Hi Friends! I am so excited to introduce to you a friend of mine, Natalie Zastryzny! Natalie is a mental health and wellness advocate who shares her story with her followers through her blog Mentalie Me! Mentalie Me is a one-stop shop life + style blog that brings you real-life content about mental health, self-care, fitness and nutrition and so much more! I am excited to share more with you from Natalie in the future, but today I am thrilled to share her story of hope with you all, in hopes that you too can see the light at the end of the tunnel!
To read more from Natalie visit: https://www.mentalieme.com/
Hey you! YEAH YOU! The one who feels empty, alone, unloved, misunderstood, like YOU will never be enough, and will NEVER get through these dark days and the thoughts in your head. Like you could die and no one would care or that you being gone would be easier on your loved ones. YOU my dear made it here. In my safe place. A place where we talk about the real sh*t. Society tries to cover up mental health and say it isn’t real, but IT IS REAL. The endless tears on a bathroom floor are real, the scars internally and physically are real, the self hatred, battling your brain, the days we struggle to get out of bed…ARE REAL.
January 2018. This is where it all began to fall apart for me. I had just accepted an amazing job opportunity to be a business development/marketing coordinator at one of the top mortgage companies in Arizona. Rob and I were living together for the first time that off season, we had our first home, we had great friends, lived in beautiful Scottsdale and we had just gotten our second dog, Rae. It was little things that were off about me…I was more emotional, fighting with Rob at least 3 times a week over the smallest things, night time anxiety started building each day, and I was unhappy doing life everyday. How could I be though, I had it all…To the outside world.
February came around and we got engaged, even more picture perfect to the outside world. Behind closed doors the anxiety, fighting, endless crying nights got worse. We thought maybe it was my birth control, I was on triple the normal dosage due to ovarian cyst so my hormones were out of whack we thought due to the pill. Got off the pill and nothing changed. March came and with my lifestyle being married to a baseball player, that meant Rob was getting ready to leave for the season. When Rob left for season, that meant I was alone. I felt like it was so much more magnified once he left. The anxiety. Panic attacks. I cried every single night on my bathroom floor. Rob, in the midst of season, had to be on the phone with me for hours to get me to calm down and then had to get up and perform at the highest level running on just a few hours of sleep. There were times he would have to step off the field to talk me off the ledge of yet another panic attack.
I felt terrible. I felt like I didn’t deserve Rob. In my head I felt like I was ruining his career and he was about to marry a mess of a woman. I created a circle of self-hatred. Pushing him away was all I knew. I could feel my life was falling apart and the love of my life was about to leave me. I was a disappointment to him, the dogs, my family, and friends. Who could love me?
April and May were tough. This is when life completely broke for me. I cut myself for the first of many, many times. It was the only thing that made the mental/emotional pain feel numb. I knew if I didn’t get some sort of help soon or tell someone, I was going to die. I finally told my parents, siblings, and closest friends. I put my pride aside and knew that I was not perfect and it is OK to ask for help. Even then I felt like no one knew what I was battling, how dark my days and nights were, or how fed up I was being me. I was tired of living, tired of having to fake it. That’s the thing. How could they understand unless they went through depression and battled with anxiety themselves?
I was away from family, my fiance, friends, and a life back home in Texas. I was planning a wedding which was just adding more pressure in life to be happy and stop complaining. I wasn’t seeing eye to eye with my in-laws, and I was scared for them to know what was going on behind closed doors. ALL of this threw me into a merry-go-round of hating life, hating myself, hurting myself, going to a job I knew I wasn’t physically able to give 100%, coming home laying in bed crying till I had to get up and do it all over again. I gained 20 lbs. I was over-eating some days, and not eating other days.
Months came and went and life completely swallowed me whole and spit me out to drown and die slowly and painfully. I had tried to commit suicide twice and I thank God (or whatever high power you believe in) that I didn’t die. You see guys, my depression had an ending. Just like winter turns to spring and spring turns to summer. My depression left. A big part of what changed me was finding out that I had over-sized parathyroid glands and a tumor in those glands causing many issues in my body. And then a big part of what changed me was talking about it on my videos I put on Instagram. Knowing that I wasn’t alone in this battle and that together we can get through our deepest struggles. I have so much to share and say and so much to dive deeper into to let the world know how real mental health is. But for right now here is a piece of me. This doesn’t define me nor should it define you. Depression happened to me and it is a part of my story…But if I can be here telling you all this, just know that it does get better and there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
I am NOT a doctor. I do not have the magical answer or pill. This is my story. These are my struggles. This is a place for you and me to have an open table discussion about you or your loved ones struggles with mental health. Hi, let’s talk.
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