New job or maybe I should say new hobby. My goal is that I am going to write as much as possible using this platform as my first resource and then hopefully land some sort of writing job that I am paid to do to hopefully transition to being a full time writer. My passion and expertise is the Mental Health field not because I am a doctor or nurse but because I myself have struggled with my mental health being diagnosed Bipolar 1 since 2002. I want to help people with their mental health journey and share some tips and tricks that I have discovered myself to help manage it along the way. And trust me I have struggled! This is a hard illness to manage successfully but here is my goal – to help as many people as I can understand their illness and thrive regardless of it.

One thing is I am a mom and my illness has changed since giving birth to my wonderful daughter 5 years ago. Stress has been a huge contributor to this change- stress of new motherhood, my divorce, and an intensive job, but other factors have come into play too- major weight gain and feeling bad about that, higher levels of anxiety that I have had to deal with in relation to the stress I have been under, needing to find a new psychiatrist and therapist after my divorce, change in my hormones etc… just to name a few. For more on my mental health journey with new motherhood and divorce visit my first blog- https://yogimommi.com/blog-feed/

In this blog I am going to focus less on new motherhood and divorce and more on my overall mental health journey, understanding the illness, and the here and now of my struggles and successes with managing my illness. I hope too as a history lover to research and share with you the stories of famous people throughout history who have struggled with their mental health and learn more about the development of psychiatry and psychology in the medical field and how it has helped people significantly.

I commend you if you have found my blog because you yourself struggle with your mental health and just know you are not alone and it is really hard. Daily it is hard and not many people who don’t struggle with this personally understand that. So just know we are out here, we are struggling too, but we are going to make it and find the willpower to not let the stress and difficulties of this illness overtake us – we are going to enjoy our lives in spite of the incredibly hard challenges we face and we are going to thrive vs just survive.

Now I know I sound more like a motivational speaker vs someone with severe mental illness, but trust me I get it- it’s hard and I have struggled almost everyday for definitely the last 5 years of the 23 years since first diagnosis. Like I said before about my illness changing is that I used to have years of stability in between major episodes but now it is more like a few months. Now these depressive and hypo-manic episodes I am describing that are happening more frequently are more manageable than in the past for sure, at least in the sense that no hospitalization has been necessary and I have been able to continue working and keeping up with my mom duties (with some help from my mom with my daughter). This has been a huge blessing, but it has still been hard. To have the ups and downs of my Bipolar 1 be less like a low bell curve and more like a sharp heartbeat on a monitor has been difficult. The times of stability are so helpful to my recovery and strength and getting my confidence back and being robbed of these long stretches of stability lately has been hard to manage.

But I am doing ok in general- as of late I did have a hard depressive episode in October 2024 lasting to mid November. I felt better through December and the holidays, getting slightly hypo-manic though (like hard to sleep etc), up until the end of February 2025 and then this March I have struggled again with another hard depressive episode. I am feeling better now but keeping my sleep in check to keep mania at bay has been a struggle as of late. Of course, always talk to your doctor first, but my new psychiatrist’s advice to take as much sleep medicine as needed to help me sleep has been really helpful with that struggle of managing my sleep.

As always, just a reminder to please subscribe and comment- I would love to hear from you! More to come in the near future, but my hope is to build an online community to help us all learn more about our illnesses and encourage each other- Happy Monday…let’s get to work bettering our lives!