My Mental Health Mattered

Hi guys! You may have noticed that I took a brief hiatus from posting. If you follow along on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, you also may have seen my posts about giving up on the blog because of the poor timing and how I was feeling about myself. I finally felt the strength to step away from this and deal with trouble areas I was experiencing in my private life.

My statement read,

I wanted to come on here to say a very bitter goodbye.

After nearly five years, I’ve decided it’s time to end a chapter. My blogging journey has been so important to me and it’s something that helped me get through some of the hardest times in my life. I made really great friends and learned a lot about myself during my time blogging.

Unfortunately I’ve realized that it has taken a severe toll on my mental health and it’s been a huge stressor in my life lately. It was a cold reality check for me. I’ve learned that the constant worries about content and reputation were really damaging and those worries overflowed into my personal life.

Thank you to everyone who ever supported the blog or my writing. I’m so grateful for everyone’s constant kind words and it still brings me so much joy when you guys tell me you read my work. Your love got me this far. Maybe one day down the road I will be willing to do this again, but I’m giving this one up to God.

When I released that statement last week, I planned on being away from the blog for a few months to a year. I left in hopes of bettering my mental health, but I wasn’t expecting there to be such a harsh decline after doing so. My statement was met with a lot of support, which comforted me and reassured me that I made the right decision. However, after nearly five years of blogging, going without it feels like trying to breathe underwater. After just a few days of being without my blog, I missed it terribly.

Like I said in my statement, I gave the decision to come back up to God. I expected there to be a clear-as-day sign that I should come back. And I got that. Everyday I felt myself reaching for my keyboard to write a new blog post or thinking to myself how great a title sounded in my head, only to remember that I had moved past that chapter of my life. So I started debating on whether or not to return.

In the last week, I have also begun going to therapy to get help for everything I’ve been going through outside of the blog. I was not going to talk about therapy on here because while I’m not ashamed of it, I wanted this blog to be a place away from my own mental health journey while I tried to figure out what that would be like. But I’ve learned that it’s an important part of me now. And if I’m coming back to this community so soon after throwing in the towel, I think I owe an explanation. My therapist quickly picked up on my love of writing through our brief conversations about the blog, so she decided to focus on that.

I was hesitant about coming back to my blog and she knew that, but she (and many others) suggested I return when I was ready- since it did make me so happy- and change the things that made me unhappy about it rather than drop it entirely. So while I figure out what all that entails, I ask that you all be understanding while things change around for a bit.

For anyone considering therapy but not yet 100% sold on the idea, I highly recommend and even encourage it. I tell everyone that it’s something you can only do right when you’re ready, so don’t feel any pressure. Make the decision and do it for yourself.

Or maybe therapy is not right for you and you need to try other things. I encourage that too. The hardest thing I’ve ever done is recognize that my current lifestyle was not conducive to the life I was wanting to live and that I would have to make serious changes and put in a lot of effort to get there.

I know that things won’t come easy or all at once, but I am still as excited as I’ve always been to continue this journey with my passion project. Everyone’s support is appreciated and that’s what’s gotten me this far. Please stick around and join me in what’s to come!