It's an important month to us here at A Million Ways.
And we're happy to be able to celebrate it with authors and articles!
Good morning wordicorns and scribblers,
May is Mental Health Awareness Month and Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes (EDS) and Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder (HSD) Awareness Month. So I want to talk about mental and physical health for a few moments.
Mental health is so often something taken for granted. Like a garden, it’s made up of many parts, it should be nurtured, and there is no such thing as all is lost.
I’ve struggled with depression, cyclothymia, anxiety, trichotillomania, and self-harm since I was a teenager. Hard, emotional, complicated, devastating, impossible—none of those cover the journey.
But I’m stable now, and I plan to stay that way. In an industry that is filled with judgement and long nights and digging into emotions to make scenes pop, that’s difficult. So I value medication, therapy, good habits, self-work, sabbaticals, meditation, breaks, drinking water, walks outside, spending time with loved ones, hobbies, finding enjoyment on days I can.
As someone who has been the lifeline for many people through organizations such as To Write Love on Her Arms, I believe in reaching out. That there is always help and love waiting for you. You are not alone. Here at A Million Ways to Be a Writer, we’ll share ways to keep healthy while writing, but don’t wait for us. If you need help, get it.
Don’t know where? Check Mental Health First Aid for resources. If it’s an emergency call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org (or 911 if it’s a medical emergency).
Though Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is not as common as mental health problems, there are 13 types and the list is probably still growing. Once upon a time, there were only 3.
I live in a complicated body. For the longest time, my family just assumed everything that happened was a separate thing. My stomach hurt because my stomach hurt. My skin hurt because my skin hurt. We didn’t have reasons, sure, but they weren’t connected. Then, they were.
Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is a connective tissue disorder. It affects me in a number of ways, but the most impactful is my joints subluxing (partially dislocating) at will. My fingers will shift, causing me to stop writing entirely for days on end. It’s painful and just plain sucks.
I wrote a novel about a woman with Hypermobile EDS who wanted to kill someone before she got too bad off. It’s extremely dark humor (think American Psycho without the sexual violence). It shows a lot of what it’s like to live in the hEDS body.
The thing is, that’s not a unique experience to hEDS. We all have something. Whether it’s as small as a hangnail that’s keeping us from typing quickly or acute like food poisoning or something far more serious, we all experience pain, physical discomfort, fatigue, burnout.
We have to protect our bodies. I’ve seen so many healthy friends get COVID and end up with life-altering disorders. It happens so quickly sometimes, you can barely blink. No warning bells alert you to prepare yourself for what happens next.
When your passion and career take mental and physical energy, as ours does, as writing and publishing and sharing our work does, we have a responsibility to take care of ourselves.
So please take care of yourselves and others. Be considerate. Don’t take your health for granted. Drink lots of water. Visit your doctor once a year (here are three ways to see one if you don’t have health insurance).
And do everyone a favor—yourself included. Don’t look at someone and assume you know what they are going through. They could be smiling on the outside but crying on the inside (from pain, from wanting to die, from replaying a conversation they had last month over and over again in their head, from a body that’s falling apart). You never know when you’ll be that person, and showing that compassion today may have someone else showing it tomorrow.
This month will be filled with talk about writing with disabilities and how writing can affect your mental health (and how to keep it from causing harm), interviews with disabled authors and a psychologist, as well as a healthy dose of charm along the way. We’re still focusing on the writing, but we are holistic humans that cannot exist on words alone, no matter how much we want to.