5 new changes to my mental health in May

Trigger warning: Suicide awarness mentioned, self harm mentioned once

Mental health matters! Today is the last day of mental health awareness month, which also happens to be the last day of my birth month. If you haven’t read my last post I highly reccomend it. 

Some major things happened to me this month, which involved my overall mental health that I wanted to share with you all. I can’t really give advice on how to deal with it all yet because I’m still figuring out myself. All I can do is share how I have started to work through everything and how I’m feeling right now. Then, I can reflect on my progress sometime in the near future.

1. Having to give away Hendrix

So, if you are subscribed to my TikTok (while the app still exists), you would have seen the video where I explained that my family had to give away my frenchie puppy named Hendrix. That has caused me a lot of stress because I didn’t want to give him away, but things just didn’t work out, and now he is on his way to his new and better forever home. But thar did still stress me out to the max thinking about if he is OK or not, he is very much OK, but I still couldn’t help but worry.

2. Birthday Drama

If you checked out my last blog post you would have seen that there was some birthday drama and hurt feelings between me, my birth mom, and my adoptive mom that was stressing me out so much and I didn’t know how to work through it, but that issue actually did improve once we all got all of our hurt feelings out in the open in healthy discussions in the days leading up to my birthday. I ended up having a really great birthday too.

3. Mental health crisis

So I have issues with really bad ptsd, and while it was much more severe years ago, I still cannot sleep at night without having flashbacks and nightmares and that has recently been affecting many other areas of my life as a result of my poor sleep. I do anything I can to prevent myself from sleeping at night, then I am exhausted all day and too tired to do anything of value. There is so much stress and hurt going on in my heart and i have been trying to fix that by distracting myself which isn’t all harmful, but i definitely need to start using some different coping skills.

4. New Psychiatrist

So speaking of crises, I was hit with a metaphorical bomb when I got a call from my Psychiatrist office saying that my doctor no longer worked there and I would need to set up an appointment with a different provider. This came all of a sudden and I was so anxious about what it would be like with a new provider eventhough I have gone through the process many times before.

I always have worries about new providers no matter how many times it happens. Well this week I just had my appointment with the new provider and he is much different than my former one, but I have a good feeling he may be able to help me in ways my former provider wasn’t qualified in so I have high hopes.

5. No longer on the Committee

A few months ago, I took a step towards helping with the biggest commitment I’ve ever helped with, and I joined an American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Out of the Darkness Walk planning committee to plan my area’s local walk.

But as the months went by I found that due to a mix of all of my mental health challenges that kept coming up and my complete regression into depression and anxiety, I wasn’t doing nearly as much work for the committee as I needed to to get anything done.

I was getting too overwhelmed and unable to focus on being effective at all. Because if that, I just made the decision to step down from my role on the planning committee and to focus on my mental health and not on spreading myself too thin with different tasks and obligations.

While I didn’t want any of these stressful events and situations to happen this month, it was powerful to realize that I could let go of worrying about the things I couldn’t control and that I needed to reflect on the things I can control so I know how to make a game plan to heal from this latest mental health crisis.

I would also like to mention how, overall, proud I am of myself that even though I am going through this difficult time right now, I am not experiencing feelings of self-harm or to die by suicide. For me, that is a big milestone, and while I am in a rough patch, I know it won’t last forever if I put in the work I need to to heal.

This is all I had to share for the end of mental health awareness month. I hope it inspired you to take a moment to reflect on how you are feeling mentally and this moment and physically too so you can determine if any of your physical sensations are a result of your mental state. I hope that if you are struggling with a crisis right now, you find the strength and support that you need to get through it.

Next month will be Pride month and I won’t make a big pride post since I did last year, but I will be posting something at some point next month that is pride related, and I will be going to some fun pride events in my area too. As of right now this is the end of this post so goodbye, I love you all, and I hope you stay tuned for the next post.