Lauren MacDonald

It’s safe to say that a majority of us have been affected at some point in our lives by anxiety, depression, mood swings, or just about any other negative emotion or reaction we can conjure up.

Pecan Pie was one of my Mémère’s all-time favorite holiday desserts.

It is no secret that woman have never been portrayed as equal in society, let alone in the workplace. We have all heard conversation around the gender wage gap. Women haven’t persevered since the first gathering of women devoted to equal rights in 1848, only to be paid .81 cents for every dollar a man makes (uncontrolled study,) or .98 cents earned for every dollar that a man earns (controlled study.) To put that into a different kind of perspective, 25 percent of working women have reported receiving less compensation than a man doing the same exact job. For good measure, I’d like to add that 42 percent of women have said that they’ve experienced some form of discrimination in the workforce, while 20 percent of men said the same (payscale.com.) Are you still wondering why we might be angry?

As human beings, it is often difficult, if not impossible for us to wrap our own minds around something that we cannot see or do not understand. In large part, that is how certain stigmas are born and cemented into society. That, coupled with failure to educate or refusal to learn is why a dark cloud still hangs around the subject of mental illness.

She opens her eyes, legs curled to her chest on the kitchen floor. She pushes herself into an upright position with her palms and glances at the shattered glass all around her. What the hell just happened?

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) aka Seasonal Depression: