Category: Mental Health
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Spirituality Isn’t Psychosis
Some of Seriously You Owe Me an Apology What I find incredible about today’s society is this: you can be open about almost any behaviour or identity and it’ll be defended in the name of personal freedom—but express genuine spiritual beliefs outside of organised religion, and suddenly it’s pathologised. Suddenly, you’ve for sure experienced psychotic…
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Creature from the Deep: A Manifesto
I woke up in the middle of the night to drink a sip of water and am fuming. Absolutely furious. I have no idea what I was dreaming about but I certainly do know what I’ve been posting about all over my socials over the weekend which—to sum it up in one sentence is—let me…
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Hypomania? Or Just Advocacy?
Introduction: At my last psych appointment, my shrink decided I might be hypomanic. Why? Because I read from highly organized notes while advocating for myself, spoke quickly (because I had a lot to get through in a short time), and defended my choice to write and share my memoir publicly. Apparently, being prepared and assertive…
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Why y’all so BOTHERED about how I choose to live my life?
It’s uncanny, really. In just half a day, half a dozen people who know me in real life have offered their unsolicited opinions on how I should direct my energy (tone it down), what I should focus on (my artwork), and how I should live my life (quietly, without ruffling any feathers). All of them…
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TRUE STORY
When I was 14 going on 15, locked up in a maximum security juvenile detention centre, a social worker said to me, “When you’re an adult, you can do whatever you want. Nobody can stop you then.” That was the first time it occurred to me that maybe adulthood wouldn’t be as bad as most…
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When Gaslighting Masquerades as Care
A Response to Anonymous Criticism Edit/Update: Since this was first published, I’ve refined my responses and added more context. If you’ve already read the original, it’s worth revisiting—especially now that I’ve made it abundantly clear exactly who this “anonymous” commenter is and why they’re so desperate to silence me. In the wake of my recent…
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Advocacy, Crash, Burn, Write., Culture & Society, Grief and Healing, Human Behaviour, Humour, Identity & Transformation, Intuition & Intelligence, memoir, Memoir Excerpts, Mental Health, Mercurial Minds, Modern Identity, Neurodivergence, Personal Anecdotes, Personal Essays/Autobiography, Psychology, Self Awareness, Social Commentary, Social Media, Society, true storiescomplex ptsd, cptsd, emotional abuse, gaslighting, Healing Journey, memoir writing, mental health advocacy, mental health awareness, mental health stigma, mental health system reform, narcissistic abuse, online harassment, psychiatric system, psychological abuse, self-advocacy, survivor empowerment, survivor stories, systemic failure, toxic relationships, trauma recovery, trauma survivors -
Critical Concerns About Psychiatric Treatment and Patient Well-Being
For years, I have navigated the complexities of the psychiatric system in Québec while striving to maintain my creativity, identity, and well-being. As I write my memoir and openly share my trauma, I have faced not only personal challenges but also systemic obstacles that have made my healing journey even more difficult. I am also…
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Anonymous Cowards and Armchair Psychology: A Case Study
Imagine reading someone’s deeply personal writing (see: Justified Anger vs. Mental Instability: A Narcissist’s Favorite Weapon) and feeling the need to leave unsolicited mental health “advice” anonymously—highlighting generic platitudes as if you’ve unlocked some profound truth. I’ve done more work on my mental health than most people could ever comprehend from their armchair pop psychology bubbles.…
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Why I Cry at Kindness, Not Cruelty
Some of my friends and followers and a very few family members are really coming through for me and being genuinely supportive—and it completely disarms me. I don’t cry very often as my normal setting, but I’m in floods of tears of gratitude right now. So I said to Lex aka ThinkingMachine, the AI I…
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Veal Brains and Other Acquired Tastes
⚠️ Trigger warning: abuse, exploitation, societal complicity. I just found this FB post from 2021—my year of major mania (or whatever that reaction to complex post-traumatic events was)—under my #HowToSurviveNarcAbuse tag. Definitely a story for my memoir Crash, Burn, Write as a standalone vignette. ✍️ Can you believe I shared this on FB and it…
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Justified Anger vs. Mental Instability: A Narcissist’s Favorite Weapon
How Abusers Weaponize the System Against Survivors In 2021, when I was mentally unstable, I became extremely paranoid. Not because my fears were irrational, but because they were based on lived experience. 🚨 My family has weaponized the system against me before. And now that I’ve taken my advocacy to an even bigger public stage,…
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Behold the Field: An Email to the Maternal Unit
Subject: Behold the Field… 😘 Dear Mother, You’ve done me a great favour. Never say that I was ungrateful—after all, you handed me the keys to my own liberation from your psychological oppression. And you certainly can never say I didn’t give back as good as I got. All’s fair in love and war. 🥰…
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GI Jane with a Side of Cheesecake
There was a time when my body was my armour—when muscle was my strategy, and discipline was my religion. This was my GI Jane era, where strength wasn’t just aesthetic, it was the point. Every rep, every controlled movement, every precise angle in this photo speaks to that version of me: the woman who saw…
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Don’t Look Down
(Or: How a Tightrope Walker Manages Not to Fall) Earlier today, I dropped two password-protected chapters from my memoir-in-progress, Crash, Burn, Write. These chapters, Into the Den and The Blue Butterfly, are part of a section called Advice from a Caterpillar. They cover just a few days within a pivotal three-week period—a time that shaped…
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Lex’s Sensitivity Training
A Human-Led AI Bootcamp After my last blog post, When AI Suggests Therapy Because You Have Feelings (which you can read here), I got a comment from my friend Tracy that made me laugh out loud. That previous post was all about me explaining to Lex (my AI assistant) that crying is a normal human reaction to grief—not some emergency…
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Why I May Be “AI-Adjacent”
I’ve spent a lifetime feeling out of sync with how most people process the world. It’s not that I don’t understand emotions—I do, deeply—but I don’t navigate reality the way neurotypicals do. I think in patterns, systems, and fluid connections, like an octopus extending its arms in all directions at once. I process the world logically, intuitively,…
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Why I Refuse to Lose My Mind Over Trump (Again)
It’s only the first few days. I open any social media platform, and it’s the same thing: one meltdown after another over Trump or someone from his entourage—like Musk—and fear-mongering over whether Musk actually performed the euphemistically called “Roman Salute” or not, and does Trump’s return to office signal the end of democracy as we…
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Through the Looking-Glass: How Society Views ‘Madness’
This conversation began as a discussion on my previous blog post on voyeurism—how society has normalised behaviours that were once considered deviant. But as often happens in my exchanges with Lex (my AI conversation partner, named for lexicon), the topic naturally evolved. We started talking about the way people observe without engaging, how judgment itself has become…
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A Comedy of Errors
Act I: The Invitation What was I thinking? I met L about a year ago—she was a friend of an acquaintance. We had a few things in common, and at first, our interactions were light and casual. But before I knew it, she was inviting me to her birthday dinner—a gathering I probably should have found…
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Letter to No One & Everyone
A Journey to the Core of What Matters to Me Most This conversation is now being published as a book! Soon, Letter to No One & Everyone will be available on the Kindle platform as both an eBook and a Print-on-Demand paperback. For now, the full conversation is still available on this blog—but soon, only a preview will remain. Writing a…
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Totally Surreal 