbing. Laurie Halse Anderson did a good job capturing the terror and internal battle one has to deal with when faced with a deathly disorder, and I was also engrossed at how it brings the competitiveness of such disorders to light. In addition, the writing and stylistic choices are interesting and add to the theme.

Secret Whispers available on 04/11/21

A beautiful family hiding dysfunction.

A house full of secrets.

An intelligent, creative, and schizophrenic girl.

An awkward, awesome, zealous boy.

Noxious peers. Worse high school. Embarrassing moments.

Danger lurks. Young love.  Reality?

What befalls one on an unraveling journey? And what is it like to question one’s own sanity? Adria is a high school junior with a penchant for painting and a clear goal: to hide the changes from anyone and everyone. In reality, she’s just developing schizophrenia. Genes are not in Adria’s corner. With an uncle as well as an older brother with paranoid schizophrenia, she’s got the family ties that make her life a challenge. Not that she needs any more stress. As the primary caregiver to her younger siblings, Adria’s life couldn’t be anything less than jam-packed and ready to implode. Adria must choose whether to risk everything, including her sanity and a first love, in a desperate attempt to save her family from the evil that stalks them.

Then there’s Ben, an awkward average teen but totally in awe at what he sees in Adria: a curious, quirky, and calm-natured dream that just applied for a job at the same store. He can’t help but be magnetically drawn to everything that is Adria, whom he meets when the odds are against her: in school, at their part-time job, and at home, especially. Little does he know her outward deficiencies are only the tip of the iceberg. Will he save the girl of his dreams, or is she destined to falter and pull him under with her when her mental health condition triggers.

Angela Grey, a writer with paranoid schizophrenia,, OCD, PTSD, and social anxiety, whom herself spent time in a psychiatric hospital, has created a memorable moving tale about the sometimes unexpected and challenging road to first love.

We must take baby steps.

babe steps

Instead of telling ourselves, “This could never happen for me,” we must ask ourselves, “What can I do to bring this closer to me?”

It doesn’t have to be a huge step. We don’t have to make it happen all at once. But we need to do something — at least one small thing — every day to get closer to the life we want. We need to do one small thing to get closer to being the person we want to be.

To do this, we need to get clear on the end goal.

So, let’s make a list of why we want something, get committed to the end goal, and then get transparent on what small steps are needed to take each day to get closer to it.

  • What do I want?
  • Why do I want it?
  • Why do those reasons matter to me?
  • What is the end goal? How do I want to see myself a year (or more) from now?
  • What can I do today to get closer to that?

Every day that we make a small step is a success! We’re proving to ourselves that we can do it when we want the end result badly enough to commit to it.

And in so doing, we build up our self-confidence. Other people’s limiting opinions on what we’re capable of no longer have any power over us. And neither do the limiting thoughts we used to have.

baby steps

Believing in ourselves doesn’t mean saying, “I’m 100% finished with my self-growth, and I don’t need to change anything or learn anything more.”

When we know the truth about ourselves, we know that we’re born to keep growing, keep learning, and keep contributing.

When we believe in ourselves, we know we’re worth the investments we need to make in our personal growth.

We know we’re smart enough, strong enough, and capable enough to do what is needed to do to become the person we want to be.

It doesn’t mean we’re not enough as we are. Being enough doesn’t mean we have permission to stop growing; it means we have what it takes to keep growing.

Because we do. We need to believe in that, first of all. Then build on it.

And may our courage and unshakable belief in ourselves influence everything else we do today.

Giving Ourselves Permission Fail at Something

failure

Self-doubt is essentially about the fear of failure, and when we practice self-confidence and move forward anyway, we build on that confidence — just as we build courage the more we step up in the presence of fear.

The most successful people have failed more times than most people even try. The danger is mostly to the ego, but that can recover.

Giving ourselves permission to fail in an endeavor could lead to something great; if we don’t make it the first time, we get to learn from what we did wrong. Then we can try again at that same challenge or pivot and apply what we’ve learned to another similar task or something altogether different.

When we fail — and if we’re actually trying and taking risks, we probably will — but can’t focus on the failure itself but on what led to it and what we can learn from the experience.

Those who become the people they want to be, choose to focus on what they can learn from their failures instead of getting stuck in a failure is inevitable mentality.

What this mentality says is “maybe other people could succeed at this, but not me…whatever I do, I’m bound to fail.” But again this isn’t based on fact but on a fear-based assumption.

The fact is that if we survived this failure, we can learn from it and do better next time – at the same challenge or a different one.

And we owe it to ourselves to keep moving in a growth-oriented direction.

You-make-mistakes.-Mistakes-dont__quotes-by-Maxwell-Maltz-43

We are not our mistakes. What determines our outcome and the person we become is how we handle those mistakes.

We need to stop listening to people who doubt us.

Self-Doubt-Lena-Yang

It’s hard enough dealing with the voices of self-doubt inside our heads; we don’t need to be around people who reinforce those thoughts.

Just because someone else hasn’t dealt with their own self-doubt doesn’t mean they get to drag us down with them.

If they’re stuck in a defeatist mentality, we need to try to avoid conversations that will lead to negative rants about their potential or ours.

In some cases, we’ll need to simply avoid these people as much as we can, just as we do the drama vampires. Every conversation turns into a negative monologue or tears us down. We can’t give them the opportunity.

Instead, we need to hang out with people who build us up, who are unabashedly self-confident, and who set an example of growth that inspires us to keep moving forward. Spending more time with people who believe in themselves is contagious. We need to give ourselves a vote of confidence.  We can’t wait for someone else to pick up the pieces and tell us that we’re enough, and “we can do this.” We have a responsibility to ourselves, as well as to others.

We need to take responsibility and tell ourselves that we’ve learned and mastered things before, and there’s no reason we can’t continue learning and mastering new things.

Think of what we’ve already accomplished, and keep telling ourselves, “There’s positive energy on the other side of fear (and I choose positive energy).”

We can do more and become more than we can probably imagine right now; we’re not limited to “the way things have always been” or to “what we’ve always known.”

We need to remind ourselves, we were made to live fully and intentionally until the moment we die. We owe that to ourselves — and to the people, we care about.  This I learned in The Art of Healing at the Center for Spirituality & Healing at the University of MN.

Social Anxiety Disorder Evolution

social-anxiety

As with my previous post, where I elaborated on my mental health according to each decade, here, I will go over how my social anxiety disorder came to be.

It began in college when I sought my Bachelor’s degree, which included numerous presentations, speech coursework, and one Acting class. I don’t remember why I chose that elective instead of the other options. In acting, I liked the preparatory exercises each day, and the journaling to the instructor assignments, but the acting itself was a genuine hardship. King Lear and Steel Magnolias scenes were my midterm and final. Oh my god, it’s difficult to even recollect.

With King Lear, I had an angst-ridden, class-skipping cohort which left me in the lurch during on-stage practice sessions where the instructor filled in for him. However, I don’t know if that perfunctory student was worse than an acting major with a precisionist pace that led to palpable Steel Magnolia scene rehearsals. I spent moments in the restroom beforehand, popping Xanax to allow me the assertiveness to complement her rigorous retention of detail, dramatic capability, and goal.

Speech class was about as negative an experience as Acting class turned out to be. I received A’s in both, but it didn’t come without permanent damage to my psyche. During my first three minute speech on day one of that class, others comforted me out by the college commons cafe during break and telling me that “it will get better and easier,” which never happened. Apparently, I shook so much that my fellow students thought I’d faint. The spontaneous speech, and subsequent interview from my peers, found me racing home to bed to quell my nerves, almost bringing about a psychotic break, and I’m not using hyperbole. My final was a tribute to my (foster) dad that raised me, maintained the lengthy ten-minute minimum delivery, and hit all the requisite buttons. But again, not without damage to my mental health.

social anxiety disorder evolution

After those courses, I withdrew from groups, except for the Center for Spirituality and Healing classes, where I gave many performances, but only because after getting to know the other classmates did I realize they had experiences or issues in their lives that were only slightly below mine. Those classes taught me that everybody has anxiety, everybody has regrets, and that everybody has negative memories that carry within themselves.

But outside of those courses, I shielded myself from the world, choosing instead of at the front of the class, in the back, which allowed for a smooth departure. In between classes, I’d sit in the commons at Moos Tower, where I’d nurse a vanilla cooler for hours by myself in the corner. Classmates would wave, but I’d pretend I didn’t see them and instead hide my nose in a book.

Then with work, I became an independent contractor, thereby allowing others to do the hands-on tasks which demanded social interaction. Those around me learned of my behavior and assisted me in the sense that they made excuses for my absence or lack of participation even better than I could’ve come up with each time. I learned to better hide my anxiety from their input. Most of them didn’t know then or don’t even remember now the extent of my mental illness, only sufficing to describe me as quirky. Whatever the cause or reasoning, I’ve found that it isn’t for the best and need to continuously challenge my obstacles and limits.