Writing and the Journey Through My Mental Health
Good Morning Readers! Welcome to another blog on the Dark Nursery Diaries! With my first baby before my real baby makes its debut, I wanted to touch base on my journey navigating through my mental health and how it affected my writing all these years. It has been both a blessing and a curse in many ways.
As many of you are aware, I began writing Fallen Ribbon in 2009 during my freshman year of high school. That year was actually a really difficult time for me as I was struggling in school and began my first battle with depression in my life. It was the catalyst year that led to me moving to Boston in 2010. It was also the same period that I began really diving deep into the world of music which is how I discovered Kill Hannah which led to Fallen Ribbon’s inception. Between music and writing, those were my outlets for escapism, it made experiencing the difficult realities of this world bearable. That was how I lived my life for a couple of years both in California and Massachusetts, in isolation and alienated from the world around me whilst submerged into a world of my creation.
I got the majority of the first draft written during the first couple years of transitioning from California and Massachusetts and getting reacclimated to having a social life with new people. It was really difficult uprooting my life like that, but I needed it and it ultimately was the best option for me. I eventually managed to get through my first bout of depression about halfway through high school, and I think it was around the time I graduated and found out I was pregnant that I stopped writing the first time. In a weird way, it was thankfully not very long before I picked up writing again due to this time, Post Partum Depression… also later paired with an anxiety disorder mental diagnosis. That was a great time.
Over the years of handling anxiety and depression, I have discovered that I am reasonably decent at self regulation. That’s as long as I keep myself meticulously regimented in my daily activities and compartmentalize what I am supposed to be doing. When I’ve gone through my anxiety or depressive episodes, which sometimes can last for years at a time, it can be either a blessing or a curse, or both. On one side, it will be completely crippling and I will be incapable of doing anything productive much less any semblance of writing. And then on the flip side, my mental disorders will basically light a fire under my butt and I will fixate on only writing and fall into a rabbit hole. I’ll average thousands of words a day and lose hours of my free time to my computer all because I won’t be able to focus on anything else but writing.
I did later learn that these attributes were more in thanks to the fact that I had been undiagnosed ADHD for who knows how many years. It took me years to get someone to take my mental health concerns seriously despite seeing multiple therapists who were all luckily really great therapist, but somehow I managed to be unlucky in the sense that I struggled to gain access to resources that would better help me understand my mental disabilities. That was always the pursuit; understanding what was going on in my head. I spent so many years trying to self-regulate under the impression that my struggles were caused by the anxiety that I had, when in actuality, the struggles I was most concerned about were common struggles in ADHD.
I could go into the finer details of what those struggles were, but that’s not the point and would take way too many pages to go through regarding how I navigated them all. The point is, although it took many years to figure out and navigate, I was able to eventually navigate my mental struggles and figure out what tactics worked for which problems whether they were ADHD or Anxiety related. It’s an every day struggle, but I manage to get through it and utilize my time to the best of my ability. The biggest struggle that I have dealt with in relation to my ability to get writing or any of my hobbies done was my ability to focus on them.
When I am interested in divulging in one of my hobbies, it’s usually one extreme or another and never anything in the middle. Either I cannot sit down long enough to get anything done and get bored with everything under the sun easily, or I will only be interested in doing one thing and I will only do that thing for literal weeks or months. There’s almost never a middle ground. When I am in my writing mode, I will literally sit at my laptop going at it for hours and I will lose hours of my day because I will be so intensely focused on what I am doing. That’s when I have always gotten most of my work done, but it comes in waves.
For now, I am riding out that phase of hyper focusing on only writing for as long as I can milk it out. I’m enjoying this phase that I am in and I am going to take full advantage of it while I can so I can get the most of what I’m doing. That’s what I mean when I say that it’s both a blessing and a curse. I don’t know when my hyper fixation on writing will suddenly cease and I want to ensure I get the most out of it before it’s suddenly ripped away from me by my own brain. Thankfully there’s only a few more items on the To Do list (literally and figuratively), regarding Fallen Ribbon, and one of those items is to launch it on Amazon tomorrow!
