I had intended to write everyday for one hour leading up to the first residency. I wrote it all over my calendar in red, permanent marker to remind myself how important this program is to me. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was in 3rd grade. I’ve wanted to write a book and have it published since 6th grade. These are milestones that I have held in front of me to keep my feet moving along this agonizing path of life. (When you’ve lived everyday of your life for years on end with mental illness, even your good days are exhausting and painful.)

Now, I’m facing the very likely reality that, over the course of the next two years, I will work on one (even multiple) book-length projects. I’m already only 8,500 words away from having a completed manuscript of short stories. That book, I know for sure, will be finished before I graduate. I’m excited about this, tremendously excited because it’s proof that everything I’ve pushed through, everything I’ve overcome in my personal life, has made a difference.

But I’m also facing other things that aren’t so nice. Chronic pain in my shoulder has made working on my creative writing for one hour every day a damn near impossibility. I can’t even spend fifteen minutes typing up a blog post without burning pain shooting down my arm. My anxiety and depression have been extremely bad lately, and that has lead to me being more determined in my self-care. I’ve had to set boundaries in relationships that aren’t comfortable. I’ve had to slow down on my personal reading to make room for educational reading. I’ve had to learn how to recognize when I’m overloading myself. As an extrovert, this is extremely difficult. I thrive on interpersonal human connection and when one part of my emotional health is recharged from interacting with friends while my anxiety and depression need alone time and disconnection to relax and relieve tension, it becomes a massive internal battle for what I need most in a given moment.

Not everyone understands how tiring this struggle is. Just because I hold down a full time job and maintain a relatively consistent writing and reading practice, doesn’t mean I’m doing well. I often go through the week feeling fine and, come Saturday morning, can’t even climb out of bed or eat or drink water because my depression is so overwhelming. And when it’s not depression, it’s anxiety and panic attacks striking me like lightning at incredibly inconvenient times.

So I have to unpack what self-care is for me everyday because my needs vary depending on what I have to deal with. This eats up so much of my energy, I don’t always have enough left over to write. This is worrying since I’m about to start an M.F.A. program that requires me to write consistently in both creative and critical fashions. Just getting the reading done for the residency is already exhausting me, and I haven’t been writing at all – just working and reading.

All of that to say this: please be careful with what you say to someone with mental health problems. We already struggle to make ourselves a priority in our daily lives, we don’t need others piling on with shame, guilt, and manipulation. Reach out and ask us if we need something, ask us how we’re doing, assist when we ask for help; just please, when we say we can’t do something/go somewhere, believe us. Take us seriously. And then respect the boundaries we enforce. Just because we seem “okay” from the outside doesn’t mean we are okay, at all. And sometimes we can’t even admit to ourselves how badly we’re doing because to do so would be to lose the last hold we have on our peace of mind.