Author: liz

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH! Even more so, welcome to the first official day of “Twelve Days of TNTHmas!”

It’s only right if I dedicate this first day to possibly one of my favorite things I’ve introduced to the blog:

Guys, let me start off this rant by saying just how much I missed writing for the blog.

When I first started TNTH (almost a year ago), I started the blog trying to portray this idea that I was this put together person who had all the answers to life and if you needed something answered, I was able to solicit my advice to you guys just because I want to help others with any issues they were having at the time. As the months past, I lost the passion I had for the blog, and that’s when many of the hiatus periods started. But as I’ve started to write for me and what expressed me best, I began to find my reasons in why I started this blog in the first place. Now here I am, extremely happy to be starting this new little series on TNTH.

I wanted to use this voiceless rant to express my honesty about something that I feel like many people can relate to because it’s still considered such a stigma in society. Here at TNTH, we advocate self-awareness, self-worth, self-love, self-acceptance, and we take mental health seriously. We express to our readers that if they feel like they are at a place in their life where they feel like they personally want to give up on life, they shouldn’t be afraid to talk and reach out to those around them or to a professional. I’ve realized in the last couple of weeks that saying it is a lot easier than actually doing it. Even though I personally go against the stigma mental health has, it’s hard to fight against it when many of us still believe in it.

I come from a family of mental illness; it’s apparent on both sides of my family. It has carried down generation after generation and it has been unspoken and unseen on both sides of the family. I grew up watching one side of my family disown a family member for being mentally ill, and even though it’s more than just that, that’s how my sister and I grew up to see it as. Currently, a family member of mine is going through a process of delusionality, something that was passed down within the family. The only person who was brave enough to seek help with their mental health was my sister, and she still is persistent and active with getting extra help. Other than that, even bringing up mental health with my family is always frowned upon; you’re labeled “crazy” or looked upon as “weak.” Granted, I come from a Puerto Rican and Italian background: basically two of the ethnicities that don’t respond to mental health talk so well.

For the last year, I’ve been dealing with some bad anxiety and depression due to grad school and my life in general. I slowly felt like I was having issues with everything in my life, I lost most of my friends from undergrad, and I was dealing with the nonstop work grad school provides their students with. Being the first in your family to graduate college and almost graduate grad school puts a lot of pressure on me. My family has this belief that with my master’s degree, I’m going to be making that good money that will eventually get the family out of poverty on hard weeks. To a perfectionist like me, that translates to “you need to get a great paying job when you graduate or else two years of grad school was really for nothing!” and I know that’s not what my family means, but it registers like that, and I’m constantly panicking about what life is gonna be like this time next year and where I’m going to be. I barely have the time to think about the present, what makes you think I’m thinking about jobs?

Every time I do express my concerns about grad school, I pretty much get the same reply from everyone: you’ll get through it, just keep pushing and do what you gotta do. Please stop telling me to keep pushing forward and get the work done. I already know all of that, but that doesn’t stop the anxiety, the pressure, and the late nights of writing 5 pages of work at a time for the following class. That doesn’t stop the mini panic attacks I get if I’m stranded at 10 o’clock at night trying to get home from class in the dark in a different borough. That doesn’t stop the constant struggle of trying to prove myself in a universe where I don’t exist because I’m not a literature major. Telling me to get the work done and over it is pretty much like telling me to build a bridge and get over it. 

As much as I wrote about how I felt during this year on TNTH, I still didn’t express these concerns to my family. In my family, I feel like I always had to take on this role of being the “strong one”. I was meant to keep the family together when shit got tough and that I was never bothered or upset about the things that were happening. I’ve always been described as the “calm and happy one” and it kills me whenever my mother would unintentionally joke around and tell me I’m not the bubbly girl I once was, that I’m “boring.” I know she means no harm, but even things like that flare up the depression I’ve been rocking ever since this year started.

This year alone, I’ve probably gained a lot of weight. I cut almost 8 inches of my hair, completely damaged the shit out of it. I never knew how my day was gonna go because I was so used to feeling upset or sad during the day. My anxiety got worse, I don’t feel confident or pretty anymore, my relationships with my friends, family, and even with Obie began to suffer, and I’ve had my fair share of nights when all I wanted to do was be invisible to the world. Most importantly, I lost my passion for writing.

Still to this day, nobody (besides Megan) really knows these things about me.

Because that’s the thing about mental health: nobody can see it unless you acknowledge its presence. It’s not noticeable unless you’re shouting at the top of your lungs that you’re depressed and don’t feel like living the life you have anymore. If you’re not expressing your mental health verbally, nobody is going to see the signs. As far as I know, nobody came up to me this year and asked me how I was doing. Nobody saw that little by little my hair was getting shorter and shorter. Nobody saw how I don’t wear makeup anymore and I don’t do anything pretty to my hair. Nobody saw how I just completely stopped painting my nails. Nobody saw me stay up at 3 in the morning to finish assignments that were tedious and frustrating. Nobody saw that I stopped doing the things that made me happy. Nobody saw how distant I was becoming. Nobody came up to me and asked me if I was okay.

But it’s also my fault that I never expressed the severity of my depression. I thought it was just a phase of being too stressed out over grad school and all of that, but even when the work stopped I felt those same things. When I tried to attempt to express my thoughts and feelings, they were never taken seriously because it’s always the running joke that grad school is stressful as fuck because of the workload. I always thought that my thoughts on grad school, no matter how much of it is actually my life, were a burden to those around me; that I was going to become that girl who spoke nothing but my struggles in grad school and I felt really embarrassed to share my concerns.

Even after all of this, I’m still telling those around me that I’m fine.

I don’t know when I’ll be ready to break this stigma, but I’m personally at the point in my life where it has to break sooner or later or else my life is going to go down a rabbit hole that it has not been in for years. I just wish people could see what’s wrong and give me the support without even having to ask me. I don’t always want to talk about all these issues; half of the time they make me cry and relive the year over in 10 minutes. I wish I wasn’t so afraid to seek the help that I need. I’m not on the verge of killing myself or anything, but I know I’m also not living my best life.

So, thank you guys for allowing me to express myself on here. I don’t know if I’ll feel fine after writing and posting this. I don’t know when I will feel fine. There’s no set and goal time for recovery, but I know I will someday look back at this and be like damn girl, why didn’t you speak out sooner?

It’s okay not to feel okay, and it’s okay to express your not-okayness out loud.

-Liz. (:

 

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH and most importantly, welcome back to another installment of A Voiceless Rant.

I am going to be 24-years-old in 2018. I am going to be graduating with my Masters in 2018. I will potentially get my first job in 2018. My life is going to make a complete 360 in the next year, and I’m not ready.

I’m definitely a creature of habit; when I’m comfortable, I tend to stay put. This year alone, I’ve been realizing that the things that made me feel like myself are slowly becoming distant. For the entire year, I thought was falling down the rabbit hole of depression to the point that I’ve been holding onto parts of myself that I don’t identify with, just for the sake of having one.

For the majority of the year, I felt like I wasn’t even a real person. I felt like I was just living each and every day without any purpose, without any motivation, without any drive. I’ve tried so many things to help me get back to the person I was a year ago and when I even got close to being that person again, it didn’t feel right, and I began to lose even more than I intended. Something’s gotta give, right?

As I’m now slowly transitioning into a healthier mindset, I realize this is potentially the start of a life-changing journey.

Do I sound non-sensical? When do I not? I can’t see the future and I don’t know if this will lead to anything, but it’s something you just feel. You look back at what life was like in the last couple of months and see from an outside perspective how you behaved and handled situations. Everything that I felt stems from the fact that my life is going through a transition from ‘student’ to ‘real-world adult’. I am preparing myself for the better, and undoubtedly the worst.

If you feel these things happening in your life, don’t worry. Things happen because they need to happen. Give it time and thought, yeah, but things naturally happen because they have to. You feeling this way is one thing, acknowledging it is a completely different thing.

1.) You feel the need to physically change something.

A year and a half ago, I had ombre hair. In March 2016, I decided to dye my hair all black. My black hair felt like the color I was going to keep for the rest of my life. It felt like my signature color because so many great things came with that hair. I felt like myself. When 2017 came, I didn’t feel like that person anymore. I felt like I was now wearing a wig of the old person I once was, the girl who was getting ready to graduate college with her bachelor’s, having a big group of friends in my acting class, and having a passion for cinema. For the majority of the year, I constantly bleached my hair and cut it really short just to feel like a different person. Two weeks later, I found myself buying black hair dye just so I “felt like myself again”. A month later, I would go through the same cycle. I am one of those women who changes their hair color and style whenever I feel like I need a change in life. I guess this last year alone I was afraid to let go of my comfort zone: long, black hair. I am now currently rocking chin-length ombre hair, and I feel like I am making it my own.

Also, I find myself wanting to lose weight, not because I’m lacking self-esteem or confidence, but I am starting to see and feel the potential health hazards that come with being overweight. I’m only going to be 24, but I am starting to feel like I’m 44, and I’m tired of feeling tired. In the recent weeks, I’ve considered getting weight loss surgery once I graduate in order for me to begin this new lifestyle change that I can’t do on my own. I mean, this is as life-changing as it’s going to get, but I want to get this done not just to “lose weight and look good”, but I want to feel good. I want to be able to move around like I’m in my 20’s. I want to actually live to see my 60’s. These little (or major) decisions to make to commit to physically change is as life-changing as it is. You change the way you live, and I feel myself wanting to accept that change coming my way.

2.) The things you tolerated before now annoy you, A LOT.

I was never a person who spoke up because I was never confrontational. For the most part, it worked, I just dropped things, but in a way it allowed people to treat me a certain way, and I would have no reaction to it. I always felt that I was able to fix things without actually sharing my side of things. I’ve been seeing that in the last year, I’ve definitely been more irritated and annoyed when people do that to me, and I never understood why all of a sudden, I was acting like that.  I was growing tired of the fact that I felt people weren’t giving me the respect I know I deserve. Because of that, I lost a lot of people in my life in the last year. It’s still hard for me to stand up for what I feel and believe in because I hate arguing, but it’s needed to let others know that yeah, I’m cool, but don’t disrespect me in any shape or form and my voice matters just as much as yours. 

3.) Your emotions are on a constant roller coaster.

Yeah, most of us will call it our hormones and PMS, but when it happens randomly at any time of the month, any time of the day over anything in your life, you begin to wonder what the hell is wrong with you. Ultimately, you may think that you’re just unhappy with life, but maybe you’re just realizing how to properly express how you feel. Just because you become more in touch with your emotions, doesn’t mean that feeling them and expressing them is a bad thing. Yes, there is a time and place for every emotion, but personally, I find myself feeling a lot more because, for years, I suppressed them. I always thought feeling too much was problematic so I would bottle them up until I forgot about them. But like everyone says: “bottling up your emotions doesn’t solve the issue.” This year I’ve cried more than the last three years combined, and I’m not ashamed of it.

4.) You are more aware of yourself; you are more in-tune with your soul.

This may sound weird, but I personally believe people who are going through this transition in their lives know themselves best. People who have their shit together got an idea of what they want, what they like, and how they react to situations, but I feel like, in this significant part of your life, you learn more about yourself. You go through different shit just to see how you react to it and handle it. You’re able to see yourself in an outside perspective. Because you are more aware of yourself, you are able to make decisions more efficiently; you begin to see what really in life makes you happy. The last couple of months have shown me that what makes me happy is the things I already had, or already was doing in my life: writing for TNTH, Obie, family, listening to some really good music, and honestly watching some Game Grumps. The simple things that I absentmindedly did or enjoyed before were now absolute cheer-me-ups once I acknowledged their uses for me. For example, a 2-hour long Game Grumps compilation of their funniest moments can instantly calm me down from an anxiety attack. It’s knowing how you respond to things in life and knowing what to do when put into a situation.

5.) You feel lost, or you don’t feel like you’re getting enough in life.

I think this is what made me realize that I might be possibly going through a transition in my life. I am constantly thinking about change. I know personally that whenever I think about change it’s because I feel lost or stuck in life. I feel like I’m not moving up to better myself or I feel like I’m not experiencing life to its full potential. I constantly think about finally graduating so that I can make TNTH a serious part-time job and going out into the world to find a full-time one. I am constantly thinking about traveling outside of the city to experience new scenery and hobbies. I am constantly thinking about where I want to be by the time I’m 30. Yeah, it’s great to live in the present and get things done now in order to get to where I want to be, but sometimes you need the break in order to move forward. Last weekend, I took an entire weekend off from school work and did the things I wanted to do (which was just a YouTube binge), but it felt good not to worry about school work for once in a really long time. Just because you have to go through hardships in order to get where you wanna be, it doesn’t mean you throw your happiness out the window.

Like I said: most of us are going to go through these major transitions where we feel like we’re changing for the worst. I felt like I was walking backward for most of the year because of it. If you allow yourself to think that way, you’re going to indulge in it some more. Misery loves company. Acknowledge how you’re feeling, and take into consideration why you feel like that. Think of it in a positive perspective. Think of it as getting to know yourself again. People change, you change, and it’s okay to feel like you are. Change is definitely a risk, but don’t be afraid to take it. Don’t sell yourself short.

 

-Liz. (: