Category: Self-Appreciation Saturdays

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH!

With November just making its entrance, you all must’ve heard to get up off your asses and vote in this year’s election! Although the Presidental election isn’t for another 2 years, it is extremely important to not make the same mistake we made during the last presidential election in 2016. So please, go and register to vote!

I say this because, in every aspect of your life, your voice matters. You are allowed to be heard. You have the right to express yourself and use your voice hopefully for good. Spread awareness about the things that matter the most, like expressing outrage of the Trump Administration trying to erase the identities of transgender people currently happening and how he wants to abolish the 14th Amendment by ending birthright citizenship. Express yourself on issues such as discrimination and injustice, women’s rights, mental health; pretty much everything that matters right now in the world.

I will be the first to admit that I take my voice for granted. I sometimes feel like my voice is just one little squeaky thing in a room full of louder, better people. Sometimes, I fail to realize that all voices are voices, period. They express, they discuss, they have something to say, and taking it for granted isn’t right. We live in such a progressive time where changing the status quo and changing the type of voices being spoken for us need to change.

Using your voice is more than just speaking out. It’s writing your truth for awareness. It’s getting up from your house and taking a stance at a voting booth and vote for change in our democracy. It’s standing up for a person who is forced to be silent. Using your voice is about being outspoken in so many different areas, and truly not giving a fuck what anyone thinks or says about you.

I speak because I was told my anxiety and my mental health didn’t matter at one point. I speak because I was mentally abused. I speak because I have people in my life who I love that are being targeted by either having them killed or having their identities erased as if they aren’t real fucking human beings. I speak because I am tired of being afraid to speak when I know that my voice matters.

Many of us are tired of being silenced in one aspect of our lives, and it’s slowly changing.

-Liz. (:

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH.

Raise your hand if this week was an extremely stressful and long one for you. I’m raising both of my hands if that helps explain the week I had. It’s okay to have those types of weeks; you are only human, remember? We feel a wide range of emotions on the daily, and that includes all the negative ones that contribute to our bad days, our bad weeks, and even our bad months.

Healing isn’t a product, nor will it ever feel like we’ve been completely healed. Healing is a long, exhausting, and tedious process, and even then we aren’t that sure how long we’ll be okay for.

I’ve come to this realization when I finally thought that I had my life figured out and controlled just a little over a month ago. I was managing my anxiety pretty well, I was leaving my house more often and being sociable, and I felt like my self-image was getting better by the days. Then suddenly, that switch went off.

To keep some of these things private as I deal with them in real time, I will not be getting into extreme details of what’s been going on with me. I am currently trying to deal with it, and I would like for only the people I already told what’s been happening to be the only people who know. But to summarize it all: my healing process took a wrong turn.

What I’ve learned about healing and its process is that it’s an extremely difficult one. It’s a series of ups and downs and uncertainty that will never have an answer. You can never be completely healed; you may heal from past experiences or dilemmas that bothered you, but who’s to say when a new situation comes about, you won’t be affected by it? I guess my point is that healing is never a product. It’s not a thing that you’ve mastered in life. It’s always going to be a process, and that process is different for everybody, every scenario, and every stage/phase in your life.

For those who are reading this and are in a similar state of mind, be gentle with yourself and take care of yourself in any way possible. I know personally how lonely it could be being in such a process where you think others don’t understand you or you think others are judging you; there’s a chance there is someone in your life who will listen and comfort you because they care about your well being. Sometimes, it’s the negative thoughts that are stopping you, not your fears of speaking out. I am not speaking as a survivor of this “stage in life”, I am speaking as a person currently going through it and trying to get better as well. It’s hard, it’s sacrificial, and it makes you focus and see things that you repressed in your memory and soul for months, even years on end. But the best things in life aren’t easy to get, and your process and journey of healing are worth going through to become a better version of you.

-Liz. (:

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH.

So, to keep it sweet and straight to the point: They are a lot of different people in this world, obviously. But there’s something we typically don’t think about a lot about people, and that’s what type of aura they carry and what kind of soul do they have. If you’re still wondering what the hell is this chick talking about, ask yourself this: have you ever saw a person for the first time and already had a judgment about them? Maybe you saw a girl that you would typically stay away from because they carry this “tough-as-nails” aura. Maybe you lean towards someone who had a friendly or bubbly aura. Almost everyone you encounter will have some sort of aura about them, and when you get to know people better, you’ll start to understand how and where that aura comes from in the first place.

In the past couple of months, I realized that what I’m passionate about and what I want my place in this world to be is me helping others. I’m a mental health advocate, I’m all about exploring your authentic voice and self, and I’m willing to help those who may feel silenced be more accepting to their voices and own their stories by expressing themselves. I like to think that my a part of my soul was meant to heal people.

Being a healer, I know how difficult it is to heal yourself when you need it.

I feel like healers have the worst judgment of themselves; they may feel like their healing process doesn’t matter or worthy enough for energy, we’re most likely insecure ourselves, we have personal issues about our image and self-worth that we try to disguise or mask most of the times, and we decompartmentalize for other people’s sake. The best example I could give of a person being a healer is YouTuber Shane Dawson; he is responsible for the “docuseries” type of videos that are being popularized on YouTube and where he goes to help other YouTubers out with their channels, images, or just themselves in general. He’s a healer, but you can clearly tell that he represses some of his own healing by helping others out, and healers seem to be known for doing that. It’s like that whole quote of “the loudest in the room is usually the weakest” or “the happiest person is usually the saddest” – I feel like the people who heal others are the ones who actually need the most healing.

So, how do you heal?

That honestly depends on how you want and how you need to heal. It’s different for every person, but it always requires you to be a little selfish with yourself. First and foremost, you had to realize that you matter and how you feel also matters and just like everyone else, you deserve to heal as well. Healers are more so selfless, and it doesn’t hurt for them to be a little bit more selfish with themselves. Acknowledge how you feel, recognize the things that are preventing you from your own process of healing. What is it that you’re masking and disguising for the world? Once you realize these things about yourself, you’ve pretty much already told yourself that you’re worth healing and are at the beginning stages of that self-awareness.

I recognize that my behavior was a warning sign that I needed to do some healing for myself. I began to not feel like myself as a person, and I began to feel disconnected from people who I loved the most. I’ve never experienced something that drastic in my life before and immediately began to be self-aware of the things that made me feel the way I felt and what type of behavior that resulted. It took me a lot of rock bottom moments to start my own healing process because a lot of the time I believed that my own struggles were not worthy enough to start my healing process. I believed that other people had it worse than I did, and focusing my energy on myself felt like I was being self-centered and selfish with myself for all the wrong reasons. But healers are human too, and we deserve to heal in whatever we need to heal from.

So to all the healers silently trying to keep their shit together for the sake of others: take care of yourself and begin your process. As my first Tori once told me: “you can’t fill someone else’s glass when yours is empty.” In other words, take care of you before you take care of anyone else! It’s possible to be your own healer as well, and it’s important that you do so.

-Liz. (:

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH.

With most of the Shane Dawson “Jake Paul” series published and being viewed, there is constant talk about mental health and many of these labels are being thrown around without actual context to back these claims up. I know in my reaction post regarding Shane’s second episode of the series, I was misinformed by a lot of the information given about Anti-Social Personality Disorder and the differences between that and being a “sociopath” (which that’s a word that’s being thrown around a lot these days as well). I want to formally apologize for my lack of knowledge behind the context, and fell into the suspense and interesting aspect of that episode without regarding the feelings of those who may have been watching and who deal with this particular mental disorder. On my end regarding my post, I should’ve done more research on the subject (as should Shane I believe), and we have to stop referring to cluster-B mental disorders (or personality disorders in general) by the images and things we see portrayed in media.

With that being said, I would like to talk about something that I believe many people write off as just being a “characteristic” in people: narcissism. 

Continue reading “SAS: Let’s Talk About Narcissism. (10/13/18)” →

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH!

If there’s one time of the month that I absolutely hate, it has to be that time of the month. You know: the one week where you feel 20 different emotions at once, you’re in pain without any relief in between, and when you just want to lock yourself up in your room and hide from the world until it’s over.

Yes, I am talking about good ole’ mother nature. Aunt Flo. Your period.

About a year ago, I wrote a post talking about period depression, which yes; it’s an actual real thing. Period depression feels like 5 steps down from PMS; it’s like being kicked down to the floor countless times and you just give up trying to get up for the sake of your aching body. Many women experience this during that time of the month, and it’s completely normal if that happens to you! It is not weird for some women to experience minor symptoms of PMS, and it’s not weird for others to experience PMS in hell.

I’ve been a woman that has got it bad during that time of the month. The cramps are unbearable, the mood swings swing further than that amusement park boat ride that swings back and forth for fun, and the depression: it was real. While I always believed I became a different person once my time of the month was here, I’d always wonder why it just got worse all of a sudden. During my years in grad school, my period was my absolute nightmare. It wasn’t until I started therapy when I realized that all this time, my PMS/period depression was at its worst because I was dealing with an anxiety disorder.

Continue reading “SAS: Handling PMS with an Anxiety Disorder. (10/6/18)” →

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH.

So, we’re literally four months away from a new year. That’s insane. It felt like it was just yesterday the summer started. Sheesh, it feels like it was just yesterday that September started, and look where we are now. 

We can say that about time in general: it seems like the older we get, the faster time goes. You have people in their 20’s feeling their biological clocks ticking, you have people feeling elder every time a birthday comes around, and the years seem to come and go faster than ever.

What’s really hard to detect, though, is change over these years. We see it in ourselves and the people around us, but we never see just how much changes in society and modern culture until we reflect back on “the simpler times”.

Or, what I like to call it: the ignorance times… Lemme explain. 

Continue reading “SAS: Acknowledge Your Ignorance From Your Past. (9/29/18)” →

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH!

Happy first day of Autumn, TNTH readers! I am so happy that the summer season is officially over, and that sooner or later we’ll be all wearing light jackets and sweaters and not sweating. Also, happy weekend to everyone who’s had a very long, busy and stressful week; I know I had.

This past week has been a stressful one; one that I haven’t experienced since… probably grad school. If it wasn’t me preparing for my class for Thursday, it’s me handling personal business regarding my physical and mental health.

Due to me handling everything for the last couple of days, I’ve been experiencing some bad days. My emotions have been all over the place, I’ve been a bit more anxious than usual, and it’s just beginning to feel like these bad days are here to stay.

But when my mind is running down the spiral staircase of negative thoughts and feelings, I have to remind myself that at any given time, I can stop running down the stairs. I can walk back up those stairs. In my personal growth and mental health journey, it’s really important to remember that you, and only you have the power to turn your day around.

A while back, Claudia Sulewski, a lifestyle YouTuber, mentioned something that always stuck to me due to how real and raw it was; she said that one thing that helps her to keep going in life is reminding herself that

your mentality is your reality.

In a nutshell, a positive and optimistic mentality will grant you a positive and optimistic reality, and vice versa. Many other people that I followed over the years mentioned something similar to this quote, stating that happiness rarely stems from an outside source. Happiness begins with you. As a society, I feel as if we forget to check-in on ourselves; what are we doing to make sure we control our happiness? What is something that we do that makes us happy? Is it waking up every morning at a specific time? Is it getting your favorite coffee order before work? Is it your hobbies and interests? It’s crucial that we understand these things so that when we aren’t feeling so great, these are just some of the things we could look forward to, and do. Of course, happiness isn’t so concrete; sometimes happiness is just an emotion that comes whenever it feels like.

But what happens if it doesn’t come at the end of the day? What if you’re just in such a crabby mood to the point where you don’t feel like doing anything? What if you’re drained out? What if nothing brings you happiness that specific day?

Newsflash: it’s okay.

We’re human beings. We feel an entire spectrum of emotions on a daily basis, and sometimes happiness just isn’t one of them. Bad days are bound to happen, even to the happiest people in the world. We’re allowed to have them; sometimes things aren’t just going our way and we need a breather from life and time away from people, and even from our responsibilities. (And I mean an hour or two away from work that has to be done in your own spare time, not during work hours or anything else that requires your undivided attention.)

And yes, that bad day can turn into bad days, and even a bad week. And if the bad days last longer than two weeks, then it’s time to reconsider why these bad days are occurring so frequently and speak to your doctor about possibly seeking professional help.

In the most generalized scenario, bad days are temporary. Every time you go to sleep and wake up in a new day, you are granted another chance to make the most out of it. I feel like we forget sometimes just how temporary bad days are in life, and it’s really up to us to make sure they stay as temporary as possible.

So yeah, I had a bad week. I felt like the bad days were here to stay. I felt myself indulging in that sadness and anxiousness and tiredness of those bad days, and on most days I did that fight the urge to “turn my day around”. I kept walking down those spiral stairs.

But I stopped myself from reaching the bottom, and I started walking back up.

-Liz. (:

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH!

So, how are we already in the middle of September? Before we know it, it’s going to be Halloween, then Christmas, and then BAM! 2019 is here.

In the two weeks I’ve been away from the blog, a lot of great stuff has happened; I started my TA position back at my college, I officially have my Master’s degree in my hands, and I did something that challenged my anxiety.

It may not be the biggest deal in the world, but for a person who has been held back by their own poor judgment of themselves for years, I finally did something to theoretically take back control of my body.

I cut my hair very short.

Continue reading “SAS: Be the Boss of Your Own Body. (9/15/18)” →