Content note: This post discusses anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and a past suicide attempt. Please be mindful of your own well being when reading.
It’s a rainy day here, so what better time to return to my cozy little corner of the internet than now?
It’s been a while since I’ve sat down to write a post, but I’ve got something on my heart.
So, here we go.
This morning, even the normal parts of my routine felt harder than they usually do.
Feeding Starburst Penelope breakfast. Starting my day. Just doing the things I do every day. Those things aren’t always effortless for me to begin with, but today they felt even heavier.
I had this feeling sitting in my chest, and at one point I felt like I actually had to remind myself how my body was supposed to breathe.
Okay.
Your chest rises.
Now your chest falls.
Because underneath everything else, all I could think about was my therapist and what she’s going through.
And somewhere in the back of my mind, there was a snake.
Rattling its rattle.
Waiting.
Lurking.
But before I explain the snake, I probably need to explain who my therapist is.
Without sharing parts of her life that aren’t mine to share, my therapist has been seeing me for almost ten years.
Finding My Therapist
My journey with mental health goes back about as far as I can remember.
I remember being five years old and my mom asking me why I worried about things that five-year-olds shouldn’t have to worry about.
Why was I thinking about these things?
Why was I so worried?
And I couldn’t tell her.
I didn’t know why, either.
The funny thing is, I grew up surrounded by therapists.
Not mental health therapists, necessarily, but occupational therapists and physical therapists because of my cerebral palsy.
I remember being called a “worry wart.”
I remember adults telling me not to worry so much.
I remember hearing different versions of the same thing my mom would tell me: You don’t need to worry about that.
And now that I’m older, sometimes I wonder why nobody stopped and asked a different question.
“Why is this child worrying this much?”
Why didn’t somebody pull my mom aside and say, “Maybe this is more than worrying.”
I don’t say that because I’m angry with my mom or my family. Our relationship is much stronger now, and they understand things that none of us really understood then.
But sometimes I wonder how different things might have been if someone had realized earlier that this wasn’t just me being a “worry wart.”
Maybe it would have saved all of us some heartache.
So when I tell you that anxiety and depression have been part of my life for as long as I can remember, I’m really not exaggerating.
In 2016, my parents and I were getting ready to move from Tallahassee to St. Augustine. I was moving with them because I wasn’t ready to live on my own yet.
Right before we left Tallahassee, something happened that I think changed the way my parents understood what was going on with me.
I don’t remember the entire conversation that led up to it, but I remember having a meltdown. I went into my room and cried and cried and cried.
Around that same time, I had been trying desperately to explain that anxiety wasn’t just me being dramatic or emotionally immature — something I couldn’t simply decide to stop doing.
I sent my mom articles from The Mighty about anxiety and mental health because I needed her to understand that this was a real medical issue — that what was happening inside my head wasn’t something I was choosing.
I wanted so badly to be able to explain what was happening to the people around me.
There were so many times when I tried.
The words were there. They were in my mouth, sitting on my tongue, and I knew what I wanted to say.
But I literally could not get my mouth to move.
I couldn’t make the words come out.
And when you can’t explain what is happening inside your own head, it becomes even harder for the people around you to understand how serious it is.
That was part of why I started sending my mom articles about anxiety and mental health. If I couldn’t always say the words myself, maybe I could show her something written by someone who could.
Somewhere in all of that—the articles, the crying, the conversations—I think something finally clicked for my parents.
I had seen a therapist before who, even while I was trying to explain the thoughts happening inside my head, told me they didn’t think I was at the point of being suicidal.
But I knew what was happening inside my own head.
And by the time we were getting ready to leave Tallahassee, I was in one of the darkest places of my life.
I distinctly remember my parents telling me, “Just hold on until we get to St. Augustine. Hold on, and we’ll get you help.”
So I did.
I held on.
And after we moved, my mom and I started looking for a therapist.
And when I say my mom and I, I really mean that. At that point in my life, I was still scared to make certain phone calls by myself, so she was on the phone with me when we called to make that first appointment.
We actually called asking about a different psychologist.
Before we scheduled anything, my mom asked about accessibility. Because of my cerebral palsy, I use a walker or my power wheelchair depending on what I need, so accessibility isn’t something I can just assume will be there.
My mom explained that her daughter had cerebral palsy and asked whether the office would be accessible for me.
The psychologist we had originally asked about wasn’t available, but the receptionist told us there was another psychologist who was taking new patients.
For the sake of her privacy, I’m going to refer to her as my therapist here.
And because my mom had already explained that I had cerebral palsy, the receptionist told us something I was absolutely not expecting.
My therapist had cerebral palsy, too.
I remember just going silent.
I genuinely wondered if I had heard her wrong.
Because for years, this was something I had wanted without ever really believing I would find it.
I didn’t just want a psychologist who understood anxiety and depression.
And I didn’t just want someone who understood physical disability.
I needed someone who could understand that, for me, those things weren’t separate.
My cerebral palsy, my anxiety, my depression—they have always been tangled together in ways that I still don’t always know how to explain.
Even now, I couldn’t tell you exactly where one ends and another begins.
I needed someone who understood that my mental health wasn’t happening over here while my disability existed somewhere else.
They were part of the same life.
My life.
I wanted someone who could understand that without me having to separate myself into pieces first.
I had wanted that for so long.
I just never thought I would actually find it.
So when the receptionist told us that my therapist had cerebral palsy, too, it kind of took my breath away.
Not because it was dramatic. Just because it felt like I had spent so long hoping someone like her existed, and suddenly I was being told that she did.
And honestly?
It still sounded a little too good to be true.
And then I actually met her.
I went into that first appointment by myself, and I remember trying to explain that I had done talk therapy before and that it hadn’t really been enough for me.
At that point, I already had this feeling that I needed more than just therapy.
I thought I needed medication, too.
But I was terrified to say that out loud, especially to my mom.
I think part of that was because admitting I might need medication made everything feel more real — it meant admitting that what was happening in my brain wasn’t something I could just talk myself out of.
I remember telling my therapist that I thought I needed both.
She told me that maybe we could meet a few times first and see how things went, and then, if it still felt like I needed medication, we could talk about that.
And I remember a wall going up almost immediately.
Learning to Be Seen
Looking back, I don’t think my therapist did anything wrong.
I think I was scared because somewhere inside me, I already knew that talking alone wasn’t going to be enough for me anymore.
Maybe it never really had been.
So when I heard that we were going to try just talking first, part of me panicked.
And that wasn’t the only thing happening.
I had spent my whole life getting really, really good at hiding what I was feeling.
I knew how to mask.
I knew how to let people see only the parts of me I was willing to show them.
And somehow, during one appointment with someone who had never met me before, I felt like my therapist saw more than I wanted her to.
She saw me.
And being seen scared the hell out of me.
When my mom came to pick me up after that appointment and asked me how it went, I remember telling her very clearly:
I did not want to go back.
Absolutely not.
Never again.
But my mom convinced me to give my therapist one more chance.
The next time, my mom came into the appointment with me so she could help explain more of my history and some of the things I had struggled to put into words myself.
And somehow, that helped.
I went back. And then I went back again.
There is probably an entire other blog post somewhere in the story of how “I am never going back to that woman” eventually became almost ten years.
But for today, all you really need to know is that my mom convinced me to give my therapist another chance.
And I did.
For that, I will always be grateful.
Part of the reason I created Sips of Stardust was because I wanted somewhere to talk honestly about mental health and disability, especially what it’s like when those things exist together.
I think when you’re born with a disability, people sometimes assume you’re just used to it because it’s all you’ve ever known.
But just because something is all you’ve ever known doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect you.
And I don’t say that because I want pity.
I don’t.
And for a long time, I became very good at acting like everything was okay.
In October 2013, during my senior year of high school, my classmates voted me homecoming queen.
I remember going out onto that field.
I remember everybody cheering.
I remember smiling as big as I could.
And that smile was genuine.
I was grateful. I was happy. None of that was fake.
But there was also a part of me nobody in those stands could see.
What would they have thought if they knew their homecoming queen was thinking about death every night before she went to sleep?
What would have happened if I had stopped smiling long enough for somebody to see that underneath it, I was shattered?
Both things were true.
I could be genuinely happy and also really, really struggling.
I could be grateful and still hurting.
I could have people around me and still feel completely unseen.
So maybe that helps explain why meeting my therapist scared me so much.
I had spent years learning how to control what other people could see.
And then I sat down across from someone who somehow saw more than I wanted her to.
There is so much more to my mental health story than I could ever fit into one post.
I’ve made a suicide attempt.
There have been times when I genuinely didn’t know if I was going to survive what was happening inside my own head.
And my therapist was there through some of the hardest parts of that.
She helped save my life.
And maybe even more importantly, she spent almost ten years helping me learn how to save myself.
There are so many more stories there. Maybe I’ll tell some of them someday.
The Snake
But that isn’t exactly the story I’m trying to tell today.
Right now, my therapist is dealing with some health challenges.
And that is about as specific as I’m going to get, because her medical story belongs to her, not me.
What I can say is that she needs some time away and some flexibility to take care of herself.
And I want her to take it.
I’m grateful that my therapist knows when she needs to step back and take care of herself, because I would never want her to put me or any of her other clients ahead of her own health.
Just because she’s a psychologist doesn’t mean she’s supposed to be the strong one all the time.
I’ve actually told her versions of that for years.
We’ve talked about really, really deep things together — things that have hurt me to my core.
I’ve told her before that just because she’s a psychologist doesn’t mean she isn’t allowed to struggle, too.
Because I know what it’s like to be hurting and not know how to say it out loud.
I know what it’s like to feel an ache so deeply that you can almost physically feel it radiating—pulsating from your heart—and still not know how to explain it to the people around you.
And I would never want that for her.
So this isn’t about me being upset that she needs time away.
It isn’t about expecting her to always be there for me.
And it isn’t because I don’t understand that there are boundaries between a therapist and a client.
I do.
But those boundaries don’t make me care about her less.
I love my therapist.
Not romantically. Not because I’m confused about what our relationship is.
I just love her.
When my therapist came into my life, I wasn’t literally alone.
I had my parents.
I had my sister.
I had Demetrius, who is another important part of my story that maybe we’ll talk about another day.
So I wasn’t literally alone — but I felt alone.
I felt like no one really understood what was happening to me or how badly I was struggling to explain it.
I felt untethered.
And then my therapist came into my life.
She helped save me.
And over those years, she has continued to help me learn how to do that.
And I think that’s part of what hurts so much right now.
It’s the helplessness.
Someone who has spent almost ten years helping me is going through something difficult, and I can’t take it away from her.
I can’t fix it.
I can’t run to her and somehow make everything better.
I can’t trade places with her.
And that last one has really been sitting with me.
Throughout my life, people who care about me have said some version of the same thing about my cerebral palsy:
“If I could take it away from you, I would.”
And I always believed them.
Usually, I would say something like, “Thank you. But I wouldn’t want you to have it, either.”
And I meant that.
My life isn’t awful because I have cerebral palsy. But it isn’t easy, either, and there are obstacles that come with CP that other people simply don’t have to think about.
What Makes the Rattle a Little Quieter
I think I understand it differently now.
Yesterday, I told my therapist that if I could switch places with her, I would.
She told me she knew.
And she told me that she wouldn’t want me to, either.
She doesn’t want this for me any more than I want it for her.
But if God, the universe, or some fucking genie dropped out of the sky and told me that I could switch places with my therapist and take everything she is dealing with right now away from her, I wouldn’t even have to think about it.
I would do it.
I would do it a hundred times over.
And I think maybe now I understand what people meant all those years when they told me they wished they could take my cerebral palsy away.
Sometimes when you care about someone that much, you look at the thing hurting them and think:
Give it to me.
Not because you think you could handle it better.
You just want them not to have to go through it.
And realizing that there is absolutely nothing I can do to take this away from my therapist makes me feel powerless.
She has spent almost ten years sitting with me while I carried things she could never take away.
And now I think I understand a little more what it feels like to be on the other side of that.
Recently, the plan for addressing my therapist’s health changed unexpectedly.
She still seems hopeful.
She knows what the next step is.
And I know there are reasons to be hopeful, too.
I wish knowing that was enough to make my brain shut up.
It isn’t.
When I try to explain what anxiety feels like for me, the image I keep coming back to is a snake.
Sometimes it feels like a constrictor, squeezing tighter and tighter around my chest until breathing becomes something I actually have to remind myself how to do.
Okay.
Your chest rises.
Now your chest falls.
Other times, it feels like a rattlesnake.
I can hear the rattle somewhere in the back of my mind, getting louder and louder, like it’s warning me that something terrible is about to happen even when I don’t actually know that it is.
That was the snake I woke up with today.
I was trying to do the normal parts of my routine—the things that aren’t always effortless for me to begin with—and today they felt even heavier.
Feed Starburst Penelope.
Start my morning.
Breathe.
And there it was.
Lurking.
Waiting to strike.
What if my therapist dies?
You can’t do anything to help her.
What if she doesn’t know how much you love her?
Does she really understand what she has meant to your life?
What are you going to do without her?
Can you imagine a world without her in it?
And then there’s the logical part of my brain.
There are reasons to be hopeful.
My therapist herself is hopeful.
She knows what comes next.
Nothing I know right now tells me that the worst thing my brain can imagine is actually going to happen.
I know that.
I really do.
And I also know something else.
This is happening to her.
As scared as I am, I know she is the one actually having to live through it. She is the one whose plans changed. She is the one who has to deal with all of the feelings that come with that.
And I want so badly to be able to control my anxiety for her.
I don’t want to sit in front of her crying and telling her how terrified I am when she has her own feelings to carry.
I want to be strong for her.
I want to be able to say, “I’m scared, but I’m okay. You take care of you.”
And part of me can say that.
Part of me means it completely.
But then there is the other part of me—the part where the fear is so visceral that I can feel it in my chest.
The part where it is so fucking terrifying that knowing what I want to feel and knowing what I should be able to handle doesn’t automatically make my mind listen to me.
I want to control it.
Sometimes I just don’t know how.
Because the motherfucking snakes don’t care.
The monsters in my brain don’t care.
They don’t care about logic.
They don’t care about hope.
They don’t care about the things I know to be true.
And that kills me, because they’re supposed to care.
They’re not supposed to be stronger than me.
But sometimes they are.
So what do I do when the snakes don’t care?
What do I do when I know all of the logical things and my mind still won’t listen to me?
How do I explain to someone who has never felt this way that sometimes anxiety can make it feel like I have to remind myself how to breathe?
Maybe that’s why I started this post by telling you that it was a rainy day.
Because after spending part of this morning feeling like I could barely breathe, I went to Barnes & Noble.
And I came home with four books.
Somewhere between walking through the shelves, picking up books, reading the backs of them, and deciding which ones I wanted to bring home, that feeling in my chest started to loosen.
Not completely.
The snake didn’t disappear.
But the rattle got a little quieter.
I could breathe a little easier.
And now I’m sitting here writing this post, and the same thing is happening again.
Right now, I can breathe.
So maybe the goal isn’t to kill the snakes today.
Maybe it isn’t to kill them tomorrow.
Maybe I’ll never completely get rid of them.
Maybe the goal is to figure out what makes them rattle a little less loudly.
What makes them feel a little weaker, even if it’s only for a while.
For me, sometimes that’s Barnes & Noble.
Sometimes it’s buying four books that, yes, I absolutely did not need, but really, really wanted.
Because books can take me somewhere else for a while.
Somewhere the monsters in my brain have a harder time following me.
Sometimes it’s Starburst Penelope.
Sometimes it’s writing.
Sometimes it’s taking the thing that feels so huge and giving it somewhere else to go.
Today, I went to Barnes & Noble.
The snake is still there.
But right now, I can breathe.
And the kind of ironic thing is that yesterday, I was anxious about my blog.
I was worried because I haven’t been posting regularly.
Other than updating what I’m currently reading—because if somebody stumbles across this little corner of the internet, I want them to know what I’m reading—I haven’t written much lately.
And my brain started telling me that maybe people would think I didn’t care about Sips of Stardust.
But I do.
I love my blog.
Even when I’m not posting, I’m still thinking about it. I’m still working on little pieces of it and trying to make it feel like me.
And then today happened.
I woke up with a snake in my mind.
I went to Barnes & Noble.
I bought four books.
And then I came home and started writing.
I didn’t plan this post.
I didn’t sit down because I thought, Okay, it’s been too long. I need to post something.
I sat down because I needed somewhere for all of this to go.
And somehow, the words just came.
Maybe that’s what I needed to remember.
Sips of Stardust doesn’t have to be something else I’m afraid of doing wrong.
I can come back here when I have something to say.
I can come back here when something is sitting so heavily on my heart that I need somewhere to put it.
And if you’re someone who happens to stumble across me here one day, you can come back too.
Maybe something I write will make you feel a little less alone.
Maybe none of this resonates with you and you’re just here because you want book recommendations.
Maybe you’re here for the books, the coffee, Starburst Penelope, the hard conversations, or whatever else ends up here.
And maybe Sips of Stardust just isn’t your cup of coffee.
That’s okay too.
But I realized something today.
I wanted Sips of Stardust to be a place where other people could come and feel less alone.
I think I forgot that this is allowed to be my safe place too.
So today, I came here.
I wrote.
The snake is still in my mind.
But its rattle isn’t as loud as it was this morning.
My chest rises.
My chest falls.
And right now, I can breathe.
I’ll come back when I need to.
And if you need to, you can come back too.
Until the next sip. ✨
✨ Artwork created with the assistance of ChatGPT, inspired by my own ideas and creative direction.
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