Leah
Leah
on
Dear Leah, If there was a way this letter could have gotten to you tonight, I don’t think you would have even listened. The grips of depression are relentless and intoxicating. It took years of deciding that despite the love around you, you are entirely alone. You think you are ready for your life to […]
Leah
on
If someone had told my seven year old self that I would become a time traveller when I got older, my daydreaming imagination would have soared. Could I go back to the periods my American Girl dolls were from; could I go on adventures in the future? Could I visit people who were no longer […]
Leah
on
“So, what now?” my therapist asks expectedly. “I don’t know; I wasn’t planning on still being alive right now,” I respond, fidgeting in my seat. I left my therapist’s office a little over two weeks prior to this session with a plan. I had just turned 25 and I felt completely defeated, like my mental […]
Leah
on
The whirring of my professor’s voice swirls around me like a dull warm breeze on a sticky summer day. This is my third time taking this class and I sit in the front row of the lecture hall unable to hear a thing. My hands sweat and my heart knocks against my hollow chest: You. […]
Leah
on
Mental illnesses command the atmosphere like tornadoes, spinning everything around in circles until we are stuck sorting through the aftermath of a once healthy life. They tear through homes, through friendships, through careers; they do it relentlessly and without apology. Mental illness hit me hard in college. I was failing classes. I had taken a […]
Leah
on
I watched the summer tumble into autumn from the window of my hospital room. The colors seemed to burst, all at once, like a firework. Autumn was always my favorite season and always the best time of year for my mental health. Every year, with the falling of the leaves came the lifting of my […]
Leah
on
“In the past, have you ever attempted to seriously hurt yourself?” She means have I ever tried to kill myself. I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. “Um, yeah. I’ve tried to kill myself,” I counted with my fingers in my lap, “…about, a handful of times.” A handful. A neat five little fingers. […]
Leah
on
I just got discharged from an inpatient psychiatric hospitalization. I see a therapist once a week. Every Monday and Thursday, I spend an hour in group therapy. Then I change into my scrubs and drive to work. I’m a psychiatric nurse. I’m also a psychiatric patient. “You don’t know about bipolar disorder. You can’t really […]
Leah
on
The expectation of many teens in the US is to choose a college and an academic path that will direct you to the ultimate goal of beginning the career that presumably will be what you do for the rest of your life. I chose a four year program that would lead to my Bachelor of […]
Leah
on
One thing I struggled with a lot during the worst of my first battle with depression was mixing feelings with facts. I meshed them together thinking that my emotions dictated what was true and what was false. One of my patients asked me about this recently, to clarify an exercise she did in one of […]