Broken Crayons Still Color

I have a lot of work that I should be doing. I'm in a better, more focused frame of mind today than I have been all week. I should be taking advantage of that and catching up on the things my brain wouldn't let me accomplish the past three days. I have stacks of papers to go through, lists of progress notes to finish, multiple phone calls to make, and treatment plans to write. But I don't care, because that work isn't going anywhere. Instead I'm going to write about a topic that has been on my mind for quite a while now and writing my feelings may be the last bit of closure I need to completely shut it out of my brain forever. I hate to use the word trauma so loosely, because I know of and work with so many people who have had real, hardcore trauma in their lives. At the same time trauma is a spectrum. Just like depression, anxiety, Bi-Polar, Schizophrenia, Autism, etc etc etc. all look different in each person who has those, trauma has a different meaning to ever

I am constantly learning what my triggers are and trying to learn self calming techniques to prevent those triggers from throwing me into complete panic. Over the past two or three months I started having panic attacks every time I go grocery shopping by myself. The first time it happened to me I had no idea what was happening. I was just trucking along and out of nowhere panic came over me and I had to stop what I was doing to breath and try to collect myself. That has NEVER happened to me in the grocery store before. I've always found grocery shopping by myself to be calming for some reason. That day in the store I was about to leave my cart full of food right where it was and run out the doors as fast as I could, but I didn't. I am pretty sure I said "Meghan, you are fine" out loud in the middle of the aisle. I went to the checkout and tried to get out of there as fast as possible. I'm pretty sure the check out boy couldn't have gone any slower, which didn&

My journey of self love has be a long, bumpy road. I grew up thin as a rail with a metabolism that was fast as lightening. I could eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted and not gain an ounce. I went to college the same size I was when I graduated high school, A cup and all.  At some point between the ages of 18-23 I got fat. I kept eating what I wanted, drinking beer, and nursing hangovers with McDonald's double cheeseburgers. At some point around the age of 24 I decided enough was enough. I replaced my daily Mt. Dew with coffee, stopped covering my food with ranch, and chasing my meals with beer. Without doing anymore than a few diet changes and going to the gym 4 or 5 times a week, I dropped 30 pounds. I felt good about myself because and got a bunch of new clothes. I was happy. I was also living with anxiety disorder that wasn't yet diagnosed. I knew I had depression, but that wasn't consuming me like anxiety was. My ambition to lose weight and my decision to seek a co