Hey, Miss J!

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Hey. It’s 12:36AM.

I wanted to discuss why I ever thought that starting a blog on WordPress was a good idea. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not new to blogging. It’s true. Years ago, I had both a DeadJournal and a LiveJournal. I believe I started the DeadJournal in 2002-2003. The LiveJournal was started about four years later. The content of those blogs, especially DeadJournal was… not very good.

I wasn’t in a decent frame of mind in the least. As a teenager, I was depressed, frustrated and disliked just how much I was being picked on. I was struggling to resume drawing art again, all while fighting the cloying loneliness that lingered.

I didn’t have any friends, except my friends on the internet. They didn’t see what I looked like, didn’t judge me for being socially stunted.

I hated my life back then. Things got so bad that I shaved off my eyebrows. It was the only way that I could have an outlet without seriously hurting myself.

Sure, my family didn’t understand and put me in therapy. I bucked against that as hard as possible, refusing to take the pills they were trying to get me to take. I didn’t want to be a “pill-popper” as I called it back then.

As an adult in my late 20s, I found the two journals again… but re-reading them made all of those old feelings resurface. I wanted to cry when I realized just how much I was suffering back then. I was begging for help, but felt as if no one heard me.

It was as if I was screaming into a void, with no hope of even hearing my own voice coming back to comfort me.

I realized… Maybe – it was me who wasn’t listening when others tried to help.

Horrified and disgusted at how I was, I immediately set both of those blogs up for deletion. Was it cowardly? Perhaps, but I didn’t want to revisit that part of my past again. All of those lines of text were best left buried.

Fast forward to today. I’ve lost most of my family. Until late 2019, I thought that I could handle it, but it was too much. To lose my mother while she wasn’t that old felt like the final nail in the coffin. Then… there was a near tragic accident with my father and aunt in Spring 2020, right when Covid was in full swing.

Followed by what turned out to be months of intense stress and fear. Some days, I felt as if I would rip in two. I was pushing myself so hard in the early days that I lost 17 lbs in 10 days. Great right? No. To say that my doctor was concerned would be an understatement… I was weak, light-headed and still pushing my body harder than I should have.

I began to realize at the end of 2020 that I needed to do something – anything to get help. For myself. Because if I didn’t help me, no one would.

But I was afraid.

There is a stigma in the black community about having a mental illness. Especially in my family. You’re treated differently when people find out you are, as I quote a well-meaning family member: “Sick in the head.”

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. I don’t plan on only dealing with my issues while we’re in this month. And why did I create this blog with such a poor past with the previous ones? And why make it PUBLIC of all things??

I wanted to track how I felt over the course of my treatment for depression and anxiety. My hopes, wants and desires… I want to capture as much of it as I can. I have many genuine friends now that are offline, people who love and care for me more than I could ever imagine. They’ve helped me in ways that they’ll never know.

Will I feel as sad at the end of the day when I read these older posts later on? I’m not sure.

With medication and therapy, I want to say that these entries will be the beginning of the most beautiful days I’ve ever seen. I’ll be able to have a snapshot in time of them. Just as in life, I’ll be able to share the changes.

We’ll explore them… together. Thank you for taking this journey with me.

~ Miss J.