Mental Health Check-In

Because the world is always ending, and it is always being rebuilt

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. Today’s post is short and sweet, and is for paid subscribers only.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Hello everyone.

I was interviewed for a Canadian TV show last year, although I ended up being cut from the final product — that’s show biz, baby! The producers were looking for people who had grown up in homes where the parents and church community were obsessed with the end times. I was on a panel with two other people, and we talked about the long-term impacts of being terrified that the world was going to end. I will never forget the last question they asked us — are we hopeful about the future or not? The other two people said something about climate change and political instability in the U.S. and how basically we are all fucked so why not enjoy the present. But I said that I didn’t have the luxury of being hopeless about the future and everyone sort of stared at me.

I realized almost instantly that I was the only person there who had kids, and how this had propelled me to work incredibly hard to find glimmers of hope about the future. As I told the host (Jay Baruchel, the voice of Hiccup in How to Trains Your Dragon) and the other panelists, I have to have hope for the future because my kids are inheriting this world. I will do what I can in my own small ways to create the life I want to live, and teach my children to do the same.

It was at that moment I realized that so much of my hard work when it came to my mental health was centered around breaking the cycles of apocalyptism, catastrophizing, and passive suicidality that had been a part of my own childhood.

These days, more than ever, I am so grateful for the work I have done to change these cycles.