A blog dedicated to breaking the silence around mental health, offering a safe space for stories, insights, and resources. Where Mental Health Finds a Voice empowers readers to embrace their journeys, find support, and speak their truths.
There is this version of me that I can see. She is standing beside me, but not next to me. I can't reach out and touch her because she is too far away, but I can feel her.
This book has been in the works for twelve years. It didn’t begin as fiction. Instead, it began as a memoir. It began as truth. Raw, personal, and difficult to hold up to the light. But somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t ready to be that exposed. I needed a way to reframe my story so that my body felt safe enough to share it.
Sometimes emotional neglect comes from the inside. From the way you silence your own needs before anyone else can. From minimizing what you feel. From convincing yourself you’re ‘too much' or 'too sensitive'. From abandoning your own voice to keep the peace. The peace within you.
Lately, I’ve been noticing how the strategies that once protected me now leave me exhausted. How the habits that helped me endure are quietly burning me out. How staying in motion has become a way to avoid sitting with myself. As I look toward 2026, I’m realizing that I don’t want to live only as someone who endured. I want to learn how to live as someone who is present.
I stopped working out. I cried in silence. I stopped meditating. I stopped living. I thought that I had the whole self-love thing under control. I had figured that out in 2014 and was more than ten years into that journey, and so I forgot how easy it could be to slide backwards. It started like it usually does. With a small thought. A thought that I wouldn’t have even noticed because, after all, I was an expert at self-love. A few days later, that same thought would come
Words are small, but they are mighty. We carry them, sometimes without realizing the weight they add. Some words lift us. Others linger longer than they should.
2025 became a year that broke me into a million different pieces. Pieces that are roughly glued back together. Pieces that, if any disruption occurs, may fall back out of place. In 2025, I had more days that broke me than any other year.