Healing is Not Linear | Fall Reflections
The day my doctor and I agreed to change my mental health treatment plan happened to be the fourth birthday of my blog. It was also the day I picked up my pen once again to share — and here is the result. Writing a mental health blog feels extra vulnerable this time around, but I am grateful to fill the role I feel so called to play: mental health advocate.
Wildfire Season
As summer’s heat reached its boiling point, I wrote this poem.
My poem reflects the burnout I felt after a sunlit season of pushing hard, shining bright, and ultimately bleeding out. It’s how I feel every year as the summer leaves dry up, parched from drought, and fade into electric autumn shades, doomed to fall to their death.
There is a trend in my beautiful, anxious little life. I go through seasons of growth where I don’t realize that chronic stress and anxiety are slowly and sneakily building up to my breaking point. A point where I suddenly realize that my fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system has been activated for an entire season.
Chronic stress and anxiety cause our sympathetic nervous systems to be WAY overactive. For example, our fight-or-flight response activates when we read the news on our screens, pay our taxes, or speed 80 mph in our giant metal box on wheels because we’re running three minutes late. However, our ancestors’ fight-or-flight response activated during times of real threats, like when they were hunting for their family’s next meal or escaping predators. Valid reasons to enter survival mode.
Today, we’re all conditioned to do, do, do without enough rest. Productivity, success, perfection, efficiency, and constant stimulation are highly valued and habitual in our culture. So, our cortisol (stress hormone) levels are through the roof, and we’re burning out like campfires.
Healing is Not Linear
Long-lasting burnout teaches me that it’s time to reevaluate my healing process. It’s like the newest version of me has outgrown some of the ways I had been nourishing myself or treating my chronic illnesses.
I’ve always said it, and I still believe it — different seasons of life call for different methods of treatment for different people. Healing is an ever-evolving journey of peaks and plummets. And that’s how it should be because it means we are stretching and growing — not staying stagnant.
When we’re feeling broken or frustrated or lost, we must compassionately remind ourselves that our healing journeys are NOT supposed to be linear. It would be way too extraterrestrial of us if we only trended upward. We’re human. Downward spirals are a part of our existence, too. It is okay.
Changing with the Seasons
This year, summer ended in a series of events and burnout that changed me from the inside out. As I grasped at ways to cool the fiery sting of anxiety and sensed the impending spooky season, I reached my breaking point. And I realized I had a choice.
It’s cheesy for some, poetic for others, but because I love the autumnal theme of “letting go,” I asked myself, “What leaves do I want to shed this year?”
And I made a courageous decision.
Right before the fall equinox, I scheduled an appointment with my doctor. There happened to be an opening the very day I called. I went into her office, we chatted, and I came home with pills.
After five years of treating my GAD, OCD, and most of my other chronic conditions naturally and without medication, I decided to willingly walk back into the medical treatment and trauma I’d endured as a child and young adult.
Only, it didn’t feel traumatic this time because it was MY decision to get back on meds. It was a brand new experience getting back on Sertraline, the SSRI that was so familiar to me and yet so foreign, as I’d weaned off that drug five years ago. Before that, I had taken medication for mental illness for 18 years. I don’t actually remember first getting on antidepressants — it felt like I had simply always been on them.
When I weaned off at age 23, my mind was in the darkest place of my life, and SSRIs were NOT working for me anymore. The choice to wean off was brave, unleashing a ribbon of trauma and nine months of withdrawals to work through. And it was beautiful, launching me out of previous nightmares and into a season of holistic, naturopathic mental health and chronic illness treatment, healthy lifestyle transformations, and finding intersecting ways to treat all of my chronic illnesses (OCD, GAD, endometriosis, eczema, degenerative disc disease and scoliosis, IBS, and GERD).
And yet, through that beautiful, healing season of life, I had to try REALLY hard nearly every day to move through anxiety. Without the pill-shaped band-aids to stamp on my symptoms, I tried so hard to heal that it became my greatest obsession.
Over the past five years, every decision I made had to benefit my health. OCD unearthed itself from its cave, hidden beneath the veil of antidepressants all those years, and became a debilitating method of control. OCD is so much more than its stereotypical association with cleanliness and order, and it took its toll on me and affected my loved ones. I frequently had no tolerance for imperfection. And my nervous system was often suspended in that sympathetic state of flames.
At the same time, I was genuinely thriving and growing and living my best life, but like… with a heaping side of debilitating anxiety. I am biased by my own experiences, but an anxiety disorder has got to be the slowest, most painful death. It’s like burning alive.
Toward the end of summer this year, I told my dad, “I am trying really hard not to try so hard at everything.”
And yeah… that was the epitome of my life. I was energized and motivated, yet exhausted from the daily battle. I just wanted to exist without working tirelessly to extinguish little flame after little flame after little flame.
So, I decided to accept some help in the form of a small, baby blue, cylindrical pill, and she has been graciously kind to me.
Shedding Leaves Burnt to Ash
In honor of the autumnal theme of “letting go,” the leaves I shed this fall include:
The need for extreme control (OCD)
Hyper-independence
Being on f*cking fire all the time
Health scares and medical treatment felt entirely out of my control during my childhood, teenage, and young adult years. I believe that is why I feel so much fear about not being independent or in control nowadays. But I don’t have to overcompensate for those fears anymore.
Instead, I am choosing to TRUST — my word for 2024. Full circle moment. I completed my character arc for the year, after all.
Goodbye, leaves.
I can rest now — winter is coming.
What to Expect From Me Creatively in the Future
Yeah, yeah, yeah… this is my first blog post in two years. You might be wondering what to expect from me creatively going forward. Well…
You can expect my art to come from a simmering space of inspiration and emotion. But you cannot expect any structure or schedule from me. :-)
When I first started my mental health blog in 2020, I published a blog weekly for two years. As the years went on, I discovered that when it comes to creating and sharing art or growing a business, my schedule and availability shift as the seasons shift.
I let go of a schedule for posting blogs and sending newsletters. I moved away from creating deadlines around publishing my debut fiction novel. I said screw it to staying too niche on social media. I replaced all measurable marketing and financial goals with intentions to just create and do what I love.
I believe that creating for myself will attract readers in alignment. Art is therapeutic joy for me when I can authentically express myself whenever I feel inspired. I write my most meaningful and impactful words that way.
Like the healing journey, art is too nonlinear for finite expectations or schedules. I’d rather let my creative energy flow freely and cyclically, like the seasons…
Mental Health Blog Disclaimer
I am not a medical professional, therapist, or mental healthcare professional. The information provided on this website is for informational purposes only, comes from my own personal experiences, and may be read, interpreted, and practiced at your own risk. Do not rely on this information as a substitute to medical advice or treatment from a healthcare professional.