I officially started my journey of mental wellness back in June, eight months ago. If you know me, you know how much I hate talking about my feelings. Do you know how awkward it felt for me to acutely describe to my doctor how physically hard it is for me to put on shoes sometimes. Or how sometimes I get this empty feeling and it just feels like an alien is taking over.

Therapy is difficult to navigate around. You have to find the right therapist for you and if you don’t therapy is practically pointless. Why pay to talk to a guy you hate? So medication it was. When I got my first bottle I googled it and looked at all of the things that could go wrong. I didn’t take my first pill till a week after I got the bottle. It made me dizzy, nauseous, I felt like curling up in a ball. The doctor warned me this could happen. My mother suggested that I waited a week before deciding whether or not I wanted to get off of them.

A few weeks after, I couldn’t tell if it was affecting me or not. But I sure could tell that I was ten times more optimistic and I had so much energy. So throughout the whole summer I stayed with my crazy pills. I never had an episode or felt like crap during those months. But I struggled to do creative things I loved. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t watercolor. I had such a short attention span and I always had to be doing something. I had a whole bunch of ideas floating in my head but concentrating one one of them was impossible.

I was so scared to be fully sober of my crazy pills. To be completely honest, it happened on accident. There was a few days that I completely forgot to take them and I sort of just decided after the third day of skipping them that I should go pill free to see how I feel.

I blamed a lot of what I was feeling on the drugs and I used them to justified my erratic behavior. But I felt like me again, the me that little eight year-old Cate thought she would be, so incredibly happy and care free. But I overanalyzed a lot of my problems. I tried to figure out whether my issues were stemming from my crazy pills or if they were really me. It drove me crazy and I felt like there were two Cates existing.

It’s been two months and I’m still in this weird in-between, wanting to go back on them and wanting to try alternative options. I don’t know man, I’m ready to try acupuncture, light therapy, meditation (probably not).