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Mental Health Monday – Awareness Month

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This past Friday, Mental Health Awareness Month began.

I never really thought about my mental health. I had things I felt – anxiety, sadness, too much of this, too little of that, and I never looked further. I was too young, being organized isn’t a bad thing, eating four M&Ms at a time isn’t problematic. The list goes on, and it ranges from what sounds like nonsense to what can grow into real issues, not just for me but for the people around me. My mental health issues don’t fall into illness categories, not everyone’s issues do. Sometimes we dismiss it as idiosyncrasies, or cousin Jane is just like that, it’s a preference. Our mental health affects not only ourselves, but the people around us especially if you live with family or friends, have work colleagues, hobby partners, etc.

Again, until I became suicidal to the point that I noticed a problem and addressed it with my doctor, it was overtaking all of my thoughts. Until then, it fell into the characterization of a shrug, something I do, and something I just live with.

Once I was diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety, I could look back all the way to childhood and see things that I did and felt that I thought were “normal” or things that I was blowing out of proportion with no genuine reason for feeling how I felt. One example of this was when my parents were out of the house. We lived in a split level, so there was a short staircase near the front door, and I sat on those carpeted steps in a heightened state of anxiety waiting for them to get home. Was I six? Ten? No. I think I was sixteen and much too old to be in this state because I was alone in the house. I’m not even sure I was alone in the house – I have two siblings; they may have been home, but it was nighttime, and my parents were not.

I have been on medication since 2012. Medication was not the only answer, but I consider it a large part of my recovery. Medication is not a dirty word; there is nothing to be ashamed of in taking medication to regulate your brain. I take medication for my diabetes and high blood pressure, and no one questions why I take pills instead of just “feeling better” or “calming down”.

Here are five things to do right now or when you wake up or just before you go to bed or whenever you want to do them. You decide what works for you. I was on the phone with someone for my job and I had tried to say something pithy, intelligent, and comforting and what I said was whatever works for you is – *long pause*, well, it’s whatever works for you. I don’t know if it’s intelligent, but it is certainly pithy. It’s also true. I can suggest hundreds of things to do, ways to think, lists upon lists of how to get through the day, but in the end,whatever you decide works for you is what works for you.

Here are those five things that work for me:

  1. Close your eyes and breathe. Through your nose and out of your mouth.
  2. Read a book. Any book.
  3. Color or draw. You don’t need to be an artist. Doodle. Scribble. Something mindless and colorful. Try it for five minutes.
  4. Turn off social media (unless turning it off gives you more anxiety). Not permanently. Turn it off for five minutes. Maybe ten or even fifteen. There is nothing happening online that can’t wait five to fifteen minutes.
  5. Drink a tall glass of iced cold water. Hydration is always the right answer.

Have a good week.

The Mental Health Monday posts for this month will also be crossposted on my Substack.

100 Days…And Going

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Yesterday was the hundredth day of my 100-Day Project. That would presume that I have completed one hundred prompts. Well…

Overall, I’m really proud of what I’ve accomplished and would highly recommend Suleika Jaouad’s book, The Book Of Alchemy: A Creative Practice For an Inspired Life. The essays she wrote and the ones she shared range from the funny, tales of life to the poignant heartbreaking twists and turns of life. Some resonated and some did not as all things in life can do. Some prompts were more difficult than others. I don’t recall which one, but I believe there was one that I completely noped out of, and went in a different direction. I laughed, I cried, and each prompt made me think and feel and wonder.

Today, I am on prompt 94 so I am nearly done with the book and I have decided to take two days with these last ten. I want the book to continue on. Last weekend, I was on a writing retreat with my wonderful writing group, and so my concentration was on that writing and reading, plotting and planning. I felt no guilt at all. Once Monday arrived, I got back in the flow of Alchemy.

The most recent one was a prompt about enchanted places and what makes them enchanted. There’s more to it than that, but that’s what I took away. I set that one aside on Friday, and went to one of my enchanted places: The Kateri Shrine in Fonda, New York. I spent about an hour there walking around, photographing flowers and chapels, signs and statues, and yes, writing. There was one picnic table with benches there and I sat there with my kindle and my keyboard and got out just over nine hundred words. There will be edits and additions.

After about day twenty, I made a plan to return to the prompts, and that is my plan for the summer between writing my book and keeping my deadlines, publishing on my website, and perhaps a Substack or two.
When all one hundred are completed sometime in the next week or so, I will read the end pages of the book, the contributors notes and bios, and then I plan to go back to what I’ve written and add, edit, flesh out the ones that have somewhere else to go. After all, that is what being a writer is: writing, writing, writing.

For the most part, I wrote my responses to the prompts on the same day I read them. I kept track of the subjects, categories, and word counts, although sometimes I feel as though word counts are arbitrary. I am stretching these last few out, savoring them. Even though I plan to go back to the ones written since the beginning of the project, there is nothing like doing something for the first time.

On some I added thoughts and paragraphs to the writing. Sometimes, I included ideas that were floating around formlessly in my head. Each prompt had so much potential, and it really is a wonder how many different ideas and inspirations I could get from one prompt. It’s glorious to see what others come up with from the same prompt as well.

Tangentially related, in the memoir class I’ve been taking this season, a book was recommended to me that I’ve begun, and it has given me the framework for my next book once St. Kateri’s Shrines (not the actual title) is completed. I had been struggling with that subject and how to approach it for years, and so seeing this one random inspiration is a gift to myself.

And now, on to prompt #94!

St. Kateri Tekakwitha

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I didn’t start out writing a book about St. Kateri. I’d never heard of her before a chance encounter with a random church in 2012, but that is an entire other story and a lifetime away, or at least that’s how it seems. As

I’ve written about before, I was drawn to her at the time very near to her canonization, and when I went through the conversion process, RCIA at the time, she was on my short list for confirmation saints. I went in another direction, partly for my attachment to Wales and partly because I still held onto the fear of appropriation. That might have been that, but in my discernment of joining the Catholic faith, I visited the shrine of the North American Martyrs and discovered holiness there. I found out that this palisade was the footprint of the original Mohawk village, Ossernenon where Kateri was born. She was born about ten years after the Jesuits martyrdom, but it never really resonated with me as her place. Over time, I discovered the Fonda shrine where Kateri had grown up. I visited the museum, the archaeological site, had a picnic there with the Cursillo group, a Catholic organization, and gradually began to read about her life. Her life in Fonda, her ‘escape’ to Quebec, the reception of her sacraments as a young adult, and her death at a very young age.

I’ve written about a lot of this, and some of it will feature in my book, but through it I learned more and more, and thought I’d visit her shrine in Canada to complete my journey with and alongside Kateri.

I’ve spent many meaningful hours at the shrine in Fonda, New York and the people there have been gracious and generous with their time and resources as I continue my research and writing. I feel a part of their community, and the first time I received an unexpected hug it came with a large smile welcoming me back. I felt it deep inside. I am drawn there more and more, each visit a gift. Learning about Kateri through different sources is also a gift.

She was born in 1656, parents died in 1659; she was baptized in 1676, received her first communion in 1677, and died in 1680. In 1980 she was beatified, and in 2012 canonized.

I give you the litany of her statistics to remind when big things happened in her life in order to inform that this year is a big deal anniversary. One member of the community did some math and as I said, Kateri was baptized in 1676. This was an Easter Sunday, and the date was April 5th. Because of that uncovering, it was realized that this year Easter Sunday also falls on April 5th! It is exactly to the day, and the Easter celebration that St. Kateri was baptized three hundred fifty years ago.

To commemorate this event, once in a lifetime I dare say, the Kateri Shrine in Fonda, NY requested ad received permission from the bishop of the Albany Diocese where the shrine resides to hold an Easter Mass on that auspicious day. The Shrine typically doesn’t open it’s buildings until May 1st when the weather is warmer as the public buildings have no heat, so this is a special day in so many ways.

The presider will be Fr. Michael Heine, OFM Conv., the Minister Provincial of the Conventual Franciscan Friars. They are the custodians of the shrine since its founding in 1938 by Conventual Franciscan Friar, Fr. Thomas Grassman.

It is a day or so away as I write this, but I am beyond excited to be going to the mass and to be part of this extraordinary event commemorating her baptism and we renew our own baptismal vows.

Information on attending this mass or any other events at the shrine can be found on their website: Saint Kateri Tekakwitha National Shrine & Historic Site