From age 16 when my intrusive thoughts started to about 23, all of my coping was self-taught. I don't think I'm alone in this: shame will keep people quieter than an old lady shush at a musical (I miss theatre, forgive the laboured metaphor. Remember audiences?!) My brain was creating violent visions that would dominate my mind and put me in a state of panic and half-functionality until I was either too exhausted to be scared. I would bargain that I would never do the things

When I realized that I never wanted another person to experience the uncertainty I did before my diagnosis, I started writing this blog. Well ACTUALLY I thought about it for years and then finally said fuck it and was brave enough to share. Taaddaaaaa! If even one person learns that they are not alone and gets the resources they need early, I will have succeeded. That's my purpose and this blog is the vehicle. I would usually say that I will die on the hill of diagnosis. Howe

I have a lot of fun alone. K, yeah. That way too. But that's not what this article is about. What I mean is that I genuinely delight in my own company. I make myself laugh when I do stupid things. I shimmy in the kitchen and use utensils as microphones with conviction. I talk to myself as I putter around the house. I think I am cute and hilarious when I drop things. In Easy A when Emma Stone decides to spend an entire weekend with a musical card that plays "Pocketful of Sunsh

I wouldn't recommend self-diagnosing O.C.D. in Indigo at age 18. But that's where my feet took me years ago on a life changing day. Flash back a week before the "book" store, in my room, on my bed, searching for the first time for clues about my intrusive thoughts. You would think I was Googling "how to cook meth" with how thoroughly I wiped my history. I thought someone would discover the chain of searches, declare me insane and lock me up. I wasn't afraid of incarceration t

Traveling is stressful on a good day, but knock back a cocktail of anxiety, an enclosed space for 9 hours during an airborne pandemic, moving to a new continent for the first time and you've DEFINITELY levelled up. HOWEVER, moving through tangible challenges has never daunted me. Illogical though it may be, it's never direct threats that arrest my functionality: things I can quantify don't scare me. It's the stasis, the quarantine after, if you will, that proves the bigger ch

“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.” ― Bessel A. van der Kolk Any kid who had the privilege to ferry to the Gulf Islands as a kid knows that Hornby Island is the best (FIGHT ME). Every summer growing up my family would spend a week there camping and I hadn’t been back since I was a kid (gasp). It was really spec

I am in doubt of where to start. There is a short lifetime of stories in my brain and heart; they all want to be told. I am overwhelmed by them and how little I have disclosed of my experiences. Luckily blogs don't have article limits so I don't have to get it right, I just have to get it out. So, how do you start telling a story that feels like a box of puzzle pieces in my brain? It's like trying to unravel a ball of wool that was cut in the centre; there is no long, linear