A Personal Blog.
Dear, guys – welcome back to Letters from Liz.
Before we go forward with today’s letter, I should put a disclaimer: this letter, in particular, can be triggering and/or uncomfortable for some readers who are sensitive to the topics discussed in this post. If you feel like you can’t read on, then I advise you to skip out on this one and come back on Saturday for a new SAS post.
Without further ado, let’s get right into today’s letter.
Dear, guys – welcome back to Letters from Liz!
March pretty much flew by, don’t you think? I mean, April is literally in two days and this time next month, it’s going to be warmer, brighter, and less gloomy and cold.
While everyone is getting ready to wrap up their productive school years and preparing for the summer season in a couple of months, it’s quite easy to fall in that rabbit hole yourself. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a break just like everyone else, but personally, for me, I feel like I’ve had enough rest and now I’m ready to have a normal, functional routine where I’m productive, and I’m doing what I love.
Being in the job-hunting process is an exhausting one, and even when you’re doing the work needed to find and apply to jobs, it just seems like the rest of the world looks at you as being “lazy” or “unmotivated”. It’s just hard out in these streets to find and land a good job, y’all!
So, when you feel like you’re just walking down rejection lane and see the warmer weather coming, it makes you wanna stop looking and pushing yourself towards the end. You tell yourself, “ehhh, jobs aren’t really looking for people during the summer, so I’m going to take a break and enjoy myself.” Again, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to enjoy the warm weather and scenery, but as someone who is working towards something, it’s very crucial to keep on going and working towards your goal.
It’s so easy to get sidetracked and unfocused on the big picture in hand, and when you do that, you might be missing out on job openings and other opportunities that are being put out there! Someone is always working on something, someone is always looking for extra hands, and someone is always looking for someone with the skills and knowledge that you have that they may need. Don’t just assume just because society turns off their productivity from school and work during the summer, doesn’t mean that everyone out there is.
At the end of the day, it’s important to keep your eye on your goal at all times. If you’re looking to find that job, if you’re looking to take your passion project to the next step, or if you’re looking to improve on anything in your life, it should always be something that you’re focused on doing, despite what everyone else is doing.
So enjoy the warmer weather, you deserve to just like any other person on this planet! Just make sure to take some time out of your day to keep it pushing, and to keep going in your process; whatever what they are for you.
For me, it’s to finally land a damn job.
Dear, guys – welcome back to Letters from Liz!
So, as a little refresher course for old time readers or potentially new readers: Last summer, I was diagnosed with Social Anxiety disorder, and this past November, I was then diagnosed with Major Depression Disorder. A month after my first diagnosis, I thought it would be beneficial for me to be doing both therapy and taking medication. As I spoke about on my post, “Let’s Talk About Mental Health Medication”, I discussed some of the concerns I had about starting medication regarding my anxiety disorder and how it could potentially alter my personality, lifestyle, and everything in between.
Now, being on mental health medication for 9 months, I’m here to discuss something that is just as important as taking medication when you need it: handling the side-effects that come from it.
Continue reading “SAS: Knowing the Side-Effects of Mental Health Medication. (3/23/19)”
Something told me to accept this offer from my partner who has constantly invited me to various social gatherings such as this one. If there’s anything about my partner understanding my social anxiety, it’s that he tries to be as helpful as he can, and in some cases, that’s asking me out to go places, such as tonight.
Although my body wanted to say no and blame it on my SAD, I knew that I couldn’t say no to everything in this world. That’s not reasonable. Also, it’s not fun being the 25-year-old woman that doesn’t enjoy her twenties while they’re still here.
To be quite honest, I loved going to parties when I was younger, and when I mean younger, I mean birthday parties for my friends and all of the proms I attended whenever I was graduating and stuff. I always enjoyed the loud music playing, being on the dance floor with my friends and dancing whenever a good song came on and just having those excited butterflies in your stomach anticipating the actual party that’s coming. Then, all of that change when I was in my late teens. I became more closed in, to the point where I hated to go out to places with even the people I enjoyed being around. When I was 22, I even tried to break that old habit of never going to parties, but that totally ended in me experiencing one of the first (and many more to come) anxiety attacks.
For a while, the people who knew me best just stopped invited me to go places, and even though it was because they already knew the answer that I was going to give them, it still hurt. Getting the invitation at least showed me that people still wanted to hang out with me, but when I didn’t, I just began to feel like a burden to everyone around me. Me not going out to places came with its consequences when I got into my twenties, and slowly but surely my friends kept leaving to go hang out with their other, more extroverted friends.
So when I got that message from my partner asking me if I wanted to go to a party just a couple of hours before it would happen, I said, “yes, I’ll go.”
Of course, the anxiety seeped in as soon as I committed to going:
It was just a whirlwind of thoughts that didn’t stop until I had to take control of my mind and my body. For one, I had to tell myself that I’m going with a person that I trust enough to be there with me for most of the night. If anything were to happen like an anxiety attack, at least there was someone who knows me well enough to know when I need to go outside and take a breather. Secondly, I had to trust in the risk. Anxiety, for me at least, loves to believe that I just have this never-ending bad luck and if I go against my comfort zone or anything that I’m familiar with, things will go bad. Taking this risk meant that I was putting myself out there in a position for potentially bad (yet great) things. I also had to tell myself nobody is really in there paying any attention to you in the first place; people are there to have some fun and celebrate at a party! Nobody is in there secretly hating you, (and if they are, so what?) But for the most part, you’re not the center of attention, so relax. Lastly, I had to tell myself that I’m only young once in my life, and going out to enjoy myself isn’t a crime, but a good thing! The more fun I have and more times I take risks like this, the happier and more comfortable I’m going to get being in these types of atmospheres.
With everything in mind, I went to the party and had a really good time. A couple of beers, two nasty shots that both my partner and I wished we never had, dancing, and a Philly cheese steak with fries later, I ended the night really proud of myself.
The success on how this night went isn’t even towards the fact that I didn’t have an anxiety attack during the party, it’s the fact that despite all of the anxious thoughts my mind and body were having, I still got up and went. Coping with SAD will always be something I’ll be working on, and for me to take this step forward to actually accept an invitation to a social gathering, it’s another step forward of me learning how to handle both my mental health and my life. This time last year, you wouldn’t catch me dead inside anyone’s damn social gathering yet alone a party for someone I didn’t know personally. And that’s why it’s such a victory for me: I got to be in control for one night, while my social anxiety was forced to go with the flow and let me take back that control.
So, yeah: I went to a party, and it’s simply one of the proudest things I’ve done thus far this year.
Dear, guys – welcome back to Letters from Liz!
Many of us in this world weren’t blessed with the confidence needed to stand by our life choices and our decisions without caring what people may think about them. For those who fall into the category of “people-pleasers” or “needs approval from people”, We never feel really at ease when we make a decision for ourselves and we don’t get that seal of approval or that “good job sticker” from others. Yeah, maybe when we were younger in our teen years, that decision-making process was easier because we had to follow rules from our parents or guardians and quite frankly didn’t have all of the freedom we so desperately wanted back in the day.
Now we’re adults and we’re telling ourselves, “damn, I need some guidance or sense of approval in my life to live it.”
Ladies and gentleman, welcome to adulthood.
They said that I wasn’t supposed to be in English Honors or in AP English in high-school due to my poor testing scores during the Citywide testing days.
Despite my ongoing challenge in grammar, speech, and reading comprehension, I still loved English as a class. I’ve read some of the most amazing stories throughout my 20 years in school, and I’ve come to create some of the most amazing stories from simple freewriting prompts back in public school. Although I wasn’t much of a reader, I was very much a dedicated writer. I’ve always enjoyed writing, and after discovering how it allowed people to hear my voice and express myself without people judging me one lunch period in the seventh grade, I knew writing was all I ever wanted to do.
Of course, I always thought there were other people better at writing than me. I knew that some people who didn’t care for writing were always praised more for just being more efficient and grammatically correct. But I knew I had something that only a few of us in this world have for writing: I had the passion for it. But with your teenage years comes doubts, worries, and people telling you that you should think about doing something else.
They said that I wasn’t supposed to major in English in college because of my speech impediment, my “slowly-but-surely-getting-better” grammar, and the fact that I didn’t need a degree to write.
Yet I finished my BA in English and went on to get my Masters in the same exact thing. But, this time was different. I entered grad school learning about rhetoric and writing composition.
My first semester as a grad student I took a course called “Teaching of Writing”. I knew I didn’t want to become a teacher anytime soon, but I figured if all else fails, I’d want to teach other students that writing is such a powerful tool that many of us take for granted. I came out of that class knowing more than how to teach a couple of students how to write; I come out of that class knowing what, how, and why I take writing so damn serious, and how I can help other students that I once was like, feel heard in their specific field through writing.
Rhetoric & Writing Studies are more than just “common sense of what and what not to do in an academic environment”, it’s active learning and acknowledging issues and developing ways to improve on said issues to make writing a much more efficient and useful tool in a student’s life. In a way, it’s like learning the sociology of a classroom, and learning how to make it equal and fair for everyone in it.
I related to a lot of the issues we got to discuss in that class because I was once one of those students, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, etc. I was a student who was washed out and not heard. I was a student who couldn’t get an “academic voice” packed down in their academic writing. I was a student who was ignored a lot of the time because I was always afraid of not being good enough, I was afraid of being looked at as “the student who gets pulled out of class to attend speech therapy”, I was afraid of not writing what the professor/teacher wants me to write, and I was once a student who was never heard because of my speech impediment. That feeling lasted all the way up to grad school.
So, when I decided to write my Master’s Thesis on this topic related to rhetoric & writing studies, I knew it was more than just a paper for me. It was my first piece of work that spoke my truth that I had to hide inside of me for 20 years. Because of that class, that thesis, and my professor who showed me what that world was all about, I am now a confident writer, an expressive writer, a passionate writer.
And all it took was checking out the curiosity I had for rhetoric & writing studies.
What rhetoric & writing studies taught me was that there aren’t a lot of people (especially educators) that have the background needed to run an efficient and equal classroom. There are observers of strict and traditional teaching who go into teaching and believe that’s the right way of teaching when really it’s an outdated way of doing it. Like everything else in the world, things change and things evolve to be more progressive, and yes – that does include teaching and how we run our classrooms! There are so many different techniques and ways to keep students engaged and interested in writing without forcing them to do it. I always believe that a student should always put themselves in their writing because it’s truly one of the only ways you will have students be proud of their pieces and their hard work.
Although I’ve been out of grad school for 10 months now, academics still hold a very special place in my heart because of this newfound passion I got to discover during my time as a grad student. It has given me opportunities that I wouldn’t have had if I didn’t go for it, and it wouldn’t have given me the certain drive I have to help future college students in the way I know I would’ve liked when I was an undergrad.
For where I am now: I’m looking for jobs that relate to the whole academic/college setting because I feel like it’s a place I belong to. It’s what I know, it’s where my passions lie, and it’s a place where I believe needs someone like me that continues to have that drive to change old habits and old ways. It may not be teaching yet, but I know that I want to encourage a whole new generation of writers that may not know that writing is the way to get people to listen to you, and it’s truly one of the only ways to dedicate change, speak of change, and express of change. I want to show writers that despite people telling them writing isn’t a real thing, they come out of it writing more powerful than ever.
And I owe all of my passion to that one rhetoric class, and to my former thesis advisor, professor, and now friend: Professor Carlo. Thank you.
Dear, guys – welcome back to Letters from Liz!
How was everyone’s first full week of March? Has it left you being excited for what’s to come, or have you already hit a bump on the road? Whatever your position is currently, I hope that this time next week, it’s even better!
Within the last couple of weeks, I’ve been really trying to teach myself what it really means to have the ambition or to feel ambitious. Of course, for everyone the meaning is different, but one common thing (I believe) people associate ambition with is being able to have a constant drive to success or towards something that they want.
And this day in age, I feel like many of us are afraid to act on our ambition.
Lemme explain…
Dear, guys – welcome back to Letters from Liz!
This was definitely something I wanted to talk about for a very long time on the blog, and due to the current events in the media (film, music, reality; you name it), I feel like now it’s the best time to talk about the whole “fave culture” and how slowly it’s now excusing the problematic behavior of people who are famous, rich, and in the limelight.
So, let’s start from the obvious point: people aren’t perfect, and that includes the people you idolize in pop culture.
It’s normal to like a person for their talents and their abilities to entertain, and you may also like people for just having a good and “relatable” personality. I still believe to this day that Kylie Jenner blew up when she finally stood out from the rest of her family, dyed her hair blue, and starting recommending things that people her age (and close to it) are liking at the moment. I’m not saying Kylie Jenner, aka 900 millionaire businesswoman who already was born into a wealthy ass family, is relatable to the common person by any means, but her interests and the personality she puts out there for her fans is something that they probably like about her. And that goes with anyone in the industry. I mean, we still have people who listen to Chris Brown’s music after a decade since he was once known for brutally beaten up Rihanna and we still have people rooting for Cardi B despite the fact she’s publicly said transphobic things. There will always be people who will forgive and forget the behavior of celebrities, and then there are some who won’t. But at the end of the day, someone in the limelight can pretty much do anything they want, and still know that they have a fanbase who will ride with them until the end of time, and that’s not okay.
Because let’s put it this way: would you have forgiven your friend for beating up their own boyfriend/girlfriend in their relationship? Would you ignore the fact that they openly say homophobic/transphobic slurs? Would you ignore the fact they are portraying another race or using it as their asethetic? If you wouldn’t excuse problematic behavior for anyone in your personal life, then why excuse it for people who don’t know and don’t give a shit about you?
Maybe you chose to separate the person from their craft, as many people do in their lives. Many YouTube review channels will still review products from problematic people and try to separate the product from the person, which it’s your prerogative because we all do it. I do it. I’ve mentioned in my February 2019 Favorites post that I really enjoyed Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next album, despite knowing that her cultural appropriation and her using race and language as a trend and as something to enhance her image and look. I don’t excuse her for that problematic behavior, because it is clear as day that she is portraying someone of color to the point where her music now reflects that image, that she uses the Japanese language and culture as an aesthetic (which was something we excused Gwen Stefani for a decade ago), and yet she’s being celebrated for being the first female artist to have 3 songs back-to-back on top of the Billboard charts. Now, I’m not saying that their hard work and dedication to their fans should be overlooked, because these people deserve the recognition of their work, the problem remains with their fanbases and how delusional they are to their fave doing problematic shit that despite being blatantly obvious, they choose to ignore it.
And that says a lot about us as people. It also explains how Donald Trump became our president despite almost everything he did. It says a lot about our priorities and it says a lot about our idolization towards people.
We choose to believe that our “faves” are like saints and superheroes and that they can possibly do no wrong. The fact of the matter is that these are real people who make real people mistakes and engage in problematic behavior, and it’s totally up to them if they want to acknowledge it or brush it off, and 99% of the time, it’s the latter. Because why openly admit to their problematic behavior and be labeled as something negative when they know if or if they don’t acknowledge it, they have people fighting their battles for them on social media? Why jeopardize their coin if they already know people will be ride or die with them by buying their albums, stream their songs, go to their concerts, buy their merch, and everything else?
I know how hard it is to just boycott a person’s craft for their problematic behavior because if you actually did do that, you wouldn’t listen to any music, wear any makeup, or watch any television shows or movies. People are not perfect, and as a fan of someone’s, you need to acknowledge the fact that what they are potentially engaging in is problematic behavior. Just because you enjoy someone’s craft, doesn’t mean you should overlook the things they are doing and the mistakes they’ve made. Don’t give these celebrities the benefit of the doubt just because they’re celebrities.
You really have to ask yourself sometimes: would I excuse anyone personal in my life if they did the things my “fave” did?
Dear, guys – welcome back to “Letters From Liz“!
Welcome to March! To be quite honest with you guys, I’m immensely happy that February is long and gone. February for me must be some cursed month because bad things have happened during the month of February for the last 3 years.
With that being said, I’m going through a depressive episode. No, it doesn’t look like me crying every single night, it’s not me being suicidal, and it’s not me hating myself. It’s just me being in a runt and feeling lost most of the time. While dealing with my emotional self, I’ve learned to find ways to take care of myself during these times where it would be easier just to sit in my sadness all day and feel sorry for yourself. Of course, sometimes those days of utter nothingness are allowed, but I know for the sake of my mental health, it is best for me to go through it as smoothly as possible.
I recommend everyone who is battling their own depression or going through their own dark times in life to take this time and figure out what works best for you. It’s so easy to just let your emotions and let everything in your life defeat you, but knowing that you are handling your business and managing to keep your mental health at a healthy state is such a badass babe move. Like, #TakingCareOfYourselvesTheBestWay2019
If you’re stuck in what it may be that you should do when you’re battling depression or a depressive episode, let me tell you some of the things I’ve been doing to help me get through the day.
I know my little things may differ from yours; as they should! As long as it fits you and your needs and gets you through the tough times, it’s good to always have some sort of idea of what makes your mind, body, and soul content and calm.
I’ll get through my own episode, and I hope you get through yours.
Dear, guys – welcome back to “Letters From Liz“!
I don’t know about everyone else, but this month literally flew by. It seems like the month just started! Now in 2 more days, we enter March. Which means Spring. Which means denim jacket weather! Well, in April it is.
Anyway, it surprises me that for such a short month, a lot of cool things happened, a lot of new things I became obsessed with, and a lot of life lessons were learned in the 28 days this month provided us.
So, without further ado: here are some of the highlights and favorites of this month!
Letters From Liz. 