*TW* Depression, anxiety, and other themes of mental health.
Last week, my therapist told me that the goal of life isn't to be perfect: it's to grow. This makes sense, and it isn't the first time I've heard it. No one can be perfect, and denying this makes making progress harder. It's hard to work when your goal is objectively unattainable. At the same time, though, this statement hit a little too hard. I've spent my whole life trying to be the best. What am I supposed to work towards if not perfection?
Dealing with depression and anxiety as an analytical person is interesting, because my emotion and reasonable mind are both regularly functioning on high and are often in conflict with each other. My emotion mind screams that I cannot possibly solve any given problem, and that there's no point in even trying because I was miserable before this problem arose and I'll likely be miserable even if I solve the problem. My reasonable mind overcompensates, telling me that I can solve every single issue I'm faced with, so long as I do everything right.
This is how I've tried to address everything in my life for as long as I can remember. Doing everything right, though, is exhausting. Sure, I'm taking good care of myself – I see my therapist weekly, my general practitioner regularly, I get in 30 minutes of exercise a day, I've cut back on sugars and added vegetables to my daily diet, I stretch every day, and I walk around with the most pertinent pages of my DBT handbook to deal with emergencies. But good is not perfection. I don't eat enough potassium, I could exercise more strenuously, I could eat plain oatmeal instead of adding brown sugar, I spend too much time in bed, and the other day, someone told me that I should go gluten-free if I wanted my depressive symptoms to ease up. In my mind, then, it doesn't matter that I'm doing better than I was a couple years ago: I'm not "cured" because I'm still not doing everything right.
And that's just to mention the things I know about that I could be doing better. Another key part of solving problems is being armed with knowledge. I am a firm believer that the more you know, the better you can do. I mean, I have a degree in psychology partially because I wanted to know everything about how to make myself "better" after being diagnosed with depression at age 15. Knowledge is a valuable power, but it's not the only power out there.
After all, no one can know everything. Neither can you act on everything, as so much of what humanity knows is conflicting. So, striving toward knowing everything and behaving perfectly is inherently a doomed mission, certain only to create failure and self-doubt.
By no measure do I consider myself near perfection. I'm simply so obsessed with obtaining perfection in every aspect of my life that the growth I have made seems embarrassing when compared to my goal. I am so obsessed with obtaining perfection that, no matter what I do, I find myself trying to figure out how I could have done better, and how I'll do better next time. I am committed to growing and becoming a better person, more than I am committed to anything in life. Part of being a better person, I think, means being realistic and accepting of one's flaws and missteps. Plus, over-analyzing everything I do takes time away from actually living life.
I'm not sure how to end this blog post because I'm still trying to figure out what I'm working towards if I'm not working to be the best. So, I'll end by saying that I've been waiting since the spring to wear this outfit with my denim jacket for the blog. It's the middle of October, but on the day my friend Sydney took photos of me, it was still too hot for a jacket. I'm going to post these pictures without thinking of how I should have worn this outfit another day or powered through and worn the jacket anyways.
*TW: depression, anxiety, suicide, and general themes of mental health*
My freshman year of college, I took a couple months off of Instagram. I was going through a huge transition, and being on social media wasn't helping me comfortably adjust to my new life. When I re-downloaded the app, the first thing I did was go through my following list and remove a bunch of the people I'd gone to high school with. It didn't seem fair that, while I had struggled through high school and continued to struggle through college, the people who'd had such a great high school experience were also killin' it in college.
I know now that my perceptions did not accurately reflect the lives my former classmates were living. Like me, these people were experiencing trials and tribulations as part of life. I didn't know that their smiling faces and enthusiastic Instagram captions only told part of the story. At the same time, though, my Instagram account painted the picture of a smiling, enthusiastic college student. I, too, was lying.
My Instagram account from the month I decided to delete the app. Look at all my smiling!
We've all heard not to trust what we see on social media because it only portrays part of the story. People only post the good stuff on social media, so there's no way to know what's really going on in someone's life. You have to take others' social media posts with a grain of thought.
I was fine with this concept for years. I'd see someone caught mid-laugh at a party on social media and think to myself, "what a liar." Then, I'd open Instagram and upload my own "candid" mid-laugh pic before crying for a couple hours and falling asleep at 9 pm.
Some prime smiles and good times. What's missing from these pictures: I'd just gotten out of the hospital, moved out of my apartment, quit my job, and had to step down from my role in a campus publication. I was having a really damn hard time.
There are countless arguments against being authentic on the internet. Being authentic is difficult enough as it is, because it requires you to be vulnerable and being vulnerable is HARD. Many people actively work to keep their personal lives off of social media in order to maintain a professional internet presence. Hiring managers and other members of our professional lives definitely check us out on social media, so there's a lot of pressure to keep it clean. The internet is also known to keep things for forever: once it's up, it's up. Even if you delete an embarrassing post, there's still a draft of it in a database somewhere. If you post something and forget to delete it, it can easily be brought up in the future and easily used against you.
There's really only one good argument FOR being authentic on the internet: to share the human experience. We all go through good times, and it's great to be able to be there to encourage and congratulate each other as we graduate, move, get hired, or even just have a good hair day. We also all go through bad times, which is alienating enough as it is. What's even more alienating is not seeing your struggles represented in your environment. Not only are you having a rough time– you're the only one not managing to live your best life. There must be something wrong with you.
One of my research projects in college was examining social media habits and their effects on mood and outlook. In multiple cases, researchers found that simply opening up Facebook had a dampening effect on one's mood. This negative impact got worse the longer the participant remained scrolling on the site. Qualitative research methods showed that participants perceived their lives as worse than their peers' based on what they saw on social media. We compare ourselves to our environment, often without meaning to do so and without any awareness of the process, and we find that our full story doesn't compare to the purely positive spins posted on social media.
My Instagram from the week I got dumped. The only indication that I might not have been having as good a time as it looks like I was having is that I captioned one of these pictures "feeling blue" and another one "I am a rock! I am an island!".
I was recently listening to an episode of my favorite psychology podcast when the topic of social media and self-perception was brought up. The research I've already described was discussed through the personal anecdotes of someone just a couple years older than myself. The guest describes the pressure to keep up with her Facebook friends, who were getting married and buying houses and having kids while she was traveling and working odd jobs. After a while, she found it hard to keep up with her Facebook self, as she continued to post about the great stuff in her life as her marriage and career fell apart around her. She found she was unable to portray herself as taking the bad with the good. After all, no one else on her timeline was talking about the bad stuff, even though statistical reasoning suggests at least 25% of her friends were going through similar difficulties.
We all fall trap to that line of reasoning: if no one else is doing it, why should I? If everyone else on my Instagram feed is laughing and smiling, why should I allude to the reality of living with chronic depression? If everyone else on Facebook is posting cute couple photos even when they're fighting, why should anyone refrain from doing just that? It creates this vicious circle: I'm not being honest because I don't see anyone else doing it, but others aren't being honest because they don't see anyone else (myself included) speaking honestly, either.
A series of tweets in which I expose the world to exactly what I'm experiencing in that moment.
The conclusion I drew from getting rid of my high school friends on Instagram was that none of us are quite who we pretend to be on social media. The conclusion I drew from the literature review I wrote in college was that social media can be a space in which to create and maintain an open community, but that we put up barriers which often keep us from reaping the benefits of these platforms. The conclusion I drew from listening to this podcast was that, by not being honest ourselves, we're contributing to the problems that make social media impact us so negatively.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and I've been thinking about how grateful I am for the people in my life who speak honestly about their struggles on social media. They encourage me to be vulnerable and they help me not feel nearly so alone. One of the most important reasons for Mental Health Awareness Month is to bring awareness to a very serious aspect of health that affects everyone, whether directly or indirectly. How are we supposed to bring awareness to mental health if we're only talking about it in the abstract and not sharing our experiences? I say this as someone who regularly shares mental health-related articles on social media and who has talked about my struggles with chronic depression and anxiety in the past. I also, however, regularly refrain from talking about the reality of my day-to-day life as a human and a human with these mental health conditions. I'm striving to be open without oversharing on social media right now.
Most of all, though, I'm striving to not paint a picture of myself on social media that simply doesn't exist. I don't have to share the most vulnerable details of my life to not portray myself as happy all the time always. For me at this point, that means honest Instagram captions, honest (and even vulnerable) tweets, and keeping my Facebook professional instead of just happy. I'm still working on not sharing smiling photos on days when I'm not smiling.
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This post may contain facts pulled from research, but that doesn't mean my opinion is 100% right. Do you agree with my opinion that we need to be more honest on social media in order to mend the divide between ourselves and how we perceive others? Can vulnerability on the internet help raise awareness of mental illness, therefore providing countless resources to those in need? Let me know in the comments below!
I had two primary motivations for hosting several friends for a Bring Your Own Cheese (BYOC) night. First, I love cheese. Every time I go to the grocery store, my one big treat for the trip is a new kind of gourmet cheese. Unfortunately, as a college student, I'm unable to indulge myself in as many different kinds of cheese as I'd like. So, a friend and I came up with the BYOC event to provide a large variety of cheeses at a more reasonable expense to each attendee. My second motivation was that I've always wanted to attend a chic event held on a rooftop overlooking the rest of the city. Cliche, yes, but still a dream of mine. When I found out I was dog sitting in a building downtown with a roof, I knew I had to take advantage of it. A few minutes on Facebook later, and voila! The event was set in motion.
Now, those of you who know me know that I often find myself torn between my desire to host people I love and the immense anxiety I experience surrounding social occasions. My mom and her friends have taught me the art of hosting since I was young. They've shown me how to prep for an event, how to set a dress code, how to determine when a theme is appropriate (pretty much any special occasion except religious holidays), and how be DIY savvy enough to decorate like a Kardashian. My dad has taught me how to supplement an event with the perfect menu and party playlist. I grew up going to some really awesome events, and have thrown some pretty cool ones of my own (including a Harry Potter party for my sister's 11th birthday, a mother-daughter graduation tea party, and my own birthday parties since I was in middle school).
At the same time, though, I am an introvert with an anxiety disorder. As much as I love picture-worthy DIY decorations and the idea of spending an evening with some of my friends, I treasure my alone time and have been known to hyperventilate at the thought of interacting with people for too long. So, I'm often torn between these two opposing parts of myself.
How do I satisfy my desire to host fun nights while keeping my anxiety and introverted tendencies in check? Well, I've spent a lot of years trying and failing to achieve this balance. I've overextended myself and found myself alone in my room by the end of the night, desperate for some breathing space. I've made the mistake of inviting a wrong person or two and ended up wishing everyone would just go home already within mere minutes of opening my door. I've even spent long periods of time without anything planned, only to find myself feeling lonely and bored. So, I've tested my own boundaries to be able to establish what I'm comfortable (and happiest) doing.
First, I've found that I'm happiest with a smaller guest list. As enticing and easy as it is to keep clicking "invite" on Facebook, things are more likely to get out of control and I'm more likely to feel overwhelmed with a large guest list. Keeping it small means it's quieter, easier to clean up, and my guests are also less likely to feel overwhelmed: all of which help to ease my anxiety. Plus, having a small number of close friends means it's more intimate, which is conducive to stimulating group conversation.
Second, I set an end time. I've learned that I have the emotional energy to keep a party going for about four hours. After that, I find myself wishing everyone would leave so I could snuggle my dog in peace. This is a lot easier to enforce with a smaller guest list.
Third, I keep the emphasis off the alcohol. I'm not a huge fan of doing anything based on drinking, so this is an obvious rule that I set for myself. When there is alcohol present, it's never hard alcohol, and it's provided in moderation. Drunk people make me incredibly anxious and uncomfortable, so I avoid that as much as possible. Plus, there are so many other things to emphasize at an event: good friends, good food, and good picture opportunities, to name a few.
Finally, I keep things casual. This is especially essential as a college student. I've learned from experience that people my age simply don't have the funds or the time to fully participate in formal or themed occasions. This used to disappoint me, but now I embrace it. I have plenty of time to kick things up a notch in the years in front of me. For now, I'm enjoying company over costumery.
A photo posted by Hannah Goldstein (@thehannahgold) on
This experience was, in a word, terrifying. I wish I could tell you some inspiring story about how I worked up the courage to bare my soul to the world for the benefit of contributing to the dialogue on mental health in modern society, but that just wasn't the case. Over the years, I've developed a large number of coping strategies for dealing with anxiety and stressful situations. One of these coping strategies is straight up ignoring the situation I'm in. So, that's how I found myself able to be so vulnerable on the internet.
I'm still pretty nervous about having shared this thing that I tried so hard to keep hidden for so long. It's particularly nerve-wracking thinking about everyone who's read it. Sure, that was what I expected when I shared this on Facebook and Instagram, but it's still weird to think about. I'm friends with everyone on Facebook: my extended family, friends of my mom, my boyfriend's family, the popular kids from high school, people I've been in professional meetings with, etc.. To think that any of these people may have read such a personal story makes me really anxious, but the positive reinforcement I got from sharing my story makes me think the anxiety might be worth it.
It's strange to think that exactly a year ago, I was reading the Survival Stories on Life Ain't Easy But It's Worth It and thinking that I could never speak so honestly about my demons the way these inspiring young women did. Their stories inspired me to keep going and stay strong, even in the face of severe hardships. Maybe my story will do the same for someone else.
An emotional support animal is, in many ways, a service animal. She travels with me, lives with me, and, of course, provides me with the very important service of supporting me emotionally. The main difference between an emotional support animal and a strict service animal is the process the animal has to go through to become certified. Luxe just had to be her sweet self to be certified as an emotional support animal by my psychiatrist and therapist. I spent months looking for the right dog to be my emotional support animal. My process started in spring of 2014, when my doctor recommended I look into getting one.
I could go into the complicated intricacies of my long mental health record, but I would rather focus on how Luxe has helped me than in what ways. Part of this mental health record includes a history of panic attacks. Since getting Luxe, my panic attacks have decreased from weekly to once in a blue moon. In fact, I'm generally just less anxious. Being around such a calming presence has been so amazing for my anxiety.
Luxe also helps out with quite a few other things that I deal with, be they daily or occasional symptoms of my mental illnesses. She can and has helped me get out of bed on days when it's felt impossible. On days when I haven't been able to get out of bed, just knowing that she's there depending on my care and love encourages me to get through times when it seems impossible to keep going. She may not be the cure-all treatment for everything that I struggle with, but she certainly helps quite a bit.
Luxe has absolutely changed my life. I'd recommend looking into an emotional support animal to anyone dealing with whatever mental health concerns they may be dealing with. Like I also mentioned earlier, though, she is not a cure-all treatment. Her companionship is helpful alongside the use of therapy sessions and thoughtfully prescribed medication. It may seem easy to just sign your pet up as an emotional support animal, but there's a reason a certified mental health professional is required in the process of certifying an emotional support animal. I'd strongly recommend taking advantage of the therapist or psychiatrist involvement required in the process of getting an emotional support animal.
While I haven't exactly been secretive about Luxe's role in my life, I haven't exactly been publicly upfront about it, either. I'm not ashamed that I need an emotional support animal. On the other hand, it's not entirely socially acceptable to discuss your mental health problems openly. Mental health is considered a taboo topic in modern society, even more so than physical health. By not talking openly about mental health, though, we discourage a lot of people from seeking the help they may desperately need. Promoting open and honest communication about mental health is an important part of promoting suicide prevention. As hard as it is to admit and talk about the mental illnesses I suffer from, it adds to the dialogue about mental health and suicide prevention, which can only encourage the dialogue to grow and give people the confidence to seek the help they need.
Those of you attending a school on the trimester system know it's already time for finals. As for the rest of you, finals will soon be upon you. Taking so many giant tests and/or writing so many colossal essays in such a short period of time can be overwhelming to say the least. As someone who feels like they're taking a life-changing test at least once a day, I feel qualified to give some tips for calming down.
Before anything else, close your eyes. It's so easy to be overwhelmed by the stimulation around you, so blocking some of those sensations out can help you to center yourself.
Stand up straight. My acupuncturist told me that this can help your breath flow better, which I can only imagine is a good thing.
If you're sitting down, cross your legs. This often forces you to sit up straighter. If you already have your posture in check, completely relax your legs and sit however feels most comfortable. Comfort is key in relaxing!
Breathe through your nose. This is another acupuncturist tip, meaning I can't explain why it works but it does.
Put your hands behind your back. In addition to helping you straighten your posture, this position forces you to use your diaphragm to breathe, which supposedly is a "healthier" way to breathe.
When breathing, stick to a rhythm. I do the "in-two-three-four/out-two-three-four" breathing technique, which essentially just means you count to four while you breathe in and count to four while you exhale. Even just concentrating on sticking to that rhythm can take your mind off things.
If you can't figure out how to breathe with your diaphragm, try putting your hands over your head.
If that doesn't work, stretch out your tummy in an upward facing dog pose. Stretch out as you inhale and relax as you exhale.
Take yourself into the fresh air and try meditative walking. Really all this means is walking as slowly as possible to focus on your breathing and the feeling of moving your limbs to clear your mind of distractions.
Drink water and decaf teas during times of stress. Staying hydrated is almost always the answer to any physical problem (and anxiety is often very physical) you may have.
