I know it might sound crazy, but sometimes I miss being sick. I've gotten so much better over the past few months, and there is a small part of me that misses being sick, and I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one who's ever felt this way. So let's talk about it.

If you build confidence, you can reduce your anxiety. This is because anxiety is often characterized by feelings of fear and worry. When you experience chronic anxiety, these feelings of fear and worry may persist, and it can be challenging to overcome. Chronic anxiety can continuously affect the person experiencing it, and the individual may find that they periodically experience panic attacks and other physical symptoms of anxiety.

Trust is important in any relationship, but it is especially critical in your relationship with your therapist, and it can be hard to recover from a bad therapy experience when that trust is broken. Therapy requires allowing someone we barely know to access our deepest fears and insecurities and trusting that they will treat this information with respect and sensitivity. When we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and receive empathy and understanding from our therapists, therapy can be healing and fulfilling. When we feel unseen, invalidated, or misunderstood after sharing deep parts of ourselves, it can open emotional wounds and make us feel even worse. A bad therapy experience might even turn us off to the whole idea of therapy, but if we never try again, we might miss out on a transformative relationship that allows us to achieve our goals and live happier lives.

Supporting someone in denial about their mental health can be a very delicate situation. A friend of mine is living this reality at present -- her partner is exhibiting clear symptoms of mental illness but is not able to have a conversation about it just yet. Supporting my friend has reminded me of when my brother was also in denial about his mental health before he received a diagnosis. Here are some of the things I learned through that experience.

Today is the seventh anniversary of the day that I was raped. In the early years after the assault, I used to feel retraumatized and upset on this day.  However, time, healing, and therapy have helped me change the meaning of my rape anniversary and view it differently. 

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, etc. (LGBTQIA+) community faces mental health challenges specific to their gender and sexuality. Transgender and non-binary individuals (TGNB) experience mental health challenges such as increased acts of rejection or violence and microaggressions by mental health providers and the general public. 

One of the many side effects of suffering verbal abuse is decreased self-esteem and low self-worth. Even the strongest individuals can suffer the damaging consequences of having someone verbally chip away at their psyche regularly. Unfortunately, this was very much the case in my childhood and adult years.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a month dedicated to highlighting mental health and mental health difficulties so that people understand how common it is to experience challenges and to provide a very realistic sense of hope. This message is crucial, for it reduces the unfortunate sense of shame and isolation that so many people feel when they suffer from anxiety or any other mental health challenge. In the spirit of Mental Health Awareness Month, here are some truths about anxiety.

Anxiety and being tired is common, and I’ve also noticed that anxiety can mess with your sleep patterns in weird ways. Sometimes, it’s impossible to get to sleep when you’re anxious – this makes sense, given that your mind is probably racing like crazy. But on the other hand, sometimes, if you’re anxious, you just can’t stay awake – this also makes sense because anxiety can make even the mundane seem overwhelming, and sleeping is a way to filter all that out. For me, there’s no telling when anxiety will cause me to be tired or lose sleep – recently, I’ve been going through a bout of always feeling tired, so I wanted to talk about that.

Whether it's a relationship that ended or a job that fell through, dealing with rejection is a huge part of life. More important than rejection, though, is how you handle it.