I am not broken. I may be a little dented and scared, but I am not broken. I think that there are a lot of people who think that their anxiety and depression makes them broken. I have thought that I was broken. I have let myself fall into a place where I felt broken. And I have struggled to come away from that way of thinking.

It is easy to feel broken when you feel different. It is especially easy when you are already feeling isolated as a result of depression. The realization that you are not alone is exceedingly liberating. Not everyone has anxiety, but everyone has felt anxious. Not everyone is depressed, but everyone has felt deep sadness. The point of this is: you and I are not alone.

There have been numerous videos and articles about celebrities that suffer from any number of mental health issues. The point of these videos is to show people that they are not alone in their struggles. I gave up hiding my struggles a few years ago. I don’t think that I was actually successful at hiding anything. The only person I was trying to hide things from was myself. I hid them, or tried to hide them, because I thought people would not want to know me if they thought I was broken. I thought that if they knew about my struggles with PTSD they would think less of me. I also thought that they would not want to associate with me.

When I started to be more open about what I have been though and what I go through I found that some people became more receptive towards me. I also found that some people would rather not be around me. This was a welcome piece of information. I now knew who I wanted in my life and who I did not.

As I struggle with my PTSD and my health I find it easy to beat myself up over failures (see previous posts). I am also gaining an understanding of how to relearn things that I have lost due medications and treatments for my heart. I have had to relearn grammar as well as a few other key components to writing. Being in a writing program has accentuated my lack of knowledge. I want to say sometimes, but that would be a lie. It is a struggle all the time.

What I want people to take from this is: we are not alone, and we are not broken. We may be dented and our scars may show. However, in the end those scars do not define us. Our love and compassion define us.