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 …
Tag Archives: stigma
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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How I Found Out
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 …
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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Living with Total Recall 