I’m going to try to be intentional about writing on here. Writing has never been one of my strong suits and my mentally this last year has been out of the norm for me and I’m working through things. I love my life, let me start by saying that, but I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression my whole life. Up until around my senior year of high school I was on Prozac (an anti-depressant). I had been accepted to Clemson and was preparing for college when I decided I wanted to quit taking it. I first want to say that I am 100% for medication to help with mental health, it literally saved my life. But, I wanted to push myself to find peace myself and overcome my anxiety and depression by keeping in check with myself mentally and actively seeking to better my life. It’s definitely something that will always be a work in progress, and sometimes there’s regression instead of progress. There have been days, weeks, months and even years where life has just been to much to handle and my daily life and mentality falter from it. I think that’s why it’s important for me to start this. I’m a communications major because community is something we find power in. By being able to share ideas and open up with one another we are able to grow through one another’s experiences synthetically in ways we never would’ve been able to experience. I’ve recently started meditating as a way to intentionally check in with my mental health and focus of goals for my life and mind. I’ve always had a running mind and it can be hard for me to focus, but my hope is that with this I will be able to keep myself intentional through my passion for communication as well as directly work on my social anxiety by sharing the feelings of layers of my story that I sometimes feel uncomfortable being real about.