the month: mental health awareness

“It’s gonna be May.”

Justin Timberlake

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, I owe it to myself to start posting consistently. I’ve been making excuses, and let’s be real, those are some major tools of incompetence which lead to some major monuments of nothingness (i.e., over a month of no posts) so let’s change that. It’s been a minute since I last announced a blog post and a LOT happened, so let me update you on a few things:

1. I wrote a post in March that I never publicized. I think a lot of it had to do with me feeling bad about struggling to stay on top of posts on my blog. If you haven’t checked it out yet, here’s the link: the journey verzuz the destination.
2. After also struggling to land consistent employment at the start of the pandemic, the main full-time job I finally got, threw a monkey wrench in my plans at the beginning of March. Posting about this on 5/3.
3. Unless you know me personally, you don’t know that I have 47586 jobs. This is an exact number quoted by my best friend Veena. There’s one that I’m actually particularly happy about, that happens to focus on this thing called mental health. Posting about this on 5/10.
4. In this period of not writing and being reclusive to the entire world, family and friends included — you can ask them, I’ve been incredibly poo in terms of returning messages and calls — I started binge watching this show called “Euphoria” on HBO. Although this is mainly about drug use, rehab, gender identity, sexual orientation, domestic violence, and a host of other things, they did some discussion on depression that I felt would be appropriate for me to highlight. Posting about this on 5/17.
5. On April 24th, I celebrated another year of life. Although I was thankful for it, I wasn’t excited about it. In fact in true turtle fashion, I pretty much shut down and spiraled into a state of depression. Posting about this on 5/24.
6. At the end of the month, a month which sort of felt like an emotional roller coaster, something cool did happen at one of my 47589 jobs. It’s about suicide prevention, which I’m realizing now more than either, is hella important. Posting about this on 5/31.

Five posts in the pipeline for the fifth month of the year. That sounds epic, right?

I hope this makes up for my lack of posting for the past 57363367 days and sets me on a new trajectory of believing more in myself to keep writing. Thanks for rocking with me through my radio silence and I hope you get something out of my transcribed thoughts.

Until next time,

Get well. Be well. Stay well.

Lauren ♥