Just as a fish doesn’t know it’s in water, often times we ourselves don’t know we inhabit dysfunctional living environments, especially when we are born into them. Up until I was 26 years old, this was the case with me.

Shadow work is the act of sitting with your self in your entirety, in the painful feelings we otherwise run from and numb out in acts of avoidance, with addictions like unhealthy relationships, food, shopping, alcohol, social media.

I often talk about toxicity in our lives in the context of people, environments, etc. But what if the toxicity is coming from you? What if you are the toxic source in your own life? Before I started really doing my work, I was a horribly toxic person, both in my own life and in the lives of women that considered me a friend. It ended up costing me old friendships, integrity, karma, and regret I still wrestle with to this day.

What does it mean to be a part of the “mental health community”? My initial impetus for going public with my story was to help other women and men suffering in the way I have, people searching for ways to help themselves, who want, as I did, to feel better. What I have found since tapping into the “mental health community” is something far graver than what I had anticipated.

Can you live an entire life without ever knowing who you truly are? This is a question I’ve asked myself a few times this week. My life today looks absolutely nothing like my life last year, and last year’s looked nothing like my life before I got off medication in New York. I almost don’t recognize myself anymore, and living as an observer in my own life lately has been a trip to say the least. I attribute these radical positive shifts to the work I’ve done on myself, which I will explain.

and like the moon,

she died in phases,

killing parts of herself to rise anew.

I learned about the concept of resistance in Steven Pressfield's The War of Art (which I'll never be able to recommend enough to anyone) and had since been on a quest to understand what it actually is, where it grows from within me, what exactly the force is that prevents me from creating what I dream about most.

It wasn’t until I realized I had been doing so much work on myself- therapy once a week, restrictive diet for mental health, CBD when needed, constant self-analysis- yet was still under-earning, attracting unavailable partners, and struggling with underlying anxiety. It felt like I was experiencing major blocks in my life, blocks I could see through patterns but couldn’t exactly touch or fix, despite my best efforts. Then I learned about hypnotherapy.

A few months before my 27th birthday, I realized I had been doing the same thing for so long, back and forth from my psychiatrists office, from the pharmacy, from cognitive/behavioral therapy, and my baseline was still utterly miserable- and getting worse.