“Beautiful sisters,” the barista complimented, handing us our matching black coffees.
“She’s my mother,” I corrected, smiling at her deep blue eyes, vanilla-colored hair and tiny frame. I loved when people thought I looked like her.
“Good genes,” he said.
He couldn’t see the long ragged scar hidden beneath her sundress, the splinters along my own hips, or the secret pain we shared with just each other. Keep reading »
Every kid in middle school played hooky. I was a total goody-two shoes, but still a hooky master—I told my mom I couldn’t go to school whenever I woke up sleepy, lazy or just hadn’t finished my homework. And then I turned 13 and got my period. As the Jewish tradition goes, my friend slapped me across the face in the bathroom, screamed “Mazel Tov!” and it all began. The cramps were unbearable. They felt like someone was punching me in the stomach. I couldn’t even think of using a tampon because I’d have to change it every 20 minutes—like Missy Elliott, my flow was out of control. But like the little boy who cried wolf, my mom didn’t believe that her star hooky player could have cramps that bad and sent me on my way to school. It wasn’t until a month later that my mom realized I wasn’t playing hooky—something had to be wrong when four extra strength Motrin and a heating pad didn’t help my cramps. My mom immediately made an appointment for me at her gynecologist. Keep reading »
We tend to think of the concept of “pain” as something physical—something that involves blood, bruises or casts. But people with mental illnesses struggle with this entirely other debilitating concept of pain, one that literally saps the life out of them. I have struggled with depression, or unipolar depression. The National Institute of Health says major depression is when a person has five or more symptoms for at least two weeks. Symptoms include: fatigue or lack of energy; feelings of hopelessness or helplessness; feelings of worthlessness, self-hate or guilt; inactivity or withdrawal from activities that used to be pleasurable; trouble sleeping or sleeping too much; loss of appetite or dramatic gain in appetite; agitation; difficulty concentrating; and thoughts of death or suicide.
For me, depression has manifested itself in all these ways. Sometimes I can sleep for 12 hours straight and still want to spend the rest of the day in bed. Other times, I can’t sleep and seem to be living on my own anxiety-fueled adrenaline. The only common thread is feeling like a human being with all the joyful parts of humanity leeched out of her. Keep reading »
It can be something as little as the time I was standing in a hotel parking lot while on vacation one summer, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man walking toward me. He looked exactly like my father. The closer he got, the larger the lump in my throat became. Or, it can be something a little bigger, like the few dozen times I’ve walked past the building on the campus of Northern Illinois University where my father worked and pictured him galloping up the stairs with a huge smile on his face. Or, even the time when I found the blue-knit cap he wore during the course of his chemotherapy and radiation to treat an aggressive form of sinus cancer and up until the day he committed suicide two weeks after finishing treatment. Or, the smell of his clothes and how they’d remind me of his big bear hugs.
That’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in a nutshell. It’s the body’s way of trying to process the massive stockpile of emotions left in the wake of a traumatic life event. Keep reading »
Like most high school kids, I often fell asleep during class when I was bored. But my last two years of high school, it started happening more frequently and I couldn’t control it. At my after-school job at a coffee bar, I would drink ever increasing amounts of coffee to stay awake during the day. Most of my friends couldn’t drink java after 4 p.m. because it would keep them awake through the night. I would fall asleep an hour after drinking three cups.
By my freshman year of college, I was drinking 10 caffeinated beverages a day, but nothing kept the sleepiness and the lethargy at bay. I would oversleep my alarm every morning, much to the growing irritation of my roommates, and run to class if I hadn’t missed it entirely. Keep reading »
Fact #1: I am a woman. I have boobs, ovaries, fallopian tubes and, well, a place down under. I have had the joy (yes, that’s sarcasm) of a regular period since high school. Fact #2: I’ve never had sex. I graduated from college last week, but I’ve still never been in a relationship that’s gotten to that point. Which was why, after six months without a period during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of school, I started asking myself if I was pregnant and how it could be possible. Did I drink too much one night and not remember hooking up with someone? Or was I a victim of sexual assault but had repressed the memory to the back of my brain? I was terrified of what was going on in my body, but I didn’t know what to do about it. After all, I had finished only a year of college and couldn’t handle having a kid. Keep reading »
Right before I signed the paper, I looked into my husband’s fearful eyes and felt a wave of disbelief at the realization that I was about to consent to the very thing that I had desperately wanted to avoid. During the previous six months of my pregnancy, I huffed through prenatal yoga sessions, dragged my big belly to childbirth classes, spent $500 on acupuncture treatments and even hired a birthing coach (known as a “doula”) to insure that my firstborn would make a serene entrance into the world. As my due date approached, my thoughts became preoccupied with images of the idealistic birthing experience that was about to change my life. I carefully selected songs for my “birthing playlist,” and envisioned the perfectly disheveled picture that I would post on Facebook to introduce my little guy to the world. With all the energy I put into personalizing the experience, it never occurred to me that I would end up feeling like a statistic—one of the 38 percent of new mothers at our New York City hospital who delivered her baby through Cesarean Section. Keep reading »
I was 17 years old and sitting in a dimly lit, poorly ventilated doctor’s office next to an incredibly nervous mother. I never imagined that the following six simple words would change my life forever: “You have spots on your brain.”
Excuse me? What does that even mean? I thought.
Ten years later, I still question the doctor’s choice in words and his flippant tone. What he meant was this: you have Multiple Sclerosis. Keep reading »
When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to have a full-length mirror in my room. My Jewish mother loathed hearing me complain about how fat I was and refused to invest in one. I never made the purchase for myself until I was a freshman in college—and even then my mom questioned whether or not I should buy it. Now, I’m a 22 year-old fashion student and while I own a full-length reflector, I keep it at a slant. The incline makes me appear slimmer. But it’s never enough.
See, I have Body Dysmorphic Disorder. I look at my reflection and see something that just isn’t there. You could say I have an eating disorder, but I’ve never been able to fully starve myself or binge and purge. I am 5’3” and weigh 115 pounds. But when I look in the mirror, I see a girl who is 150+. Keep reading »
In retrospect, it was all inevitable. Not the details, like the time I grew so afraid of using the toilet that I urinated in cereal bowls in my apartment, or the time I collapsed outside a filling station in Sicily and told someone I couldn’t remember how to breathe. Those specific situations weren’t predictable, of course. But looking back, I can see how much sense it makes that I have panic attacks. Keep reading »
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