I have a mental health disorder. I am still worthy of love.

But I haven't always believed it.

Hi. I’m Katie. This newsletter is a place for the woo curious to explore spirituality, culture, and humanity in an intersectional way. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week…

Last weekend, on hour three of a six-hour road trip, I got in a huge fight with my parents.

We were on our way home from Nebraska after a beautiful weekend spent celebrating the marriage of my youngest cousin. I was eating gummy worms and had just finished listening to a French podcast. My father was in the front seat. My mother was in the back.

Like most fights, I struggle to remember the entire scope of what went down. What started it. When my emotions crowd in too close, my memory for the details goes fuzzy. 

But I do know that defensiveness, blame, and martyrdom all worked in tandem to build a Tower of Babel that my mother and I have walked in circles around for our whole life. We seem to be speaking different languages at times. This moment was no exception. My father, as always, stood several yards away from the foundation of this faulty tower, quietly observing and at moments, tried to translate what my mother said.

As the gummy worms I had eaten began to congeal into a terrible, hard stone that sat heavy in my stomach, the air in the car shifted. I went from feeling like the newly-minted 34-year-old woman I am to the raging teenager who was sent to her room, time and time again, to “get it together.” Except this time, I couldn’t go anywhere. I was stuck in a car, 200 miles from home. My heart rate increased. My breath became shallow. It was like the interior of my tiny hatchback had been filled with smoke that I struggled to see through.

I know that I said awful things to my mother. But, as always, we tend to remember the words said in anger that hurt us the most. Somewhere in between the futile back and forth, my mother said something to me that touched a live wire protruding from my heart, one that I have tried to ignore for most of my life.

She said, “if I’m the problem, why don’t I have fights like this with your brother and sister?”

And there it was. My biggest fear and closest enemy. The idea that I am difficult to love. I know my mother didn’t mean for me to take it that way. But this feeling is old, old enough to buy alcohol, rent a car and have a 401k. It’s a story that I’ve told myself for a long time: loving me is anything but easy.

After all, if I were easier, my mother and I wouldn’t be throwing insults at each other while hurtling along at 80 MPH. We’d be recapping the wedding and laughing at the ridiculous billboards that flank the highways in Missouri. If my brother or my sister had been at the wheel, perhaps the drive home would have played out this way. But because it was me, everything went lopsided. Like it usually does.

In the wake of my mother’s words, an opening line to a familiar narrative began to rattle around in my head: “If you just hadn’t…”

Hadn’t brought it up.

Hadn’t said that.

Hadn’t…been who you are.

Then all of this wouldn’t be happening.

As the heavy silence that follows an unresolved fight blanketed the car, I gripped the steering wheel and tried to take deep breaths so that I didn’t slip into a full-blown panic attack. I’ve had one before while driving. 

It’s not safe.

I was a difficult child from the moment I was born. When it came time for me to make my grand entrance into this world, I stubbornly flipped myself around and refused to come out. So, on a Friday the 13th, under a waning crescent moon, I was lifted from my mother’s belly.

In rebellion against my unexpected eviction, I spent the next several years throwing epic temper tantrums, even holding my breath and turning a peculiar shade of red at times. Unsurprisingly, I grew up with the labels of sensitive and dramatic. Rightfully so—I didn’t just wear my heart on my sleeve. My emotions covered my entire body, radiating off of me even in moments when I wanted nothing more than to hide.

But despite the force of these feelings, I struggled to explain them. I didn’t understand why I cried so easily when a baby bird fell from the nest and broke its neck or when I didn’t do well on a math test. Other kids seemed to be able to run around outside or play a round of four square to move on from disappointment. I dwelled on it, letting it fester for days, often picking at its scab and re-opening what was trying to heal.

For most of my life, I didn’t question this. It’s sort of like seeing colors: you know your version of blue. You can point it out confidently. You don’t think about whether what you’ve always seen as blue is actually completely different when viewed through someone else’s eyes.

My careening emotions were my version of blue. I had never considered that life could be anything else.

If I had to tell you what it’s like to be me, I’d tell you about hot summer days spent swimming in the creek near my childhood home.

When the thermometer inched past 90, my dad would pile us all into his doorless Jeep and drive down a careening gravel road until we arrived at Prime Creek, a thin vein of water bordered by rocky shores that I picked my way across before wading in.

I nearly always floated on my back and let the sun-warmed water that was nearest to the surface envelop me. The oversized, tattered T-shirts I wore billowed away from my body, making me look like a country bumpkin Ophelia. Here, I was safe. I could hear the whirring of the cicadas above me and the churning sounds of the dark, unknowable language of the river beneath me. A s long as I stayed on the surface and arched my back just a bit to stay afloat, I was fine. Stable.

But eventually, I would sink down to the parts of the creek where the water abruptly changed from the temperature of bathwater to that of a cold shower. The warm, yellow light of the sun turned green and wan as I descended. I flailed my arms wildly and kicked my feet to try to find my balance, but I only succeeded in disturbing the silt along the loamy bottom of the river and confusing myself about which way was up.

I always resurfaced. But there was a point where I questioned whether I would.

Life is like that for me. Good most of the time. Except when it isn’t. I can never anticipate when everything will change. The only thing I know for sure is that it will. 

I often wonder who will still be there when I re-emerge from the icy depths that I visit often, soaked to the bone with my emotions. To someone watching my constant dives from their vantage point on the shore, I seem ridiculous. Why the hell do I keep trying to touch the bottom if I know it’s going to hurt me?

I ask myself the same question.

When I got divorced, I spent a lot of time on the bottom.

I came up for air at times, my descent to the top explosive and erratic. I burst through the surface and gulped air desperately, as if I inherently knew that I’d need every bit of oxygen I could get for my inevitable descent. Though it was not the first time I had been stuck in this pattern, it felt different. More serious.

Sorrow | Vincent Van Gogh, 1882.

In an effort to understand myself, I started therapy. After months of working together, my therapist gently suggested that it may be time to look more closely at what was causing my struggles. So we did. And now, I have a name to put to a face I have stared at for a long time. A label for my version of blue. A reason behind my deep dives to the bottom.

I have bipolar disorder. Type 2, in case you’re curious.

Perhaps the hardest thing about receiving a mental health diagnosis is that it divides your life into the Before and the After. When I first heard the diagnosis, the life I had lived up until this point played through my head like a highlight reel, and I began to see where my bipolar disorder had been an extra quietly standing in the background of my most difficult scenes. I felt embarrassed and ashamed. How had I missed this?

And in the After, even with a diagnosis in hand, I still feel responsible for the moments when I am the least loveable: the fights, the relationships that I just couldn’t make work, the mornings I have woken up with salt trails of dried tears on my face. I blame myself. Maybe if I had done more yoga, taken enough deep breaths or drawn enough tarot cards, I would be better. Get better.

I think of my patient partner, who has watched me move through the highs and lows several times. He doesn’t deserve a woman who is as inconsistent as the weather in the Midwest: a gentle spring afternoon one day and a raging tornado the next. I want to be the steady, predictable weather patterns of the island he lives on: sunny and mid-80s, with the occasional downpour that never lasts longer than 20 minutes.

I think of my mother. She, too, deserves a daughter who is not cruel when she is angry. One who doesn’t keep re-opening emotional wounds and ignoring the scar that bisects her stomach, a testament to all she is willing to do for me. I want to be the easy child who eventually outgrew her red-faced temper tantrums. Instead, I am still throwing them at 34.

I consider medication. I talk myself out of it–it’s not that bad, right? Like the endorphins that flood the body after the difficult labor of childbirth, the moments when I am steady and “okay” make me forget about the terrible, painful lows that I have endured. I am able to function: to hold a job, have relationships, help others. Am I selfish when I say, “not yet” to the idea of swallowing pills every day, knowing that they could make me more palatable and perhaps easier to love?

I don’t know. I really don’t.

Last weekend, when dusk blanketed the city and the waxing gibbous moon began to rise, I got on my scooter, rode to a cemetery near my house, and sat on the still-warm surface of the paved path to watch the total lunar eclipse.

Rufino Tamayo | Eclipse (1980)

The shifts were barely perceptible at first. What started as a blurring of the edges of the moon’s curves slowly transitioned into a pronounced look of wrongness. Though I knew the change would happen, seeing it manifest was uncomfortable. The moon wasn’t meant to look like this—crooked, off balance and as if it was about to tumble out of the sky, splash into the Mississippi, and sink down to rest on the muddy bottom.

But it did not fall. The moon’s grey-white hue gradually turned a rust color that I associate with bent nails, abandoned tractor parts and angry-faced toddlers. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. What was wrong was rendered remarkable, unconventional and captivating when contrasted with the heavenly body that I have always known.

I watched this version of the moon as its color deepened, its mottled sides like a Rorschach test that needs no answer. Nearby, solar powered lights adorning graves flickered like fireflies. In the stillness of this moment, I felt like the moon was watching me back.

If it could speak, it might have said, “Don’t worry. I’m still here, even if I look different.”

I rode my scooter home that night with the moon at my back, and I thought of a song that I sang as a child.

I see the moon

And the moon sees me.

God made the moon.

And God made me.

God bless the moon.

And God bless me.

I don’t know if I’m meant to thank God or any sort of universal force for making me this way, a person with bipolar disorder. Thankful is not a word that comes to mind for my moments when I turn blood red and lose my sense of balance.

Despite this, I am working to truly see the person I am. I think of ways to handle my mental health with more grace and the certainty that who I am at my core is unchanged. My mental health is not an excuse. I know that I must be truthful about what I can do to be better. When I must say that I am sorry. And where I can grow.

To do this work, I must begin with love. For myself in all of my states of eclipse.

My mental health disorder is not beautiful. But I am. Having bipolar disorder helps me see how ugliness informs beauty. And how love does not discriminate when it comes to either of these states.

I do not think less of the moon because, at times, it looks different. I choose to do the same for myself.

I bless myself, in all of my states of eclipse.

What stories have you told yourself about love and deserving it? I’d love to hear.

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✨Cards for Humanity: The Nine of Swords✨

Whether you’re into tarot or not, here’s a few things to consider about this weird thing called life.

Commonly referred to by the charming moniker “the Nightmare Card,” the Nine of Swords is never a fan favorite when it shows up in a reading. Anxiety, worry, and self-criticism are all common interpretations of this dismal scene, which features a person who has been torn away from sleep due to a storm of the mind.

As the suit most connected with our “above the shoulders” processes like our logic, our thoughts and our communication, the swords represent that which we believe to be true about ourselves and the stories we tell about those beliefs. In the Nine of Swords, nine sabers float above the weeping figure on a black backdrop. In this form, they take on an almost otherworldly aura: what is real, and what is simply a figment of one’s imagination? It’s hard to say whether these swords represent the truth or some flawed version that the mind has created.

When the Nine of Swords appears in a reading, it’s time to wake up to the narratives that are not rooted in reality. Notice that the swords have blades that seem exaggerated and without end: often, our minds convince us of improbable scenarios that seem to stretch out endlessly, without a possible resolution. But if we were to lift our gaze and focus on that which grounds us (the blanket symbolizes this), we can cover ourselves with the love and grace that we need to give ourselves as we grapple with our anxieties.

In the moments we feel the least complete, the 12 signs of the zodiac on the blanket remind us that we are whole. We carry within us the innate beauty and truth necessary to confront the sharp swords of the stories that we tell ourselves. This work is anything but easy—the next card in the suit shows a scene of ultimate finality—but the lessons learned here will help us break through to a new perspective that honors us as we are: a complex person who is not perfect but is beautiful all the same.

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✨Prompts | The Nine of Swords✨

Meditate. Journal. Pull some cards.

☀️ What exaggerated stories are being told to me by my anxiety?

☀️ What am I avoiding when I cover my eyes out of fear?

☀️ When a nightmare disrupts my life, how can I lift my gaze and see a way forward?

☀️ What energies cover and ground me in times of instability?

A song to represent the Nine of Swords.

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✨Weekly Mantra✨

Write it down. Say it out loud. Share it with a friend.

Even in moments of fear, I am still loved.

Writing this newsletter every week has been therapeutic for me. I’m always a little scared to bare my soul on the Internet, but the support I’ve received from folks like you keeps me going. So thank you.