I grew up in a good and happy family. As a kid, I didn’t have a lot that I had to overcome. Mental health never was something that I had to think about at all. When I was in college, I got into a relationship, and this person – he was my first love. 

At that time, he was my absolute best friend and someone I thought I was going to be spending the rest of my life with. By the time he was about to graduate, I kind of had a panic. He was older than me – and that was my first real experience with mental health issues.

In our relationship, I saw how his mental health was unraveling. Everything we built together was unraveling our relationship. At that time, the way he was treating me was different from how he treated me before. I didn’t understand at that time what was going on. Things were happening differently than before and we ended our relationship. 

It was painful. I went into depression – I lose 25 pounds in a month and had a hard time processing everything that happened. The break-up was a tough process for me and it was very painful. I finished out college and just kind of moved on to other things not addressing what had happened. 

I was struggling and had a hard time. I was struggling with my mental health and I was dealing with depression. There were a lot of things that had come up in our relationship that I hadn’t addressed yet. During that time, I was questioning myself.

My confidence was not where it was used to be. It has been shattered in that previous relationship and I never addressed it as I didn’t know that I needed to. 

As females, I think we romanticized the thought of good times and I don’t know why we’re wired to do that. For me, It’s a coping mechanism because I hadn’t addressed the goal of the other. Inside my head and my emotions, I was asking myself why did he do that? And so I try to think back on the good times. 

He had traumas of his own and he never dealt with them.

Looking back on it, it was such a great relationship. We broke up and got back together a few times. It was always amazing and I believed he loved me. I thought of that stuff and ignored the others because it was painful. And for me, the pain was still deep. I hadn’t dealt with any of it and I just blocked it into a little bitty box and tucked it away. 

I remember the first time we met up, I was nervous that I couldn’t eat.I was like, this is the love of my life sitting across from me and this is possibly our second chance. We talked for like an hour and a half and it felt easy. It was so comfortable that I was like, I haven’t seen you in three years but I feel okay.

At first, I thought I was going to help him go through these traumas – and since I love him I thought it was my job to help him through. But I remember that should’ve been a red flag but I ignored it big time.

I remember when he came to town for work in Dallas, he was staying in a hotel and he said I don’t have time to go out or anything. He asked me if I can come by and I did. We talked and hang out, we just spend some time together. And I thought, man, that sounds lovely. 

But, I remember leaving and feeling like there was a sudden transition that occurred. We weren’t intimate, we just hugged and just been there with each other but I felt dirty. I felt dirty when I left. I remember crying in my car and just being like, I don’t know what this is. 

he would sometimes say some things to me but he would dismiss the things that I would say. For example my dreams, he would be like, do you think you can do that? And then he’ll start to say that oh, I’m just saying that because I love you and I’m the only person who’s going to tell you the truth. 

While all of this was happening he was also telling me stuff as I love you, I want to marry you, I want a family with you. It was all happening simultaneously. All the good and the bad were happening all at once. 

It was lonely and I felt like I was trying to always prove that I was good enough and worthy of love and affection that I could be the person he needed me to be instead of questioning whether or not I was the person I wanted to be.  

By the end of our time together, I had lost all of myself.

It was one of the hardest periods of my life because I didn’t feel like I was valuable to anyone. I didn’t feel my worth. I remember thinking if only I could just melt away. That way, he can just go away and disappear and I will not feel anything, that I’d feel rather okay and it wouldn’t hurt me more.

I recall him telling me that no one was going to me love me like he does because I was hard to love. I got to the point where I started keeping a journal because he would like to tell me things like you said this, you did this and no I never did any of those things. He will be like, “you said you would be here at two o’clock.” and I would be like, no, I didn’t. 

He was starting to make things up and he’d tell me I’m creating my own stories, that I was gaslighting and I don’t think I am. I started keeping a journal to write down things he would say and I would put a date and time and a place. I was writing everything down as I felt crazy. 

One night at midnight and it was storming outside. He got out of bed and was like, I would rather live anyone else in the world than you. At that moment, I remember crying and asking him what did I do? I don’t know what I did. 

At that moment I was begging him. “Please don’t drive back to Waco, please, please, please just stay here, please. Don’t drive back to Waco, please. It’s storming. It’s dangerous. Please. Don’t go.” there was a lot of begging on my part and he was like, “I would rather be with anyone in the entire world than with you right now. I would rather be anywhere else with you so I won’t be staying and I’m going to leave.” 

I cried myself to sleep. I had no idea what had happened, no idea what set him off. A month later, he was already dating a girl. 

My life was spiraling. He was perfectly fine. He’s like off in Lala land, he was preparing to get married. because he had proposed by this time within months he had proposed to this other girl. I was still not okay. My next steps were to see a therapist.

The first therapist that I have been through was science-based. For me, I need the facts regarding what’s going on here, and why do I feel this way. I was throwing them questions like what’s wrong with my body? Can you fix me? it was not what I thought it was. 

The second therapist that I’ve been through was a religious one. Since I’m Catholic, maybe it’s my spiritual thing. Within 30 minutes of our talk, they were telling me about how women were here to serve men and support them. And like the Bible says, I was just like, absolutely not. We’re not doing this. 

In my third attempt at therapy, I don’t even remember what it was like. I just remember the feeling of like spiritual – something about crystal. I just remember by the end of it my therapist mentioned she’s crazy so I decided I can’t be here. 

The last one that I went to, she came recommended by someone.

I was so tired of telling my story. I was exhausted. It was causing me more harm than helping me at this point.

I was a mess so I just stop and left. And I just remember, I’ll never forget this. I kind of like finish. I was just crying.

I worked with my therapist for months because I had so much that I still hadn’t addressed in regards to my past experiences that had caused mental health issues for me. And when people talk about mental health, so often one it’s been taboo for such a long time that people are afraid to talk about it because they think like, oh, you’re either using it as an excuse

I was starting to remind myself that I’m responsible for my own well-being. And so I’m going to do the work, but I’m not going to blame myself. I’m not going to say something’s wrong with me because I feel this way.

I’m going to acknowledge how I feel. I’m going to embrace how I feel, and then I’m going to work to fix it. I’m going to work, reframe it, and reposition it so that I can be happier.

I, for the longest time, didn’t realize it. I believed that I wasn’t a self-starter. So I kept sabotaging myself whenever I went to go start new projects, I sabotage over, for years, just continually sabotaging myself because I believed that I was not a self-starter.

And that was like one of the things that I didn’t realize. I didn’t know how impactful that could be in terms of mental health and how like the thought of here could show up and all of these areas of my life. I began working on my dreams.

I didn’t know what my dreams were because I had been living for somebody else.

It had been years since I had lived for me. I had to figure out what made me happy, what lits me up. So I came to the interviews again. I was like, I do think I’m supposed to do this. I think this is meaningful to me. And at that moment, my therapist thinks so too.

My point in all of that is I’m grateful that everything happened exactly as it did. Even though there’s still pain when I go back to the past, remembering the person who I was before me realize that I don’t recognize her. 

The pain is not about him. It’s not about I lost to someone because I’m glad that I lost that person. The pain isn’t because of any of that stuff.

It was painful because I didn’t understand how to take care of myself. I didn’t understand how to protect my mental health and how to process it. Whenever things happened that affects my mental health, I felt broken. I was a shell and that is painful to remember. Come to think of it, it’s painful to think of the thoughts that I had during that time of my life because they were the darkest period I’ve ever had.

When someone tells me now that they’ve had suicidal thoughts or that they’ve wanted to just disappear or they have wanted to simply stop existing, oftentimes you hear people say, well, I don’t understand how you could feel that way. 

It just feels all-encompassing. When people say I struggle with this and I have mental health issues, I take it very seriously now because I was that person. But going back to being grateful, I’m grateful that I had that experience because I feel like it’s made me the woman that I am today. It’s made me the entrepreneur that I am. 

I didn’t date for years because I was like, I just want to date me. I want to love me. Like, I want to learn how to just love myself so much. These days, I feel like we’re becoming more open to society but it hasn’t been the norm. It’s still not been acceptable for some the thought of taking care of yourself or focusing on yourself. Most of the time, it’s interpreted as selfishness or just you’re narcissistic. 

But right now I am happy that we are starting to normalize mental health. People are now starting to acknowledge that there are things that we go through and sometimes our brain just holds on to. It takes time and it takes specific efforts to work through those things. And we’re, talking about mindset as a whole. You hear business professionals talking about how mindset impacts their career or mindset impacts building a business as an entrepreneur mindset. 

Science is even proving that your mind and your thoughts can control your external circumstances. There’s scientific proof now that can change your reality. It can change your body. There are studies on how the mind can heal the body. And they’ve proven that there are people who have concentrated thought a very positive thought that is outside of what they’re currently experiencing health-wise, I think overcome terminal illnesses. 

The therapist helped tremendously. I was going to a therapist for like a year and a half. And then after that, I continued learning. I started taking courses and I bought mindset courses. I just started determining what I wanted and then I started creating roadmaps to get there. And that was something I also learned from the therapist and like reverse engineering reality. I started doing that and sure enough, like when I made the decision, I was like, you know what? I am going to be, I am going to be an entertainment host. And, I did just that.

Since then, my experience has molded me into the person that I am today. There are a lot of things that I’ve been through and so I wanted to share my turning points. It consists of three simple things.

1.  Acknowledging that I was having mental health issues or so the acknowledgment that something was wrong and it was okay for it to be wrong. 
2. Learning how to take the power back without placing blame. It’s learning how to, instead of being a victim, actually be a place of power because of those situations. You have to decide your reality. I decided how you get to be in my life. I’m going to decide what role you get to play.
3. The final step was taking action and being confident enough to say, okay, it’s my time. I’m going to love me. I’m not going to worry about getting reassurance from anyone else. I’m going to do what I need to do. And I’m going to do it for me. I’m not going to do it for anyone else. And I’m going to every single day. I don’t care if it’s sending an email. If it’s blowing my nose, whatever I need to do every single day, I’m going to take one more step towards what I want.

I think all three of those together when I decided that those things were important to me and that those things were going to be standards, they weren’t just going to be temporary. They will be the standards of my life. That’s when things changed.

People need to know that verbal abuse is still abuse and it affects us because the word sticks emotionally. There may not be any external bruises, but the damage on the inside is just as bad in a lot of ways.