Tag: Mental Health

  • I Like Gardening

    I Like Gardening

    I have been doing something new and weird. I have been learning how to exist happily. Before I had my daughter, I spent four years dealing with infertility and having miscarriages. I was in survival mode. Before that, I spent four years with significant chronic fatigue syndrome. It ended my life and my future as…

  • Knitting

    Knitting

    Knitting is productive fidgeting

  • PTSD

    PTSD

    It isn’t over. I typed those words at the end of the long essay I wrote about my first two miscarriages, Expecting, the one thing I have written that drew some real attention. I know a few long term readers found me then. I remember a few comments about they would stick around to find…

  • Got Milk? Breastfeeding Part 1

    Got Milk? Breastfeeding Part 1

    Nothing can prepare you for waking up in the soft, glowy morning after having your first child—that one in the little plastic-walled bassinet next to your bed, wrapped up like an angelic bug in a hospital baby blanket—to the brick-wall reality that you are definitely already doing everything wrong…

  • Double Standards

    Double Standards

    It’s okay everyone, I’m in therapy, therefore this can be read as socially-acceptable self-deprecating snippet of entertainment and not a poor attempt to muffle the scream for constant validation that bubbles up inside me in ever smaller intervals that I am slowly becoming aware will never, ever be sated.

  • Productivity

    Productivity

    I have struggled with this a lot since becoming chronically ill, and even more so since the pandemic started. Sometimes I need the reminder.

  • Purpose

    Purpose

    Okay, so this one isn’t exactly fluff, but ideally it’s not a downer either. Despite my resolve to post fluff as often as possible through all this, I have been … struggling. My old friend depression has been circling…

  • Forward

    Forward

    Wow 2020 sucks hey. Generally for everyone in the entire world, it seems. My personal suckitude began in November 2019 when I had my fourth consecutive miscarriage, and then continued as I evacuated from bushfires threatening my home, watched the rest of my country burn on the news, visited the ED for a sudden and…

  • Number 4

    Number 4

    I’ve had a fourth miscarriage. I drew journal comics to process the experience. I’ve decided I will post them here. I have written about miscarriage before, (first two here, comics drawn after the third one here and here) and I don’t think I can do it again. Not like that. To do that, you have…

  • Things To Do

    Things To Do

    Ten years ago I was diagnosed with depression (although I believe I had it much longer—from way back in my childhood). I started medication and went to therapy. It took a really long time and lots of two-steps-forward-one-step-backs, but a couple of years ago I reached a point where I didn’t need medication to be…