What if you could remember every day of our life?
It’s February 5th, and I am alive. I said this to myself over and over again while doing some mindfulness meditation before work. Mindfulness meditation has helped me substantially as I have adopted the practice over the past year. The goal is to be in the present moment. This is a challenge for me having …
Continue reading “Getaway Cars: Using HSAM to Escape the Present”
The number one question I can always count on being asked, specifically, in a TV interview about HSAM, whether it’s a local news segment or 60 Minutes, is: “What is your dating life like?” It’s always towards the middle of the interview. The person interviewing me will pause and say “so…I have to ask…”, and …
Continue reading “Is Dating with HSAM Different? I Don’t Know, You Tell Me.”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “Indispensable Objects: My Journey of Overcoming 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 …
Continue reading “Wearing Pigtails and Hoarding Movie Tickets: Living with OCD”
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 …
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 …
I always knew I was different. I realized at a young age other people couldn’t remember the date Easter fell on four years ago or what day the Super Bowl was in 2007. Maybe the 2007 Superbowl stands out to me because my father was a diehard Chicago Bears fan living in a house with …
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 …
Continue reading “HSAM: An Ability with Blessings and Curses”
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 …
