Hello Reader,

May was Mental Heath Awareness Month, so for the final day I am sharing my full mental health story for one of the first times.

TL;DR? I was one of those people who fully and wholeheartedly supported therapy...for everyone else...until my problems got too big to be ignored. If you think you aren't "worthy" of help, that your problems are too small (or even too large) to merit help, talk to your doctors anyway. You are not a failure if you need help, whether it's with meds or therapy or both or more.

I was one of those people who fully and wholeheartedly supported therapy...for everyone else. How could my worries and overactive brain possibly be worthy of therapy, when there are people out there who have been abused for god's sake?

It's also hard to recognize that something might not be quite right when it's all you've known.

My brain has been like this as long as I can remember. I usually have 3 things going on at the same time in there--my active internal monologue, a litany of things I'm worried about forgetting, and song lyrics. Always with the song lyrics!!

But this active brain means it's hard to shut off. I worried about things that happened years ago. Weird reactions I got from new acquaintances--did I unknowingly say or do something to piss them off??

Over the years, my heart has raced at times for no reason. I was a high strung, high stress kind of person. I had zero chill.

But I was also super high functioning, accomplished, and had everything together. I even made it through a global pandemic and massive societal shut down with barely a blip!

Or so it seemed.

Almost a year to the day of the Kansas City COVID-19 shut down I started having terrible insomnia. I've never been a great sleeper, but this was next level. Usually if I have a few night of poor sleep, I'm exhausted enough I fall asleep ok eventually.

But this was different. I usually get a solid 8-9 hrs of sleep a night, and now, for over a week, I'd been getting 2-4 hrs. To say I was a mess is an understatement. I could barely function. Not sleeping was all I could think about. I remember telling my husband multiple times that it was ruining my life.

I tried improving my sleep hygiene. No devices or TV an hour before bed. No caffeine after 5 pm. No naps. Etc.

No change.

Ever notice how the less you try to worry about or focus on a problem, the more it consumes your thoughts? Yeah, that definitely happened here too.

Eventually, after trying to deal with it on my own for a couple weeks, I saw a (terrible, horrible, minimizing, huffy, condescending jerk of a) doctor who prescribed sleeping pills. Great! I was falling asleep again! ...And then waking up almost exactly 4 hours later & not going back to sleep.

After a couple more weeks of that, I requested a different doctor. I had barely started describing my situation and symptoms when she jumped in and told me it sounded like I had anxiety. She was going to prescribe me an anti anxiety/anti depressant, and schedule me with the in house therapist.

No ifs, ands, or buts.

And just like that, I became a person who had a mental illness and a therapist and a prescription that changed my life.

It took a while, but the meds did their job. I could fall asleep. My husband noticed I was silly again. It was like a weight I hadn't even realized I was carrying had been lifted.

Unfortunately, mental health is still an awkward area in heath care here. I'm happy to see how much more accepting society is than it was a couple decades ago, even if it doesn't seem like enough. It's still too hard to access care--the systems are too confusing, opaque, understaffed & expensive--but we are going in the right direction.

I know my story isn't that unusual or dramatic, but maybe there's someone else like me out there, who doesn't think their problems are "worthy" of help. And so to that person I want to say: They are. You are. I'm sorry it's not easy to get answers. Keep talking to people. Keep advocating for yourself anyway. You are not a failure if you need help, whether it's with meds or therapy or both or more.