One moment I’m posting about working toward a more Minimalist Lifestyle, promising two more posts to follow because I was behind, and then I drop off the blogging world for a month! This was an unexpected, unplanned, and unwanted break, but looking back, it was a good thing. Here’s why-

I’ve let my struggles with my mental health be well-known at this point. The constant struggles with my anxiety and depression have time and time again proven to make every aspect of my life way harder than it needed to be… they also made me into the worst version of myself I could be. So I did something about it- I started taking medication for my anxiety a month ago. I am also on a mood stabilizer. It hasn’t been an easy transition and it hasn’t ben an easy adjustment. When you’ve been running on 210% anxiety for years and then suddenly you’re not, everything inside of you gets thrown out of whack and that led to emotional instability until I got my mood stabilizers and then my body had to adjust to those as well… Oh, and then for about 2-2.5 weeks my depression decided to come out and play because my anxiety was being quiet, so that was a whole other issue… honestly, getting adjusted to my new medication and my anxiety being significantly lowered, but depression being significantly higher gave me a Jekyll and Hyde feeling. Somedays I was good, somedays I was bad, and somedays I was a bit of both. The psychiatrist warned me it would take about a month for my body to be fully adjusted and for me to feel stable and he was right. Now that it has been a month I feel much less anxious than I ever have before in my life. My depression isn’t as bad as it was before either and I do feel a bit better. When I talk to my psychiatrist tomorrow, I’m going to tell him to leave my meds as is because they’re working and I don’t want them getting messed with. I’m just hoping he listens.

Though the medication has helped with my anxiety, I’m know there are somethings it can’t help with. I still have bad days. I still cry and get upset. I still get angry. I still have a very blunt and honest personality. I still don’t like forced interactions with people. I still prefer to be by myself or around the people I love and care for. So the medication is helping my mental health, but it can’t give me a personality transplant… which is what my former therapist tried to do to me. That’s right- my former therapist tried to give me a personality transplant! The goals I had given her in my second session quickly went out the window and she basically stopped listening to me. If I brought something up in one session, she would keep talking about it in the second session even after I told her we didn’t need to discuss it anymore. She stopped listening to me, stopped trying to help me… so I got a new therapist. I’ve only had one session with my new therapist and so far, she’s OK. I’m not going to give her my full stamp of approval until its been a month.

So that’s the mental health side of everything, which is honestly the main reason why I stopped posting anything for a month. My head was so messed up that trying to provide content for everyone to read wouldn’t have been enjoyable for anyone. It would have been forced, which would have come across as forced to all of you, it wouldn’t have been a good read, and then I would feel bad for providing content that wasn’t good… and that just would have made me feel even worse! So though it sucks that I was away for a month, overall it was probably a good thing for everyone.

So what now? For the time being, I think I’m going to go back down to one blog post a week. I think until I get the other parts of my life better situated and scheduled, one blog post is the right move. Maybe if there’s ever a week where I’m feeling super good or ambitious or have the time, I’ll do two, but that’s a big maybe. Right now I’m just trying to figure thing out because recently, things were going up on a positive trajectory and I was feeling really good, but now they’re crashing down and I’m not sure what I’m doing anymore… and I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours as a crying mess who feels like an unintelligent failure who has a knack for messing things up, so my depression has been having a field day with me right now!

All that aside, I hope everyone has been having a good month. I hope all of you have been staying safe and healthy. I hope you’ve been achieving your writing goals and knocking some books off your to-read piles. Tell me about your August, I want to hear everything you’re willing to share! And I hope everyone has a great week!