Hello, y'all! Welcome to my corner. Today's topic is Mental Health and Therapy.
In 2004-2005 (Kindergarten), I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and started seeing a therapist. In the summer of 2017, I was given the late diagnosis of being on the Autism Spectrum (ASD). and started seeing an Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) therapist alongside my regular therapist. I stopped seeing my regular therapist and made my ABA therapist my main one. When I first started ABA therapy, I was 19 and told that I would only have them until I was 21, since my insurance had a policy of some sort but they were trying to work out a way for me to have them longer. When I was 20, I was told that we had changed some of our policies, and I would have my ABA therapist for as long as I would be on my parent's insurance, which was until the age of 26. In the fall of 2019, I started Culinary school, I was finally on my path to a career I was going to be happy and hopefully successful at.
About a month or so after school started, I was told that my insurance had changed their policy, and decided that I was no longer qualified for an ABA therapist. I had improved a bit, but not enough that I should have qualified for this. We appealed to change it 3 different times, but with no proof of evidence of me needing the help, we were denied every time. December 2019 was the last time we tried to appeal and it was denied. And then as you should know, the world kind of went to pieces in 2020, with the pandemic and tragedy after tragedy happening. We rolled a nat 1 on the year 2020. So it is now August 2020, and it has been almost a year since I last saw a therapist, which is really weird for someone like me, who has been regularly seeing them for over 10 years, with no real break in it, even with moving states.
Therapy is for everyone because they are paid to let you vent to them. I think everyone needs someone to confide in, because there are some things, that you don't want your friends and family to know, but you need to get off your chest. Some people might say, just find a release, you'll be fine..that's still bottling up things that need to be said, and can sometimes lead you down a worse path because sometimes you need chemicals to help you unwind, and then that can lead to addiction, which puts you right back where we started.
For me, therapy is very soothing, since I easily get overwhelmed and can have breakdowns. I get mental/emotional breakdowns, anxiety attacks, and overstimulated, I'm very special. When I have an emotional/mental breakdown, it consists of me crying, a lot, while hiding under a soft blanket, with the lights off. I'll need someone to come over and listen, and help me understand my emotions, with a hug, because I need to hold on tight and get grounded again. Usually, stress causes these, because with my lack of sleep, and school and my habit to want anything I make to be perfect, because then I feel like a failure and that I want to quit. (I'm not OCD, I have OCD tendencies, but that usually comes with the territory of autism)
So when lockdown went into place, all schooling went online for me and many others. Since I'm at a culinary school, many classes are hands-on kitchen classes. They decided to hold off on those until we could go back to campus, and just have lecture classes, to try to get those out of the way. Never have I been happier my parents said no to me when I asked to take online classes earlier because I never want to do that again. I'm very much a kinetic learner, I was never going to have a career like a lawyer, where its a lot of reading and papers. It's the reason I hogged the art corner in kindergarten, why I spent my lunch in the ceramic room just creating during high school, I thrive off being able to use my hands to create and learn.
So now throw me into an environment where I'm in my room where I have everything I could want to distract me, and my teacher wouldn't know because my school didn't require us to keep our cameras on all of the class. I would space out of the lecture because I would be reading a book or scrolling on Instagram. Then throw on a business class where I have 10 weeks, with a research paper due every week (usually takes me a month to write a paper), in a style I haven't used yet, where I have to build up from scratch a business as if I was about to start one next month, all while I'm barely paying attention to the lectures because my mind is not in the classroom environment. I'm so glad they had a grading curve at the end.
I probably had no less than 2 breakdowns during this past term. I have also never been more social then when lockdown happened. So I'm getting less sleep, spending my time online socializing and watching videos, and pushing off all the work because it's very confusing to me because I didn't pay attention. This was a recipe for disaster. Now let me connect all the dots because a lot of this seems like rambling. The one thing that probably could have helped me during this whole thing was talking to a therapist. While my family is supportive and trying their best to help, I need to also talk about them, and I can't do it to their faces, not without someone helping me talk to them the right way. And I know there are apps out there in which you can text a therapist, but I need one I see consistently, and I don't 100% trust those apps to not just be a robot. And also because doctors are allowed to break HIPPA if what you are saying is making you a danger to others or to yourself, so what do these apps do if that's the case?
I'm a small person, and things build up fast in me, like rage, and I still need someone to help me identify my emotions sometimes because I still have trouble with that. Someone who I can tell, "hey I told my friend I liked them, and they said I see you only as a friend" and how to continue carrying on our friendship as if that didn't happen. How to see signs of mine if when I might be coming on too strong because I don't want to lose my friend. How to know when to step back, and how to remember to how often I need to do my laundry, and how it is no okay to wear the same outfit 4 days in a row because you smell because you are human. When I'm cleaning my room, am I cleaning because it needs to be, or am I rearranging everything so I don't have to do something important. I need to see a therapist because I one day want to move out of my parent's house, without everyone worrying about how I'm going to survive without someone there to kill the bugs. Someone who can let me know, it's okay to want to feel prepared for any and every situation, but you don't have to bring your own first aid kit.
All in all, hopefully before I go back to school for my last few terms, I'm going to go back to therapy for the health of my mental stability, and so I can become a more functioning and contributing member of society. You are never too old or too young for therapy, nor do you need to have an actual mental problem to qualify to go. Therapy is a good way to get stuff off your mind and have someone help you work through your problems because everyone has good days and bad days.
Until next time,
Kayla, signing off xx
