Opening Up About My Journey on World Mental Health Day
Lifestyle expert Darlene Marshall shares about her own mental health.
Today is World Mental Health Day and chances are you’ll see plenty of posts, newsletters, tips and listicles on mental health statistics and practices.
That’s good! There’s growing awareness about the role our lifestyle behaviors play in our mental health outcomes, so its likely those lists will include time outside, exercise, sleep, and going for walks.
For a subject that only a few years ago was off people’s radar, I’m over the moon.
Last year, it was my honor for World Mental Health day 2022 to be on Spotify’s main stage and shared about Self Care
(paid supporters, get a recording of that workshop at the end of this post!)
This year, I’m doing something a little different:
My Struggle with Mental Health
Recently, I bemoaned to a friend that was about to start therapy how much I hated the first session. It feels like that point in moving to a new place, the moment where the excitement has worn off and you just wish everything was unpacked already so you can get back to living. About a year ago I met with the woman who would become my 11th therapist (but whose counting), and it started with a similar tone. The unpacking of who did what, when, and how that relates to why I’m seeing her now.
Me, unburdening all the factors she’d need to know that led me here.
Her, asking reasonable questions in ways meant to keep me from getting defensive.
But this time she did something different. She asked me to take the Adverse Childhood Experiences assessment, often called ACEs. Because of my graduate work I knew that the number on your ACEs score correlates to many health and life outcomes. Those with more adverse experiences have a higher likelihood of substance abuse, being in abusive relationships, getting arrested; but also heart attacks, are less educationally successful, and tend to make less money.
Essentially, you’re traumatized in childhood and it has ripple consequences.
The higher the number, the worse the outcomes.
I knew that research, but I’d never taken the assessment.
I was shocked to find on a scale of 10, I got an 8.
Cognitive dissonance is when your perceived reality and the actual truth are in conflict, but you refuse to accept it. If you’ve never had a time that you felt dissonance being challenged to the point of melting: it’s very uncomfortable.
Learning that number both confirmed something I’d known for a long time and massively triggered the cognitive dissonance and denial I’d been wrestling.
Professionally, I am told I’m perceived as having it all together. A subject matter expert in movement, lifestyle, and health. I’m an expert in “happiness science” and asked to present at conferences about how movement, sleep, nutrition, and similar lifestyle changes can make us more happy and stable. Into that projection people add the sense that I, too, must be happy.
The deeper truth: I’m often using these practices to even out the neuroses that have followed me for much of my life.
It Started Getting Bad…
… in my teens, but no one knew. I had my first suicidal thought in high school, driving home from basketball practice. The only person I asked for help was the school councilor, but she said she was too busy to fit me into her schedule. When I asked her about it at the end of the school year she said because of my high grades and school activities I couldn’t have been in crisis and their were other girls that needed her more.
I learned to keep it to myself, like so many other things.
I was diagnosed with a serious genetic condition at 23. A bit of internet hunting told me that I had an increased risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide from being in pain all the time. By then I was self harming and no one knew. I’d even kept it from my partner, expertly hiding the marks in places I knew he wouldn’t notice. One day I finally admitted to myself what I was doing and told my partner and my mom.
I was ready to get help.
But the crisis councilor suggested medication. I don’t know what in me told me not to go on depression medication, and let me be very clear: I have zero judgement of those that do. Mental health treatment, like so many of our decisions, is deeply personal and I am not here to tell you what to do. I just knew it wasn’t for me.
What I decided at 23 was that if I wasn’t going to go on meds, then I needed to learn how to live my life with whatever my brain was going to throw at me on a given day.
At the time I was studying Buddhist philosophy, trying to make sense of life. Two foundational teachings impacted my thinking at the time:
humans will experience pain and misfortune. We suffer when we attach and identify with anything impermanent.
effects have causes. The wheel of karma recognizes that our behavior will impact our outcomes and we have to take ownership of our intentions and actions.
Perhaps I could learn not to attach to my physical and emotional pain and that I could provide a different stimulus to produce different results in myself and my life.
That was 17 years ago.
I still haven’t been on anti-depressants; though I wouldn’t say it’s been a straight-forward, simple, or easy road.
Learning About Lifestyle
When I was diagnosed of Hypermobility Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (a genetic disorder affecting my joints) at the age of 23, I intuited that getting physically strong and learning about proper alignment and movement quality were my version of medicine. What I didn’t understand, and what research is recently catching up to, is just how much of that medicine was for my mind and nervous system.
Hormonal stability, blood sugar, mood, gut microbiome ~ you are a complex, integrated system and essentially everything affects everything else. So often our wellness jargon tries to tell us what magic, vague benefits a practice has; but it’s not one thing. It’s never one thing. And not everything works for everyone all the time.
For me, it started with fitness. Lifting to get strong and more joint stability. Running because I’d quit smoking and was trying to bring down my blood pressure. Hiking and rock climbing because some physical therapist told me I couldn’t.
From that fitness bent I shifted my nutrition, eating more protein (gata build those gainz!) and learning to get vegetables into my diet. The shift in my gut meant fewer boughts of IBS.
What I didn’t realize was the running, lifting, and eating well were shifting my body’s ability to make and receive serotonin and other “happy hormones”.
Not to be discounted; but I was often working on those things in community, providing support, identity, validation, and a lot of fun.
An Ongoing Process
I still juggle episodes of mental instability ~ what my cousin and I recently named a “mental swirly”. For the uninitiated, a swirly is an iconic high school bully move of shoving someone’s head in the toilet and flushing it on them. A torturous form of adolescent water-boarding. To us, the mental swirly is the periodic mental health episode in which we know we are suffering and sometimes hold ourselves down in it, intentionally or not.
My small community and I are working on identifying not only when these are coming, but how each of us wants to handle them individually and collectively. How do we get our heads out of the crap faster? Who can help clean us up? What have we learned along the way?
The biggest feat of the last year: I have learned to accept the complex PTSD diagnosis Therapist #10 gave in 2013. I never let her diagnosis sink in back then. Just kind of nodded and moved on. I’ve made having a chronic condition a big part of my life, story, and identity; but iced this other chronic condition out.
One hallmark of Resilience is an individual’s return to baseline after a challenge. Complex PTSD is when the distressing trauma happened before a “normal” baseline could be set. There is no normal to return to. Only the dysregulated nervous system. Working within that dysregulation is the challenge of creating a “self” that never existed before - a regulated nervous system that’s never gotten to form.
A challenge I feel I am rising to.
I share all of this today to crack the veneer that is often influencer culture. The hollow gestures and inauthenticity that can make so many of us feel lonely and isolated in the world.
If you are struggling in your heart and mind, I want you to know:
I, too, have struggled.
I am not immune by the nature of my work or my education.
I use both as tools to grow towards more understanding, compassion, and integration.
It is remarkably uncomfortable to share all these things.
So much of internet is full of attention grabs and faux-vulnerability. Yet, I remember when Tim Ferriss came out as bi-polar and people felt more seen and validated through his revelation.
The challenges of mental health, even from the darkest depths, are not insurmountable. They require patience, tenacity, support, and resources.
I hope if I can be helpful on your journey that you’ll reach out.