Mental health was something that used to be only in the back of my mind. Something other people struggled with. Something that didn't concern me. Something I didn't have to worry about because I was doing just fine.

Wrong.

If you're here looking for an inspiring journey to wellness, I'm sorry to disappoint you. This isn't my story of finding the right medication and therapy to help me and getting on the right track. This is a story of learning, growing, accepting, and coping. It's all I can do, and all a lot of people can do.

To get started and set the scene so-to-speak, I feel like I need to give a little bit of a backstory on my history with mental health so you can get a feel for my relationship with it.

First of all, I have always been fascinated by psychology. My original dream was to be a fiction writer on the side while I worked as a psychoanalyst for the police or FBI.

Basically, I wanted to live out the show Criminal Minds. Anything connected to the world of psychiatry or psychotherapy was way on the backburner as a sort of last resort because wasn't that mainly dealing with freaks and psychos?

I know that it's not now, but we're talking about when I was about 11 or 12. Back then, in my household, therapy was pretty much frowned upon and all I'd seen up to that point was things that put down and made fun of therapy and psychiatrists for the most part.

While my interest encompassed the entirety of psychology, I especially took an interest in abnormal psychology. (The study of mental disorders, usually from a clinical standpoint.) I was fascinated by all the different ways the mind could affect a person, from anxiety to psychopathy and everything in between.

Still, I never connected anything I was studying as a hobby to myself. I was always happy and never felt down, so I couldn't possibly be depressed. I didn't worry about anything. I couldn't possibly have anxiety issues. My mother was the one that worried too much. It was her job, though.

Looking back, I can pick out several different times while I was a teenager that I wish I would have known what I do now. I can see so many things that I could have done differently that would have helped me now. Yet it wasn't until my 20s that I learned much of anything. I started learning about real-life disorders, such as depression, through YouTubers that I watched. About the time I turned 21, a few I watched were beginning to come out about their struggles. I still didn't apply any of it to myself, but I was beginning to develop an understanding.

Anyway, sometime after I started my second job in my early 20s, I began to have periods of heavy anxiety. It wasn't something I was completely unfamiliar with, but it was my first time feeling the physical effects of having an anxiety attack. Still, I brushed it off for a month. Then, one day, it happened.

I still don't know for sure why it happened or what exactly triggered it, other than maybe my fear of water. That doesn't make total sense, though, since I've been in similar situations and it never bothered me.

Anyway, this one day, it was raining. Someone had ordered a lot from the fast food place I worked at and I was helping him carry it all out to his truck. Rain had never bothered me before, so I didn't think anything of it when I walked out into it.

However, before I got to his truck, my heart began pounding and I started hyperventilating. I had no idea what was going on, and I was terrified. I just knew something horrible was happening to me. Yet, I still calmly put his bags down on his back seat, told him to have a good day, and went back inside where I finally let myself hyperventilate to the point I nearly passed out.

That was the very first time I ever had a panic attack.

Before then, I had some idea of what it felt like. My mother had them before and had described them to me when I mentioned how I had been feeling at work in the drive-thru. However, that couldn't compare to actually having one. The dread and sense that something awful is happening and intense fear that isn't aimed at anything in particular. The pounding heart. The tingles. The hyperventilating.

The panic attack that day was the first of many. The anxiety attack was the beginning of many sleepless nights.

I left my job at the start of the pandemic for many reasons, honestly, but partly because of the new mandates saying I needed to wear a mask at work. That was a good thing, because we are all just about on top of each other and social distancing wasn't an option. The mask was a layer of protection we needed, even though we didn't fully know that at the time.

When I was handed a mask and was told to wear it, I was apprehensive because I had always had trouble wearing masks for other things. Nothing too bad or too serious, of course, but just a sense that I couldn't breathe. Still, I put it on and right away I had a panic attack from an immediate fear of being suffocated. I ripped it off and worked to steady my breathing. When I was calm, I went back to running the drive-thru.

It wasn't long after that I quit. Since I couldn't wear a mask, I tried to stay home as much as possible. I still ventured out occasionally. Where I live, the mandates weren't strictly enforced, so I got away with not wearing a mask at many places.

Staying at home during the pandemic was, for me, both good and bad. It helped me to relax like I hadn't done in a long time, but because of that, I became more than a little socially withdrawn. Like many people, I developed a slight social anxiety.

The good part was watching YouTube. I had developed an obsession with that and anime when I was working, and those began to fill my time a bit more. Because I watched YouTube, I became more familiar with YouTubers who had anxiety and depression and became familiar with the symptoms.

As I started learning more from the standpoint of someone who had the issues, I began to turn what I had learned from my hobby to myself. I realized I had been showing symptoms of general anxiety disorder since I was a teen. It made me come to terms with the fact it had been an issue for longer than I was willing to admit to anyone.

In many ways, admitting to anxiety and panic attacks wasn't hard. In fact, it felt good to tell people about those things. It meant that I could be me no matter who I was with and they were willing to help me through an attack if I had one. I was able to educate my friends about general anxiety disorder, which I was diagnosed with, and one of my friends was able to recognize she had some of the same symptoms. It made her aware and that, in turn, helped her to get the help she needed.

That discovery made me delve deeper into how I'd been feeling. Along with anxiety, I realized that I also had symptoms of depression. I couldn't remember when those started, but they were present.

Depression, though, was incredibly hard for me to admit to. When I finally told my mom, she didn't believe me. I don't think most people who know me would.

The biggest reason for that is because I always seemed happy. I was happy as a kid and as I grew up, and it showed. It wasn't a problem until I got to my early 20s, so there was no reason for anyone to think otherwise. It just kind of hit me one day and I suddenly lacked all motivation to do anything because it all felt like it was pointless.

Anyway, I tried to talk to my doctor about how I was feeling, and he simply prescribed me medicine to try to control the symptoms. I tried a few things for anxiety, but the medications didn't help. They just made it a lot worse.

I started working again two years into the pandemic. I did this immediately after losing someone really close to me, and my mental health took a nosedive.

So far, medications haven't helped me, but I have found a few ways to make life easier for myself. For one thing, I make myself take things one day, one task, even one step. I set alarms to remind myself of what needs to be done, make daily to-do lists, get a set amount of rest as consistently as possible, and drink water throughout the day. It may not seem like these things would help much - especially the to-do list - because they're all small things, but they do.

I know we all hear about the importance of to-do lists, but they are something that actually help me out. They're become almost my obsession these days. I find I'm far less productive without them.

On daily to-do lists, I put small things that are easily finished (put laundry away, check email, pet my cat, check social media) and, if there's a larger task that needs to get done, I break it up and sprinkle it in my daily lists. I also make a weekly to-do list with some larger things that sometimes make me feel anxious or overwhelmed to see all needs to be done today (vacuum, go shopping, pay bills). I never put on the list something big like "clean my room" or "clean the garage." If I break it down and spread it out over the course of the week, I find it's far less intimidating and my anxiety doesn't send me into a depression where I can't get it done.

For example, if I need to clean, let's say, the kitchen, I break it down into sub-jobs that are part of cleaning the kitchen. My list would look something like this:

Clean the stovetop

Wipe down the counter

Clear the table

Wash plates and bowls

Wash utensils

Wash cups and glasses

Sweep

Mop

It's a lot of little jobs that don't do much on their own, but add up to a whole that would be overwhelming otherwise.

Honestly, the little things are what make a difference. It's not always something big, like one major part of your life that can be changed and will fix all of your problems. At least, it's not for me. The small things are like a car's suspension system - if it's working well, the bumps are less noticeable and it feels smoother; if it's not working well, you feel every bump and even a small rock on the road feels like something major.

While I still have my struggles, I know that a mental health journey isn't something that's short or easy - it can be a long road with many twists and turns and bumps and dips and setbacks and breakthroughs. It's something you're in for the long haul, for better or for worse.