Category: Depression and Anxiety

Mental illness

Stress

November 15, 2025

I’m losing my mind.

I am so stressed out over everything that anytime I don’t get enough sleep, I turn into a weeping mess. Everything sets me off. Especially commercials. They are meant to elicit an emotional response and damn do they work on me lately.

Let’s go through some of the shit I have been dealing with, in no particular order:

  • The government is actively trying to harm all of us. There is no easy way around it, it’s terrible.
  • My mom is still sick and I’ve been feeling extra guilty about not spending more time with her.
  • I’m on the brink of financial ruin. I have no savings and I’m still trying to buy Christmas gifts. I have so much debt and it’s becoming crippling again.
  • My job isn’t guaranteed especially with bullet point number one. We depend on pharmaceutical companies and if they lose money, we lose money. I don’t have a backup.
  • I might have to move in a few months. If my roommate can’t get a job (she’s been trying for YEARS) We will have to downsize. I love my apartment. It’s just too expensive for one income.
  • (Update: How could I forget?!) I’m also desperately touch starved. I have no one in my life I allow to give me affection. I’m never hugged and no one, except my cat, gets near me.

All I want to do is sit around and catch up on my TBR list. I have so many books I want to read but no attention span anymore. So, I just smoke weed and cry over Great British Bake Off.

My journey with ADHD (not comprehensive)

September 14, 2025

I remember in high school and beyond, I kept thinking I was Bipolar based on my impulsivity and other manic-like habits. ADHD was nowhere near my mind until my 30’s. It took until it was officially my 35th birthday for me to be diagnosed with ADHD.

I can’t believe how far I got in life without the proper diagnosis and treatment. I was so messed up for so long and I truly believe my potential suffered. I wonder where I would be if I knew sooner. Maybe I’d be in a fulfilling relationship unlike the crippling loneliness I deal with now. Maybe I would feel more confident in my career and abilities? I know I shouldn’t dwell in the past. I have enough to dwell about in the present.

I’m not sure where all this is coming from. I guess it doesn’t have to come from anywhere. These feeling exist and are valid. I am still grieving for my lost potential and chance at a different, more accepting life. But I appreciate where I am now. I am leaning into the weird aunt vibe for my sweet niece and my future other niece.

Having children around now really reminds me of how much life has changed and how much it will change in the future. I only hope the future gets better from here. We owe it to the next generations to learn to be kinder to each other now.

Picture from IG: myvictoriannightmare https://www.instagram.com/myvictoriannightmare

Reason #782 that I hate Summer

June 22, 2025

Once I was invited by a person, I thought I was friends, to a pool party. I was so excited. This would have been a step up in our friendship and I was ecstatic. I went out the day of and bought a brand new bathing suit and sat by my phone waiting to hear from them to give me the details.

They never contacted me. I spent my whole day in a rejection sensitive brain fog waiting to hear from them. By sundown, I was devastated.

I finally contacted them and fucking apologized for not contacting them first. I was being so gentle with this relationship that I debased myself when it was their fault for inviting me then leaving me out. They downplayed the event, saying it wasn’t that big of a get-together and I didn’t miss much. I was so upset.

This got to me so badly, I ended up in a crisis. I believe this was around the time I fell and hit my head so I also blame that too, but I ended up in the psych ward. It was a perfect storm but this story still haunts me. I eventually gave up on that friendship and it absolutely ruined one of my hobbies.

This person is a huge influence on the hobby I used to love, they are impossible to avoid. So, I’ve completely given up this hobby. I had put so much time, effort, and emotional energy into this hobby and I lost a ton of friendships in giving this up. This person’s rejection wasn’t the only reason I gave up this hobby but it is a large part of it.

Maybe I’ll do more posts about why I hate summer but knowing me and my adhd, I’ll forget and never do another one.

Be safe and stay hydrated, dear reader.

Birthday Month

June 1, 2025

Aaaaand it’s my birthday month again. Since my birthday is in the exact middle of the month, I get to claim the whole month as my own. Which means that I get to be extra depressed for the whole month of June. I can’t believe how fast time flies when you’re barely surviving. My whole existence is just a combination of trauma and the trauma responses that make up my personality. And I can’t forget the “self-care” behaviors I exhibit as well; my escapism. I use a variety of drugs, fairy smut books, and technology to avoid what’s going on in my life.

I’m not sure where I was going with all of this. I have never really had a great birthday so now that I’m almost 40, I associate my birthday with sorrow. It really puts a damper on Pride Month as well.

I started this post last night when I was on ketamine. I had high hopes (get it?) for its ability to soothe my soul but now I’m sitting here with a sore throat, a hangover, and all the same depression. I don’t want to fully abandon this post but I don’t expect it to be as ground breaking as it felt in my brain last night.

Sorry for being such a bummer lately.

I’ve been going through a lot

April 9, 2025

Trigger warning: death, grief

I am experiencing what I truly had hoped wouldn’t happen. But what is hope really but a promise to yourself to be sorry later. Nothing works out the way you expect.

It isn’t permemnt, this grief but it’s still a phase that is necessary to enjoy the good parts of life better. The light is that much brighter after experiencing the dark. But what if what you had was that light in the dark?

The darkness that won’t cease. The darkness that can only get darker before getting better. But it is dragging so long that the brief light that I experienced is all the much more obvious that its missing.

The beginning of my writing from today was about this man I lost contact with who was an amazing part of my life for a short period of time. I wrote about him when we first started talking in a prior post (if I’ve left it up). We started off so great that I knew it wasn’t going to end well.

Also, my mom is very sick and has been sick for a long time. She has a degenerative, chronic disease that has rendered her completely disabled. She has no use of her limbs and she cannot lift her own head. I care for her occasionally when my father needs to travel. The immense pressure I’m under when I’m responsible for her well being is straining me. It’s not her fault and I don’t blame her for it but the burden is real. The worst part of all of it is that this disease will never get better, her only relief will be death. So, the poem above is mostly about how I have to experience her death before I can start to move on. I will miss her but my life is on hold until she passes. I know she knows this and so I don’t burden her with complaining. I just write vague poetry on WordPress while on an edible after my migraine treatment. Goddamn.

Sorry for my downer of a post today. Like I said, I’ve been going through some stuff. Take care, dear reader. Appreciate what you have now since it won’t be around forever.

(Copyright photo to https://www.gabewasylko.com/social.html#/)

Life minus (some) meds

February 10, 2024

[TW: food, body image, dieting, weight discussion. I recognize I grew up in privilege and never experienced socioeconomic situations where hunger happened because there was no food. I struggled with money in my twenties and had to go hungry a few nights or live off oatmeal for a week but I always had safety nets. This post is solely my opinions on how I grew up and how that affected my relationship with food.]

I’ve been having issues with accessing my doctors lately. I’ve had many appointments pushed, by months, recently. I am leaning on the hope that everyone in the hospital system is just doing their best and this is just an unfortunate circumstance but it doesn’t remove all the frustration. One of these appointments was with my psychiatrist.

I was recently put on mirtazapine and stopped taking trazodone for mood/sleep coverage. Mirtazapine was supposed to cover what I was going to lose with the trazodone. But mirtazapine came with more than just some okay-ish sleep, I got a new emotion, fake hunger. Yup, I became hungry at all times. I woke up hungry, I went to bed hungry, I was hungry right after eating. It wasn’t normal.

Maybe it’ll get better?

My life’s motto

I’ve been on some restrictive diet probably around 20% of my life. Being overweight since age 9 will do that to you. I know what hunger feels like. Whether it be weight watchers and their point system to zone diet with their zones? I don’t remember. Neither really took. It wasn’t until ozempic that I truly discovered comfortable weight loss.

I’ve lived my life believing that weight loss had to hurt. You had to be punished for being fat. Your life was too indulgent and you need discipline, now learn to starve. Do you know how much it messes with your head to ignore a basic human need? My body wants food and I can’t eat it. To this day, I ignore bodily signals like having to pee for hours on end because “I can’t possibly have to pee yet.” (I blame ADHD for that.)

“I can’t possibly be hungry yet,” was a thought I never wanted to experience again, so, I spent the last 4 years eating what and when I wanted, regardless. I topped off at 322lbs at my heaviest and it wasn’t until this miracle drug, Ozempic, that I’ve ever been able to lose any significant weight. (I’m at 40lbs so far.) And I don’t feel hungry on it. I actually had a side effect of forgetting to eat at all then almost passing out from hunger. (Whoops.) That faded while my body got used to the drug and now I eat a normal amount of food to a small bird. It’s almost like a gastric band in a shot. I was able to be restrictive without the gut wrenching, soul crushing pain.

The mirtazapine brought back the hunger I was without for over 6 months and with it all my feelings of inadequacy and triggers came back too. I actually would feel hungry after just consuming anything. It was impossible to know when I actually needed food or was being tricked by this medicine.

As a child, I had a doctor tell me medication doesn’t cause weight gain. “Pills don’t have calories,” That was his excuse to shame me for my weight. I have been on hormonal birth control and antidepressants since I was 16. I was also 200lbs and 5’8” in the early 2000’s. I was fat and it was all my fault was the general message from everywhere. Society, peers, parents, doctors, gym teachers. But this new medicine might as well be served with a side of ice cream.

Pills don’t have calories.

My childhood doctor

Around the time I started mirtazapine, I was losing around 2lbs a week, consistently. I would have been on Ozempic for 7 months by then. Within the first 2 weeks of mirtazapine, I gained 2lbs. I not only stopped my descent, I pivoted and gained weight. It devastated me.

I decided to wait for my psychiatrist appointment to bring this up because my life’s motto is, “maybe it’ll get better?” It didn’t.

Then, my appointment was pushed two months. Thankfully, I am able to message my doctor through a patient portal. I explained the situation and he promptly (within 2 business days) messaged back to stop taking the mirtazapine. Full stop. There was no, “and start back on trazodone.” I’m just stuck now, in medication limbo, not sure if I will be able to sleep ever.

My only redemption is that I still have my adderall prescription. This is for a future post but I’m pretty sure I have always had ADHD/neurodivergent tendencies and not fitting in, being shamed when unmasking, and being exhausted from all of that is why I’ve been depressed since I was 9. Now, I’m learning how to live with the correct treatment and I would have to say, it’s not too bad.

Thanks for reading.

Weight-Dependent Love

October 24, 2023

It started yesterday afternoon, this migraine I’m nursing at the moment. I feel as if my brain is splitting down the middle, like a watermelon in a vice. The ringing in my ears indicates that I’m probably dehydrated. This isn’t a new concept for me. I’m always in a state of mild dehydration, then I’m confused when I exert myself at all, I almost pass out.

I’ve spent majority of my life (over 25 years) overweight and less of a person in the eyes of society. I wish I could go back to when I was in high school and convince myself that I was beautiful and my parents are assholes. It was my parents who started my body image issues, the people who were meant to protect me turned against me and thus, I turned against myself. This is a longer story than I am willing to type tonight.

With my caregivers lacking in emotional competence and shame-based parenting tactics (Catholic Boomers), I’ve learned that I am not worthwhile, I am a burden unless I’m spending all my time as a corporate shill and obsessed with my weight. Every living second is meant to focus on what you eat, when you eat, how much you eat, how much everyone else is eating, and finally the guilt from eating at all.

This became a me problem as much as a my family problem. I can see it directly in my mother the torture she went through with her mother. I see it in my mother’s sister and her daughter the way we all talk about ourselves, our bodies, and other people’s bodies. It’s toxic.

This is devolving. A good thing is that my therapist wants to start focusing on my body image issues. Growing up in the late 90’s/early 00’s was rough on little fat me with society valuing thinness over average bodies. Everything was “super model thin this” and “cocaine diet that”, all over the news, magazines and godforbid my crutch through childhood, tv. (TV was my ADHD coping mechanism growing up.)

The reason I write about this today is that I’m still plagued by fears of rejection based on my body. Everything comes down to my weight. In reality, I think it matters less to the people in my life than I make it out to be. I don’t have to make excuses for the way I look but I feel like I do. I can’t shake the feeling that just existing needs to be apologized for. The cognitive dissonance is deafening.

I live in a constant tug-of-war in my mind. I am confident and motivated one moment but also, hate myself and feel like a burden at the same time. It’s exhausting. No wonder I rely so heavily on cannabis, it stops the in-fighting.

This is where I leave you, dear reader. I hope I made some sense because I have no idea what’s going on. 🫶✌️

ADHD

June 20, 2023

I was semi-officially diagnosed with ADHD on my 35th birthday. I still need the report to be completed but I received a verbal confirmation. Good enough for me.

When the doctor told me that I had ADHD, I was surprised at how upset I felt. I went in knowing that I fit under the neurodivergent umbrella pretty comfortably, and at this point, I was convinced I had it. The sensation of hearing the diagnosis was like a pit in my stomach. There was a hollowness in my core. I think the doctor noticed that I was not responding well. We spent the last half of the appointment exposing childhood trauma through drawing pictures to cheer me up. It felt like a shadow was over me.

While growing up, I was always treated like I was lazy and not trying hard enough. I skated through school. I was smart enough to be in honors classes, but I was pulling solid B’s without much effort. There has been a lot of trauma around my “potential” and never being enough. What I’ve been learning through therapy, is that I was dealing with some serious mental health issues hindering me since I was young. It was true that I wasn’t “reaching my potential” but I was given the wrong tools.

My drive home from the specialist was long and filled with much dissociation. I can’t remember when it started but I started to feel relief. I was almost lighter somehow. It wasn’t my fault. I am not inherently flawed. That was a huge revelation.

My self esteem is so low though. How low is it? It is so low that not even Megan Thee Stallion knees could reach this floor. (Relevant reference)

I am waiting to hear back about treatments and interventions for the newly found ADHD but for now, I’m just telling everyone who will listen. Take care.

Self-Care Sunday

November 27, 2022

Hello, friends. I wanted to drop in and post about this product I started using that had changed my world.

I’ve always dealt with poor skin. I had many strikes against me with a genetic double whammy of acne and bad hormone control, along with [many] medications since I’ve been a teenager. My skin was doing the best with what I provided. I would get deep, hormonal acne from age 12-30+ which resulted in a slew of cheap, early-millennial, skin-care routines and striping chemicals.

Up until recently, I’ve been neglectful at best with my skin care routine because I can now. Well, I shouldn’t but I do. One of my worst symptoms of depression is not taking care of my hygiene. Which is super frustrating but I haven’t worked through that completely, yet.

Which brings me to today. I got a great promotion and raise at work before Thanksgiving. Wonderful news but it ignited my imposter syndrome, hardcore. I’m excited though, to be able to afford to indulge in something for myself. Of everything to invest in, I chose, skin care.

I got myself a starter set of Clinique products from one of their Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals. Of all the products I received, this was the clear winner in my books.

Clinique Moisture Surge

This is a product I endorse because as a neurodivergent individual, I appreciate the feel of everything. For me, at least, I’m big on textures and tactile stimulation.

I find this moisturizer to be both as a product and the results of my skin are pleasant to the touch. The moisturizing gel is silky and smooth. The results for the first few hours are dewy plump, healed skin, as if the silkiness of the gel fused with my acne-scarred visage.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a nice cream lotion for my hands and body. It causes a heaviness on my face that becomes frustrating. It’s a sensation I have trouble not obsessing over, I can’t block it out when I’m trying to talk all day. I end up touching my face a bunch and causing breakouts.

This product is very well rounded and worth the cost, in my opinion. Lastly, this is not an ad, I really believe in this product.

Christmas 2021

December 23, 2021

Since 1997, A CHRISTMAS STORY has played non-stop for 24 hours starting Christmas Eve.  

I would start my Christmas marathon of A Christmas Story on Christmas Eve by watching the first half of the first showing of the movie.  Trying to hear the audio between the enthusiastic shouting of my New Jersey family. We were in a cramped space that somehow fit around 17 people, mostly out of sheer determination and Christmas magic. All of us would try to have separate conversations that spanned distance and in full disregard of overlap. My aunt was the best at relaying her exact feelings, at the top of her voice, to my semi-deaf grandfather, from one end of the space to the exact opposite end. This would occur above all of our other conversations. The shrill emotionality of her frustration was exasperated by my uncle, her brother, taunting her about just about anything just to get a rise out of her. It was absolute chaos and I look back on my time with my family fondly. Even though I know at the time I was overstimulated and cranky. 

The next day, my immediate family would fly back to Ohio from New Jersey and at Newark Airport, I would get to see A Christmas Story in bits and pieces while waiting for our flight. It was a constant that helped comfort me when my immense social anxiety flared. The flight was only an hour and I would get super excited when we flew over the Cleveland skyline. 

When we finally arrived home, I always ran for my stocking first. My stocking would be filled with Malley’s candy and scratch-offs, basically the two things that make Christmas worthwhile for me. By this point, I had probably seen only A Christmas Story through once and some change. 

Shortly after I destroyed my scratch-offs, usually only winning $20, we would drive across town to see my other aunt and her family for Christmas dinner. She would make something great like ham or prime rib and the BEST mashed potatoes. Somehow, I would still fill up on chocolate and olives. I don’t know when it started, but black and green olives have been an appetizer of every family function for as long as I can remember. Then, to cap off the night, we would watch the end of the last A Christmas Story showing. All of this Christmas joy would happen within 24 hours. 

The movie, A Christmas Story, was the thread that connected my Christmas experience every year, the disjointed, multi-family, celebration marathon that it was. I waited until the last minute to enjoy this movie this year because I was afraid of my reaction. I knew I’ve been bottling all my emotions about this Christmas. I have to spend my first Christmas without my family this year because I have COVID. Instead of continuing to depend on my coping skills, I needed to process this change. It’s my hope that one person who may make it this far in my rambling and who has to celebrate the holidays differently this year knows that you aren’t alone and your feelings are valid, regardless if they are positive or negative. Christmas can be a wonderful time for some and I hope everyone finds a little happiness this year.