Making a comeback!

Hi there! It has been a long time since I posted here. I’ve gone through one of the longest stretches of not wanting to write in a long time. But I can feel it in the rearview mirror now, and I’m feeling more inspired. Plus, the holiday season always makes me happy and more hopeful. Despite the terrible news of the world right now, I remain hopeful because what’s the alternative?

One of the ways I am slowly coming out of the writer’s block is that I am working on an essay about my mental health crisis last year. It has been hard, but healing to write about this. It has been such a major part of my life for the last year or two and I can’t not write about it. I hope that if I can share it with you one day and maybe even publish it–that it will help someone out there who is struggling. I firmly believe that we must be open and honest about mental health so that we can not feel alone or isolated in our struggles. Isolation is the worst thing for someone who is depressed or hurting. I am sending strength to everyone who is struggling right now, especially during the holiday season.

One of the ways that I have been dealing with my own mental health is through reading authors who write about their struggles. I read a few of Kay Redfield Jamison’s books. She writes extensively on her lifelong struggles with bipolar disorder. And I recently read the incredible writer Donald Antrim’s book called One Day in April. It completely changed my view on suicide. He has struggled for most of his life, despite being an accomplished and beloved writer for The New Yorker and a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant. Mental illness can affect anyone. In his book, he writes about his understanding of suicide as a social act:

I do not think of suicide as the act, the death, the fall from a height or the trigger pulled. I see it as a long illness, an illness with origins in trauma and isolation, in deprivation of touch, in violence and neglect, in the loss of home and belonging. It is a disease of the body and the brain, if you make that distinction, but its etiology, its beginning, whether early or later in life, in the family or beyond, is social in nature. I see suicide as a social disease.

For this reason, I believe it is all of our responsibility to not only talk openly about mental illness, but to be involved with others, to check on them, to help them to live. Our future as a society depends on it.

Enough about that. As I said, right now I am finding ways to be hopeful and happy. Some of the ways I am doing that are listening to music. A few of my favorite holiday classics are Joni Mitchell’s River and Dolly Parton’s Hard Candy Christmas. And I’ve recently revisited Wham’s Last Christmas and the Pogues Fairytale of New York (RIP Shane McGowan).

We are planning a trip to New York City after the holidays which is something to look forward to. And we will attempt to make that trip to Italy in the spring that we had to cancel last year. I think I’m ready this time.

I wish you all a happy holiday season with those you love. Ours will be quiet this year with just the three of us and I am really looking forward to it.