Darkness to Dialogue: Living Well With Mental Illness

Estimated Read Time: 5 Minutes Summary It’s common to expect that healing will feel good, but for many in recovery, joy or peace can feel:  unfamiliar  even dangerous.  This post explores why feeling better sometimes sparks anxiety, especially for those with a trauma history or long-term mental illness. With gentle reflection and evidence-based insight, we’ll unpack how to trust wellness again and why discomfort in joy doesn’t mean you’re broken. “When Joy Feels Foreign” There was a moment a few months ago when I laughed,  really laughed, and immediately felt this strange, hollow tug in my chest. Instead of enjoying the joy, I started bracing for what would go wrong. My brain whispered, “Don’t get used to this.” For most of my life, I was either surviving something or recovering from something. And even in recovery, I’ve been conditioned to scan for the next wave, the next crash, the next shoe to drop. I was feeling okay, but I didn’t feel safe; it felt like a ...

Summary Healing doesn’t follow a timeline. For those living with mental illness, recovery often brings unresolved emotions to the surface long after the trauma occurred. In this post, we explore why time feels distorted during mental health recovery and how to release the pressure to “catch up.” Estimated Read Time: 🕒 5 minutes When Time Doesn’t Feel Linear 🕰️ I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately, not in the way most people do, but in the way trauma can bend it.  There are moments I look at my life and feel like I’m somehow behind. I’m in my 40s now and only just beginning to unpack some of the trauma from my 30s. Not because I ignored it, but because I didn’t yet have: the language the safety the support to begin I didn’t know what mental health recovery looked like. I didn’t know I was even allowed to name what happened to me. And now that I am doing the work, it feels like I’m sorting through emotional boxes that should’ve been unpacked years ago. Some memorie...

  Summary Recovery often means changing your patterns, but sometimes, it also means:  outgrowing people, roles, and spaces you once needed.  This post explores the quiet loneliness that can follow healing; when the chaos fades, but connection doesn’t immediately fill the space. It’s a compassionate look at how rebuilding life after mental health struggles can feel isolating and why finding belonging is a vital and worthy part of the journey. The Truth No One Tells You I never expected healing to feel so lonely. After years of living in survival mode, I assumed recovery would bring relief, reconnection, and peace. But what no one told me is that healing often creates a space, one where old relationships no longer fit, familiar habits fall away, and you're left sitting in the quiet.  Whether it was surviving toxic and abusive relationships or rebuilding after divorce, there were parts of my journey that I had to travel alone.  That quiet can feel like abandonmen...