Category: Topic Tuesdays

April 25th, 2018: Morning.

It was a normal Spring-like day: rainy, gloomy, humid, yet somewhat chilly enough for a jacket. I woke up that morning feeling a lot like the weather in many ways, but I don’t think the weather could feel a sense of anxiousness like I did. I woke up worried more than anything. I had a busy day ahead of me: I had a final draft of my Masters Thesis to be revised and ready for publication, I had to mentally prepare myself for a long night of class the following night, and just in a little over an hour, I had an appointment I was not ready for.

Two weeks prior to this day, I had a regular doctor’s appointment. I felt regular, I was okay at the moment, but something kept bothering me. I felt like I wasn’t being honest with my doctor, and most importantly to myself. When the dreaded question of “have you’ve been depressed within the last two weeks?” finally was asked, I finally put it out into the universe.

“Yes. I’ve been more sad and anxious than ever before, and I would like to seek therapy for it.”

Two weeks later on this exact day was finally the day I’d start. I felt weak that morning. I felt like I gave up on trying to help myself out of this funk. I didn’t feel like myself anymore; it felt like I was handing over my body to some professional in hopes they “cure” me and make me feel happy and bubbly all over again. I had second doubts about going to this first meeting, but I got myself dressed, I put my jacket on, took an umbrella, and left the house with my mother to go to my very first meeting, or the first initial step of feeling better.

The Waiting Room.

The first floor of the building felt like a movie set in the 1970’s. I felt myself closing in on the muted-colored walls and brown, speckled floor. It was crowded with rows and rows of patients and groups waiting for group therapy discussions. I could see the discomfort in my mother’s face and the shock over the fact that our regular doctor’s office was much more modern and bright in terms of lighting. I got handed a clipboard of the usual registration questions you’re asked: name, date of birth, address, family household, allergies, list of medications, and so on. Having to answer these questions made me even more nervous to go forward with this. I wasn’t ready. I felt myself in that waiting room slowly shutting down. I wasn’t ready to bring up things that I’ve repressed in my memory for months, even years on end. What does my family think about the thought of me bringing up family secrets? What does my partner think about me being in a mental health environment? Am I considered weak? After some time passed by, a social worker came up to me and said, “Hi, are you Elizabeth?”, which then I replied, “Yes.” She asked me to go upstairs with her as my mother sat in the waiting room, waiting for me to come back. As the elevator came back down to pick those waiting at the first floor up, I felt my legs getting shaky.

The Office.

I realized I began doing this thing I normally do when I’m painfully shy and nervous when talking to people I’m not comfortable with: I began squeezing my damn fingers together until they turned purple-y red. She introduces herself as Allison, which I was grateful that she was a female social worker because I wasn’t comfortable talking about my problems to a guy. She pulls up a long document of boxes and rows for words and begins to ask me some questions. They start off as being basic and non-triggering: what am I studying in grad school, am I in a relationship, blah blah blah, and so on. I guess they ask you the easy questions first to get you comfortable talking, so after explaining my basics for her to get a better understanding of me, the heavy-hitters begin to come and I find myself taking more time to answer them.

• “Was there any point in your life where you had suicidal tendencies or thoughts?” “Yes.”
• “Did you have a plan?” “If you count thinking about scenarios like getting hit by a car, then I guess yes. But in terms of taking pills or more common methods, then no.”
• “Can you tell me more about this time in your life? What was happening?”

I was brought back to those specific moments, ones that I haven’t verbally spoken about fully in detail in what seemed like years. I kept ending every sentence with “but I don’t think about that time anymore” or “it doesn’t affect me anymore” when clearly it’s visible that I’m lying through my teeth. Yeah, it doesn’t interfere with my daily living, but it played a major role in why I function the way I function. It’s a part of the snowball that began to roll and roll into this exact moment all these years. And I should’ve realized that the moment I began to pretend that part of my life didn’t exist anymore.

The interview became heavier and heavier as time passed by, and I was now feeling the knot in my throat and trying immensely hard to hold back from crying. I felt raw, I felt stripped, I felt exposed, and I felt vulnerable. I felt as delicate as glass. I felt easily torn like a piece of paper. I had admitted things into the universe that I repressed in my mind for so long.

“What made you want to seek therapy?”

I’ve felt more disconnected from myself more than ever in my life. I don’t know who I am anymore, I don’t know what I am to people, I don’t know where I belong in life. I graduate a month from now, and I’m scared. I’m afraid of everything that’s to come to the point where I’m not even happy that I’m graduating. I never felt this distant from myself and from those I care about most ever in my life, and I feel like it’s gradually getting worse.

After a while, the words just felt empty. They had no meaning. They had no depth in them. They felt loose and liquified, like vomit. I was done talking for the day, and I needed a breather. I think Allison sensed that, and she automatically said the interview was done. She showed me my rights as a patient, and she told me that in a week or so, I’d be getting a phone call from the therapist that is assigned to me, and from there the therapy process begins.

The Departure.

The elevator doors open and I immediately see my mother in the same spot she was in before, but the first floor is now noticeably emptier than it was before. I had to make an appointment for the second part of the evaluation, which was the official diagnosis with my assigned psychiatrist. That wasn’t going to be until two months later: after grad school ends, after I graduate, after everything I was anxious about should be finished. I sucked it up and made the appointment anyway. After we left the building, my mother asked me what did I say to the social worker in the interview. Of course, I said nothing and just went on with my day.

September 25th, 2018: Morning.

As I’m reviewing this before publication at noon, I realize just how much progress I’ve made since then. Since then, I’ve seen my therapist once a week, I’ve seen my psychiatrist once a month, I’ve been on anxiety medication since July, and I’ve seen an immense change in how I function. I’ve been able to get closer to the people I loved most after knowing what I am working with. I’ve been able to be more aware of my behavior and actions towards things and not be so afraid or ashamed to show my anxiety to the world. I am more vocal about how I feel, I am becoming more assertive with my anxiety disorder, and I am able to make steps moving forward in the progress of getting a career. Five months ago, I was a struggling grad student, and five months later I am now a TA for a graduate class in preparation for teaching my own college course in the future. I now have a professional who I trust enough to share and be honest about myself with in hopes of getting a better understanding of myself and gaining a better solution into overcoming certain obstacles. Five months later and I know I’m not completely cured, nor do I believe I’ll ever be knowing the severity of my social anxiety, but I am now in a better headspace than I was entering this world of therapy five months ago.

Five months later, I don’t repress uncomfortable thoughts or memories as I used to. I now discuss them in therapy.

 

-Liz. (:

 

Hey guys, welcome back to TNTH.

This post was inspired by a YouTuber I follow on Twitter named Tasha Leelyn. Her YouTube channel boomed when she was the face of semi-permanent hair dyes and pastel hair; she had bleached and dyed her hair crazy, funky colors for the last three years and as of last year, she dyed it back to dark brown. For obvious reasons, her hair was extremely damaged from the constant bleach that even gave her chemical burn during one bleach job. Many of her old-time viewers began writing in her comments, “I miss Old Tasha!”, “I miss the pastel hair!”, and “I miss watching your hair videos!” On the outside, it’s easy to say that to a person without personally knowing them and it’s also very common for people to be subscribed to a person for a specific type of content and when that person doesn’t do it anymore, they ultimately unsubscribe. Watching her as “Dark Brown Hair Tasha” for the past year and looking back at her videos from her pastel days, I can see why she chose to change her hair color, and I can see just how doing something as simple as that could be the answer to true happiness. I experienced this for myself in the last 6 years.

The first major hair change I had was during my senior year in high-school. I went completely blonde after having dark-brown hair all my life. It gave me the attention and confidence that I thought was going to make me feel better. In a way, the blonde hair made people notice me. I was seen and people liked me better with my blonde hair. But, the blonde hair was a cover-up since the beginning. I only went completely blonde because I wanted to be unrecognizable. I wanted to be a completely different person because I hated who I was, and who I’ve become. Even with all of the compliments and people liking me with blonde hair, I wasn’t getting better. I wasn’t feeling better, and people didn’t notice that because my bright, blonde hair masked my depression.

People have this assumption that when women dye their hair darker (i.e from blonde to dark brown or black), that’s usually the sign to notice their depression or sadness going on in their lives. Dark hair usually blends in with the crowd; you don’t notice someone so quickly when most of the world is brunette or generally dark haired. Many of the people who’ve experimented with bright/pastel hair color can tell you that one of the main reasons they decided to do an unnatural hair color is to literally become different people. In a way, they want to reintroduce themselves as a new person, hence why they choose hair colors that are different and that stand-out.

I kept my hair blonde for months, despite it becoming brittle and damaged after touching up my roots once a month. Once I had to give up the blonde, my new addition was hair dye, both natural and unnatural, because I already knew that I was able to change myself after every bad event in my life. For most of 2012 and 2013, I constantly changed the color and cut off my hair whenever I got the chance to. People deemed me this hair goddess that could do no wrong to my hair, and my hair suddenly became my only source of identity. People called me eccentric and different, and I tried to hold on to that identity for as long as I could.

Every now and then, I will look back and notice how I would use my hair as a security blanket. My hair had to be long, my hair had to be some sort of blonde, whether all over or in an ombre, and my hair had to change frequently. I went through a lot of variations to find the color I felt like myself in, and that’s okay to go through that stage to find what hair color and hairstyle makes you feel the most like you. But with every change came a new thing that I wasn’t happy about in life. I knew as a young adult that life happens, but I couldn’t comprehend that changing my hair meant that those unresolved issues would just disappear. I just kept piling more and more baggage into my hair changes and at a certain point, the damage was irreversible.

On March 22nd, 2016, I decided that I was going to stop bleaching and coloring my hair to let my hair grow long and healthy. I picked up a box of black hair dye, a color that I ultimately avoided using knowing the difficulty of removing it from hair altogether, dyed my hair that night, and thus started almost two years of revelation. 

While rocking this new black hair of mine, I started to realize that I was beginning to not rely on constantly changing the color whenever I needed to mask an issue I was having. I was forced to confront it in some way. I’m not going to lie and say that this urge to suddenly changed my hair disappeared after learning that you don’t need to do so to feel better about yourself. Most of last year, I fell back into the habit of bleaching and changing my hair back and forth from color to color and because of that most of my hair had to be cut off. If anything, having to have short and black hair has made me ultimately go into “Hair Rehab” as I like to call it. It’s also made me appreciate and learn more about myself as a person, not just “the girl who changes her hair a lot”. For a person who uses their hair as a security blanket, having my hair in its current state has challenged me to seek beauty in more ways than just one. Yeah, I have my moments were the comments of “I miss blonde/ombre Liz” get to me. I look back at old photos and I tell myself how pretty my hair was before. But every time I do look at these photos, I see these words on them. I see myself in that time of my life. I tell myself that I don’t want to have that hair again because I don’t want to be a depiction of who I was. And I wish that people and those around me were able to see those words in these pictures when they say, “oh my God, I like you with this hair color.” But they can’t, and so what if they don’t? I see them, and they give me the reason why I am where I am today.

Personally, my dark, black hair just fits me. It’s close to my natural hair color, and it makes me look healthy. I feel like with blonde/other colored hair, I look very pale and not healthy-looking in the face. Surprisingly, my black hair puts color on my face and suits me better than any color I ever had.

This is my signature color, and it’s the reason why every time I try to lighten my hair I feel a little weird and not myself. Life with my black hair has made me the happiest I’ve been in a really long time. My hair color, my style, and my mentality are now my own and I felt more like me than I ever did in the recent years.

-Liz. (:

Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH.

Let me start off this post by publicly stating that this post is by no means an attack on people who identify as a man or any term regarding masculinity. This post is simply influenced by a Facebook post a friend of mine had on her timeline and ended being possibly one of the most disgusting things I read in her comments section. The shared article was about Oklahoma’s insane outlook on women and abortions. In a nutshell, women need to be granted permission by men in order to move forward with an abortion. Without being too political, I am pro-choice. I believe it is up to the women to decide what she wants to do with her body. I believe that in certain circumstances, getting an abortion shouldn’t be out of the question. My friend, Tori, mentioned this scenario to the man she was debating with. Women who are rape victims could potentially get pregnant with their rapist’s child. I remember taking a literature class during my undergrad year where a girl had shared with the class that she has conceived the night a man raped her mother. Years later, I still remember all of the thoughts in my mind, thinking what she possibly goes through in her head day-to-day. Many women get into this scenario; many people just don’t speak about it because these women never report them. This person then began to justify the actions of Brock Turner, the high-profile story of him raping a girl behind a dumpster while she was unconscious. That’s where I had to draw the line and it was immensely difficult to stop reading.

The comments this man publicly posted under my friend’s shared article was a prime example of the toxic masculinity surfacing in a time were movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp exist. Right now, men in various different industries are beginning to be called out by women who are finally finding the courage to speak out and have their voices heard. I’ve actually heard men in my family say some really crazy shit about this topic, and the only reasoning I could make of it is because men nowadays feel the need to have a defense mechanism. Some men feel the need to defend their manhood and their gender as a whole; I know this is nothing compared to Black Lives Matter, but the way men are trying to defend themselves is the same way “Blue Lives Matter” became a thing. 

In other words, nobody would be saying anything if the current set of events were not happening.

Again, I am not saying all men are scum or trash and are the devils in humanity. I am simply saying that there are some men out there who will rather defend a man’s morally wrong actions instead of actual facts just to protect the overall idea of manhood and masculinity. 

When women chant “a man ain’t shit if he doesn’t understand no”, men respond “she was all on me at the club, dancing on me, why wasn’t she saying no earlier tonight?” When women chant “men are trash if they think it’s cute to verbally/physically abuse women”, men respond “you don’t know what women do to provoke us. Isn’t it just common sense to respect a human’s wishes and if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say at all and to NEVER harm another human being?

This idea that men have to enforce their masculinity by being strong and aggressive and masculine is one of the problems in society. Yes, we could also get into women and the things they do that are problematic because nobody in this world is perfect. What I find crazy is that the morals of everyday life are still getting questioned if it’s right or if it’s wrong.

Toxic masculinity is definitely something that is being observed more and more each day. We see it in our friends, our families, our neighbors, our coworkers; it pretty much exists in every single person who identifies as a cis man because it no doubt stems from the way these men were raised. It goes all the way back to childhood when families would praise the son for having a girlfriend yet scold the daughter for even liking a boy in her class. That boys will be boys bullshit excused their rough, aggressive playing on the playground. That teasing a girl to the point of bullying her was a sign that a boy secretly liked you. That crying and showing emotions meant you were a “pussy” or “faggot”. That if you liked girly things and the same sex, you were not considered a man anymore. That you had to be a certain way to be considered a man in society because if you’re anything but a man in it, you are looked down upon.

Fellas, we aren’t asking you to not be men, we are asking you to be functional human beings that understand what is morally right from morally wrong and to be mindfully open about the things happening in the world. We live in such a progressive world; the only way you’ll understand it all is to keep an open and explorative mind to it.

Masculinity and Femininity are simply labels. They are irrelevant to issues that are morally right and wrong. I’m not saying abortion is morally wrong or right indefinitely; that’s a debate that will never be black or white. The issue of sexually harassment, sexual assault, and rape should be something that is always looked at as morally wrong, whether the offender is male or female, or other. Rape is universally fucking wrong, no matter what your gender is.

So tell me this: is it really worth it justifying wrongfully moral actions to “save” your manhood? The same goes for women. The same goes for humanity.

 

-Liz. (: