“The key to a happy life is a bad memory.”- Rita Mae Brown. I would be confident that this quote is said to me more often than it’s probably said to most people, and I didn’t even know who originally said it until I Googled it for this article. Whether it’s a reply after sharing …
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We All Need Somebody to Lean On
I remember the moment I realized my mental illness was a joke. On August 14th, 2011 I was in Door County, Wisconsin with a group of my high school friends. For those of you who are not familiar with Door County, think of it as the Hampton’s of the upper Midwest. Although I knew a …
Indispensable Objects: My Journey of Overcoming OCD
One of the first things I learned becoming a mental health advocate in college was that every personal story about a mental illness needs to end with treatment. Why? Well, if we just share stories of our battles with mental health issues and stop at the parts where we felt defeated, our narrative doesn’t give …
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Wearing Pigtails and Hoarding Movie Tickets: Living with OCD
In order to figure out where my future could go with HSAM, it turned out I had to start by digging deeper into my past. I want to start by telling you about the bain of my existence in Catholic elementary school: card changes. Did anyone else have these? It was a discipline system made …
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Getting Tested
The word “test” has meant a lot of different things in my life. As a student it was taking an exam in history or math to measure how much I had retained from class lectures and homework assignments. As a competitive figure skater, testing meant skating in front of a panel of judges who determined …
Inside My Head
What does it look like inside your head? I am asked this very question a lot in interviews, especially by psychologists. The first time I asked myself this question was when I started watching Disney Channel’s Lizzie McGuire. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, we see Lizzie, a blonde, bubbly middle …
HSAM: An Ability with Blessings and Curses
One of the reasons I didn’t find out I had HSAM until college was because, generally, no one really knows what HSAM is. When I have gone to see a new therapist because I moved somewhere, I find myself telling them, “oh yeah, I also have this memory thing”. And when I say the technical …
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Introduction: More than a ‘Fun Fact’
The “tell me a fun fact about yourself’ questions must be pretty easy for you to answer, you have HSAM!” I have heard this several times before in the context of ice breakers, job interviews, you name it. It seems pretty obvious what my fun fact should be. Fun fact about me: I never use …
Living with Total Recall 