Look, every month is Mental Health Awareness Month when you have no choice but to be aware of the precarity of your own.
But May is the OFFICIAL month for this ~*awareness*~, made official by whatever cabal meets to decide things like this (shout out to the cabal for Scurvy Awareness Day on May 2, which prompted me to squeeze a lime into my Diet Coke).
I celebrated the first day of this month by being 7 minutes late to meet with my psychiatrist, who was delighted to hear that my own mental health is no longer in complete and utter shambles. Some shambles? Of course! But utter shambles? Not right now!
But it has been.
More times than I could count, because for a long time I didn’t think that what I felt counted.
In my 20s, I lived paycheck to paycheck in a wonky apartment in a neighborhood close enough to Park Slope for us to say we lived in Park Slope without technically lying.
I was the first to arrive at work and the last to leave and also one of the least effective workers to ever be hired because of my untreated ADHD, depression, and anxiety. I drank a lot. I ate very little.
On our dilapidated couch, my roommates and I watched this woman scream at and berate employees our age on television and thought, wow, I feel right at home.
In my 30s, I buried my father and cremated my husband and saw my second baby suspended, lifeless, on a screen in my midwife’s office.
Then I wrote an entire chapter in my book about how some people need therapy but NOT ME!!!!
I processed my feelings through writing, and avoided them through working, and when writing became my work I couldn’t tell what helped and what hurt, only that I had set something in motion and felt powerless to stop it.
When I did get help, I used therapy and psychiatry as spot treatments to get me back at it.
It being work.
Work was how I could measure my worth. Work helped me feel worthy.
I loved knowing that I was doing a good job because I didn’t think of myself as good. As worth literally anything at all outside of what I did for other people, or for their approval.
I still struggle to think of myself that way; as enough, no matter what.
Ask me how was your day? And I’ll struggle not to define it by the number of tasks I was able to cross off my to-do list.
Aren’t I worth just a bit more if I do all of the things? Don’t I get an extra sticker?
No, babe. You get burnout.
And so this message is for those of us who still have not gotten it through their gorgeous little skulls:
You are good.
Even if you are not doing your best, or living your best life.
Even if you’re not reaching for moon and landing among the stars.
Even if you’re burned down to a crisp (like my bangs the one time I tried to light a cigarette on my stove).
Even if your problems are bigger than any amount of talking and tapping and prescription medications.
You deserve to feel good not just so you can go be more useful and do more things, but because you deserve to feel good. You deserve ease. Peace. Joy, whenever it’s available.
There are approximately 15 Post-Its on my computer, filled with little reminders for my future selves.
My favorite is this one. From me to me. And now, me to you.
In Case You Missed It:
xo,
Nora
PS - If you like my writing, you might like my happyish oracle deck: a pack of affirmation cards to get you through the hard things in life, and the happyish journal, created to deprogram us all from centuries of toxic positivity.
Omg THE CRYSTAL. I forgot the crystal.
thank you, this was really helpful. I feel unworthy because I am unable to work since 2016 due to mental and physical illnesses. Then I experienced a life blitzkrieg that lasted 2 and a half years during the pandemic. Now I live alone and have a very small life and am constantly reading or being told or seeing on TV that I have to find purpose and meaning and that loneliness will kill me. Struggling and crying.