Today, I am sad. Don't get me wrong, I will laugh. I will function. I will go through the motions of my life. I know that tomorrow will be better. If not, the next day will. But for today, for right now, I am sad.

The Story:

A lot of times, you hear people with medical or mental health conditions "disown" their diagnoses. They refrain from saying "my cancer", or, "my anxiety"—and for good reason. It has been shown that by separating yourself from your illness, you don't take on the negative attributes; you are not your illness.

I was diagnosed with ADHD several years ago... but it turns out that almost everything I have been struggling with is ADHD related.

Getting a diagnosis of a disability can be devastating news. There usually are overwhelming emotions of shock, disbelief, anxiety, fear, and despair.

Anxiety is by far the most common mental health issue affecting young people today (not to say that older people don't get anxious). Of course, there are varying degrees of anxiety; for some people medication truly is a necessity, but for most of us anxiety can be managed with a variety of coping mechanisms. The trick is finding healthy mechanisms that work for you.

I am an atheist. I hold to no gods, no faith, no religion. I don’t have a problem with people finding faith comforting, but I don’t believe in proselytizing and I think that “mission trips” are just a fancy way to say “colonialism.” However, a couple of years ago, I had a friend join The Satanic Temple, and because I try to take an active interest in the lives of my friends, I looked it up. And what I found there, was the Seven Tenets, that are the fundamental base to The Satanic Temple. They resonated with me, and I read more and wrote them out; and over the last two years, have applied them to my life, and my therapist and I agree for once that they have helped me. So without pretense or expectation, I present to you the Seven Tenets, and how I have applied them to my life to aid in my constant process of tweaking my outlook to improve my mental health.

I have OCD, and it's a thing that I struggle with daily. It is a byproduct of another disorder, but that doesn't make its teeth any less sharp. I wanted today to talk about some of the things that I obsess about, and how they affect my daily life, and how I manage them using coping mechanisms, distractions, and behavior modification tactics.

Lately, I have been experiencing these mental blocks.

If I understood the things I understand now from five years ago, I believe I would be in a different place, but now that I am here, I wonder where I will be in five years? From being a kid to now, in one of Alaska’s villages, I never did understand some of the things I had problems with, my parents didn’t understand because they understood the church, the nature around the village, food to prepare, jobs, and more or less, the western world. I wasn’t any different from them. They had taught me about church, hunting and gathering, and I was learning from school. Learning the culture we have in AK, and the history of America and praying. In between the only events that go on, I grew like anybody in the village would, playing with everybody around the village.

I feel broken. I've felt like this for years, but it wasn't always this way. As a child and even into my young teens, I was an outgoing person. I could talk to anyone. I still can, but it's different now. It's more forced. I can feel my body draining of its emotional and mental energy. It's a show... or maybe a hope on my part. It's a hope that maybe one day I'll return to normal. But what is my normal? I can't remember anymore.