You Can't Break Up With Grief! With Emily Washcovick

Grief Growers,

I am delighted to introduce you to one of my nearest and dearest friends.

This is the first time I've ever had a friend that I know before I've introduced you to them on the podcast come on the podcast.

I'm just so excited to be here with her because she has a remarkable story and has so many parallels and insights about grief that still surprise and amaze me to this day.

Her name is Emily Washkovic and I'm so excited to introduce her to the show.

Emily,

Will you start us off with your lost story?

Absolutely.

Thanks for having me Shelby.

I've been listening to Coming Back and waiting to be on it for a long time now.

My lost story began almost a year ago right now.

I have a pretty fast paced job.

I work doing business outreach and I was in a very busy time last October.

I was balancing some personal life things as well and trying to find as many hours in the day as possible.

And right around October 15th,

Things started to get a little dicey for me.

I wasn't sleeping even more than normal,

Wasn't eating very healthy and my brain was just racing.

Everything finally came to a head on October 16th.

I was completely disengaged in all people who were trying to interact with me that evening.

I was going in circles around my apartment,

Physically and metaphorically in my brain.

And finally my boyfriend needed to call my parents for help.

He didn't really know what was going on.

They came and got me and safely brought me to a hospital where I was sedated for about 16 hours.

And when I woke up,

I was taken in an ambulance to Rogers Mental Health Facility,

Which is an inpatient facility.

And I was told that I have bipolar disorder and that I had just experienced my first manic episode.

You know,

That was a pretty crazy day for me.

I don't even think it really sunk in that day.

But my big questions in that moment were,

When can I go home?

And what does this mean for me now?

And you know,

I didn't really have a lot of choice right in the beginning.

I was in that inpatient facility for six days before they determined that it was safe and healthy for me to leave.

But that was just the beginning.

When I left that inpatient facility,

I had to show up the next day at an outpatient facility.

And I reported there every day,

Monday through Friday,

For eight hours of therapy for the next 11 weeks.

And yeah,

I think that pretty much sums up the initial story of where the loss began.

So I'm hearing this,

You know,

I was going in circles physically and metaphorically in my apartment.

I wonder if you had like any recognition of like what's happening or you were so far removed from the experience that it's only come back to you later.

Such a good question.

So I will say I have two aunts who have bipolar disorder.

One of them has a very classic case.

She was diagnosed in her early 20s.

That's typical for bipolar disorder.

That's normally when you're going to start displaying symbols.

And I knew a little bit about her life with that,

But she is very actively treating that and lives a very normal life,

To be honest.

My other aunt has a more severe case.

She was diagnosed later in life,

Late onset diagnosis,

And that typically presents a lot more problems.

And so I had seen the disease displayed in a variety of ways.

And I just think that I was so unaware that something like this could happen to me.

All of the things that were happening to lead up to that manic episode are such huge red flags now.

But when they were happening,

They were almost like my personality on steroids.

So I mean,

A lot was going on when this happened,

Shelby.

I had just gotten a puppy.

I'd had a puppy for five days when I finally went into the hospital.

So I mean,

Anyone who's extremely type A like myself and juggling a lot of balls like many of us in our 20s and trying to please a lot of different people,

I was constantly running around.

And in those four or five days before I was hospitalized,

It was just so amplified,

So amplified.

I was constantly texting people and responding to emails.

And man,

I was just moving a mile a minute.

But at times it felt like,

Thank God I could do all of this.

Like thank goodness my brain can keep up.

And I look back now and I'm just like,

That was the beginning.

That was the sign.

That was what to look for.

And you know,

It's interesting now.

I know more of what to look for.

And that still doesn't mean that I don't second guess it all the time.

Some of the greatest things about my personality are signs of mania and signs of building up to a potential next episode.

And so at the time I had no idea,

But I also knew something wasn't right.

And it was finally that last day where I got taken to the hospital that I was completely out of control.

And I can remember right now things that were going through my brain and they feel like they make sense,

But they really don't make any sense.

Like I cannot connect all of the dots of what my thought process was,

But I was attached to this idea.

And that was what my brain ran away with.

And I know now that all of those things can be controlled,

But I also know that all of us encounter things every day that heighten or lower our mood.

And so you just really have to be aware honestly about what your normal is,

What your level is and kind of identifying any of those changes,

Those blips on the radar,

I like to call them.

I know we talk a lot about on this show about self-forgiveness as it pertains to grief.

And I've actually done a few episodes in the past on forgiving ourselves for being the people that we were in the past.

And I'm wondering if there's any piece of you that reckons with this idea of,

I can't believe I didn't see it sooner.

You know what's interesting?

I don't carry any of that on myself.

I love my family and we are very fortunate to be as close as we are.

But as someone post-diagnosis in a family with multiple mental health conversations that could have been had,

I'm frustrated that I didn't talk about my mental health when I was in high school.

Or I'm frustrated that I didn't know that you don't have to have a diagnosis to struggle with mental health.

I mean,

My big thing that I always say is if you have a brain,

You should be concerned about your mental health.

I like that.

But I really,

I don't carry a lot of that around with me.

The one thing I do carry around though,

Is I get frustrated with myself for never prioritizing my mental health before my diagnosis.

And what I mean by that is,

I can't tell you how many times I said,

I should see a therapist or maybe I need to set different hours or boundaries at work or maybe I need to say no to these plans tonight because I just have not enough energy left.

And there were always reasons to not prioritize myself before my diagnosis and to not prioritize my mental health before my diagnosis.

But you will not catch me doing that anymore.

I do not send emails at 10 o'clock at night,

No matter who you are.

There's nothing about my job that needs to be dealt with at 10 at night.

I also cancel plans if I do not have the emotional energy to be there.

And I think we all need to give ourselves a little bit of grace and space to adjust our schedules or to say no to things or to say yes to things that are going to help us or make us feel even just a little bit better.

And that's the one thing I look back on and I wish I wouldn't have done is put myself and my mental health at the bottom of the list thinking that I could get to it later.

And realizing that it did take a diagnosis for me personally,

To prioritize things like my sleep,

Like my emotional energy,

Like how much time I spend with people and what that time looks like.

I think that's a really valid point and it brings up this,

A lot of other outlets would call it like a come to Jesus or like a pivot point.

I think I used to use this terminology when I first started doing grief work of you've had this thing happen and now you have this realization and now something about your life in the aftermath changes.

I think that makes a lot of sense and that happens a lot with grief too as people are like I realize I had to stop moving at a breakneck pace or I realize I need to quit my job and pursue my bucket list or kind of whatever crazy things happen.

When people are in the aftermath of loss for me,

I don't know that I've ever said this on this podcast before,

But my dream in graduating college was moving to Chicago and becoming like one of the first female C-suite executives in the advertising industry.

Interesting.

And it never came to pass because even though one of my first jobs was in the marketing advertising sphere,

It's like my heart was no longer with that dream or in that place or in that space or with that old person in that old life,

Which is something that happens in grief a lot.

And I think with you too,

And I think that's where I want to segue this conversation is how the person you are now is different than the person who you were a year ago.

And I wonder,

Like,

Do you miss her at all?

Do you miss that life?

And then what is different about this life?

That's a really good question.

So I think the biggest thing that I've had to hurdle over in my 11 months post-diagnosis is my confidence took a really indirect hit and I don't think I realized it at first.

So I'll be honest,

I am very fortunate in many,

Many ways.

One of my first fortunate circumstances is that I happen to be surrounded by a lot of highly educated people who understand mental health.

So I don't necessarily deal with these stigmas of feeling like I can't bring things up to family or whoever it may be.

I feel very lucky in that sense.

However,

I still derived all my confidence pre-diagnosis from positive experiences that I not only had,

But created for myself.

You know,

You build up all of these great experiences and that's how you build confidence.

And when things don't go your way or something doesn't work out the way you thought it did,

That changes your perspective on things,

Right?

And for me,

Getting that diagnosis in so many ways gave me relief,

Made me understand certain things that I had struggled with pre-diagnosis,

But subconsciously it was impacting how I felt about myself and my confidence.

Can you give us an example of that?

Absolutely,

I can give you an example.

We're going broad terms.

I wonder if we can go a little more detailed.

So when I was still in outpatient therapy,

So this is pretty soon after I left the hospital,

Let's call it two weeks after I left my six days of inpatient.

I had been coming home every night to my regular life after therapy was over and I was with my boyfriend,

Tony,

And my dog,

Oscar.

And I didn't realize it,

But every day I was walking into the world and trying to be the version of myself that I used to be with my diagnosis.

And I would feel great.

I would be doing fine and then some random thing would happen that would have never set me off in the past.

So the most prominent memory is the first box game I went to after I got out of the hospital.

Tony and I have been going to box games for years.

We're season ticket holders.

It is a place that I feel comfortable.

And that first game I was at,

The first round of leaving our seat to go get drinks and food,

I just started to feel all of these physical ailments of an anxiety attack coming on.

My back was just so tense.

My stomach felt like I wanted to throw up and I could not figure out what was going on until I just said,

I need to go back to the seats and sit down.

I need to get out of this crowd.

And I was able to identify the next day in therapy that what was happening was I was looking around and identifying all of the potential people that I might have to lie to if I ran into them at this game.

I wasn't at work.

I was on medical leave.

Most of the people in my life knew what was going on with me,

Knew about my diagnosis.

It wasn't a secret.

But if I were to run into any of my outer circle contacts at the box game,

A common question would be,

How's work?

And I am just such an honest and open person that it would have crushed my soul to lie and say,

Works great.

But I wasn't ready to tell those outer circle people yet what I was going through.

And I realized that every day when I was stepping into the world,

I felt like I was still trying to portray myself the way I had always been.

But only I knew what had changed.

And heaven forbid they asked me a question where I'd be caught in a lie.

And it took a lot of therapy to work through that.

And I cannot stress enough for people who are receiving a new mental health diagnosis,

If you are having a high intensity experience,

And what I mean is maybe it's a depressive episode,

Maybe it's a manic episode,

Maybe it's continuous anxiety attacks.

Ongoing treatment is so important and valuable because you are not only doing life,

But then going to treatment every day and you're balancing both of those things.

And that is really the baseline of how I got my confidence back.

Experiencing moments out in the world where I felt uncomfortable and not having an awful thing happen.

Having another positive experience where I was able to walk around and find that confidence again in what defines me to myself.

I want to validate something you just said because we've never talked about this on Coming Back before.

What you were talking about,

I didn't want to share the old story,

But I also wasn't ready to tell the new story.

And that induced this anxious state.

And I kind of want to give,

I don't necessarily know if I want to give a permission slip here,

But I wrote this piece a while ago called How to Perfect Your Grief Story and it tells you based on who you're talking to,

What your relationship is to them,

How long it's been since the loss,

What kind of story is likely best to tell them and lets you work through what's the script I want to use if and when I run into this person.

And I just had this thing pop into my brain of you have permission to tell the old story or a different story until the new story presents itself or is ready to be told.

I feel like our grief stories and our loss stories are things that need to be incubated for a little bit or we have to recognize they're real before we can start introducing them to others.

It's like they're humans that stand alongside us and you're like,

I'm not ready to introduce you as my boyfriend yet,

So I'm going to tell you that you're just,

We're just friends for now,

We're coworkers,

It's totally fine.

Until you're ready to tell the world,

Like,

No,

That's actually my boyfriend.

And that's just the picture that came to mind.

And I also love what you said in a different tangent about this notion of ongoing treatment because this is parallel to grief also,

Of society has this huge mentality of like you treat it once and then it's fixed and you're done as opposed to something that's chronic or genetic or long lasting or like a long-term relationship.

I've never said grief is like a boyfriend before,

But I guess I'll say it on the show.

Grief is like a boyfriend.

Unfortunately,

You can't break up with your boyfriend.

Unfortunately,

Oh,

That might be the name of this episode.

You can't break up with grief.

I love that.

I love that.

And I just,

In this two seconds,

I want to thank you for coming on the show to offer permission to people who have and battle with mental health to be like,

You can stay in treatment and still be okay,

As opposed to you stay in treatment and there must be something wrong with you,

Which is the story that a lot of people like to tell.

I think I want to continue down that road and ask how you've integrated this identity of bipolar with the identity of Emily because it wasn't there before.

There's a little squeakiness about your family not recognizing it.

So I wonder what your relationship to bipolar was before with your two aunts who have it,

If it was something that was taboo or a secret or something was amiss in the family and then now you're joining these ranks or maybe you don't see yourself as joining the ranks.

So how does that line up in your brain?

That's so interesting.

So you know,

The time,

I always say timing is everything.

And last summer was the worst my aunt has ever displayed.

Her episodes were,

You knew about it if you were in the family,

Whether you were there or not,

That was how big the reverberate,

Help me.

Reverberation?

Thank you.

That's how big it was.

Because of that,

I honestly started looking at bipolar from that fearful perspective.

For my aunt,

It is completely chemical.

To a T she will go up,

On a certain day she will come back down.

And the concept of that being bipolar was so scary to me.

The feeling that an episode wasn't going to be set on by a life event or stress but could just happen,

That was something I did not want to identify with.

And I talked to my therapist about this a lot.

And she asks me all the time,

Emily,

Does it matter?

Does it matter if the mood changes or is enhanced by something in your life versus a chemical imbalance?

It does matter because if I know I'm going to have a busy few weeks at work,

I would like to think that I can plan and prepare for that.

But the fact of the matter is none of us can plan and prepare for everything we're going to encounter on any given day.

So again,

It kind of takes me back to this thought process where I'm now in a place,

Shelby,

That my diagnosis gives me my own permission to do what I need to,

To prioritize my health.

However,

My concept of what the diagnosis was in the beginning was something that I wasn't going to identify with fully.

Now you know this because we're personal friends,

But when I first came out of the hospital and began to tell my story,

The story I would always tell is I'm very fortunate because I really only display the manic sides of the disease.

So I'll be firing off all cylinders.

I have those moments where I am just on and that is in bipolar,

That moment that stretch right before a manic episode is when really you're feeling like you've got things going on.

On top of the world,

Dude.

You are.

I used to think that's all that I have.

I get really high and then I kind of normalize.

I used to always say I really don't display the depressive side.

Even when I got a tattoo after I left treatment about a month later,

I got the symbol for the bipolar disorder on my wrist.

It looks like a smiley face that could go either direction,

But I had the dots for the frowny face laid lighter than the rest of the tattoo.

So to me that symbolized that I identified that there's the low side of the disease,

But I don't display that way.

Well,

About a month after that I had my first depressive episode post-diagnosis.

The reason I say it that way is because I look back now and I see all through my 20s blips of mania and blips of depression,

But I had always thought of depression as laying in my bed,

Under the covers,

Canceling everything,

Not going anywhere.

You know what?

That's not the only way that depression looks.

For me,

It looks like pushing myself to the edge for as many days as I need to be on for work,

And then coming home and plopping myself in front of the TV to veg through series on end and cancel plans.

I mean,

I do do a lot of the things sometimes when I'm in that low state that I would identify as depression,

But for years I never wanted to think of myself as a person that had those emotions.

It's just so fascinating because I look at it now and I feel so much better that I have both,

Because that means the middle is more attainable to me.

I don't know if that resonates with anyone,

But I went through my first fear of mania,

Like serious mania I'm talking about a week ago.

I'm getting ready to kind of launch all this stuff about my story and get things going,

And I was excited.

I was working on all this stuff that I'm very passionate about,

And I had to check myself for a second and say,

Am I getting to that point where I'm going too fast?

Am I allowing my brain to speed up and want to ramp into mania?

That's the thing that I still have to live with every day is I never would have second guessed that a year ago.

I would have thought it was so great that I had all this flowing out of me.

Now I unfortunately I say now because I hope I get to a point where I don't let those exciting juices always stop me,

But I caught myself and I got scared honestly for a little bit.

I was worried that maybe I was going that direction,

And that's when I have to go back to the tools in my tool belt,

What I learned when I was learning about this disease,

And I need to go back to fact checking.

What do I know?

What can I put in front of me to say this would be healthy versus this would be unhealthy?

Then how can I move forward?

Because if I don't trust myself enough to at least just take a pause first and do a check-in,

It'd be really hard.

I think you have to,

Like you say,

Give yourself space and the permission slip,

But you also have to give yourself a little bit of trust that you've been in this with yourself from the get-go.

You know?

No one else has been in it 100% except for you.

That's powerful.

I'm having a moment right now because trust in the self is one of the last things to come back.

I see you.

Great brothers can't see it,

But Emily's rolling her eyes,

Which is so telling.

I know that some of you listening are probably rolling your eyes as well or huffing to your kids or whoever else you're listening with,

But trust in the self is one of the hardest things to come back.

I've started talking about this on other podcasts where I've been interviewed about Permission to Grief,

But I start talking about how grief put me away from this idea and then brought me back to it,

But that I am safe in the world and I am safe in the world with myself.

Because there was a time there where I was not,

And I know this is true for so many griefers as well,

Whether it's something with mental health or suicidal ideation or just being in a precarious place or putting yourself in precarious situations because of or due to grief.

And I love this distinction that you made between is my bipolar chemical or is it situational because it's these two questions of if it's chemical,

It could just happen and there's no real way to predict it or control it or mediate for it versus situational,

Which you kind of have more of a heads up of it tends to happen when dot dot dot and then fill in the blank for your own situation.

And I like this,

But at the same time I hate it because in grief we don't get a heads up before the sky falls on our heads.

But that's not to say it's chemical either.

It's just something that happens,

Which I think is often a separation that people make between mental health and grief is like,

Oh,

With mental health,

You kind of know it's coming.

It's not something that a lot of people consider a loss,

Which is frustrating for people in the mental health field and people who have mental health disorders and diseases.

See what direction I want to go.

Oh,

OK.

I wrote this question down for you at the beginning.

And that's have you ever had anybody push back on your new priorities of setting boundaries,

Taking time away,

Not sending emails at 10 p.

M.

,

Kind of whatever they may be?

Because I knew you before you were checked in and I know you now that you're out and I've noticed this in you as well.

And truthfully,

When you start sending me more text messages than you normally do,

I'm like,

I wonder if we're going somewhere manic.

And then it kind of cools down.

And I'm like,

I'm not worried because I trust you to trust yourself and know yourself,

Which is really cool.

And also,

I'm not the one with bipolar.

So I can only know what this experience is like for you as you tell me and as you kind of clue me in on it.

But it's been fascinating to be a bystander to it.

And I've appreciated this increased amount of boundaries and just cushioning is the word that I want to use in your life.

So I wonder if there's anybody in your world who has not appreciated it,

Especially at first.

It's a really good question.

So I just like would I want to start by giving a PSA to everyone.

People who get upset about your boundaries are the people you're setting boundaries for.

OK,

So you say that again.

The people who are upset about the boundaries you are setting are the people you are setting boundaries for.

And what I mean by that is take a week,

OK,

Just evaluate the people in your life and take many mental checks of how often people prioritize themselves and then keep track of how many times you get upset about it.

Because I guarantee you it's not that often,

But we all feel like we need to uphold the priorities of other people.

And really,

If you take a step back to realize that no one else is prioritizing you but you,

Setting those boundaries become a lot easier.

I'm lucky I haven't had a lot of pushback,

But I also think it's about the way you set a boundary too,

Right?

So I'm not walking around telling all these people how they can live.

I'm just telling them how I'm going to live and they can choose to be OK with it or not.

But the boundaries that I'm setting are about me.

And I think that's where you need to focus first.

If there's someone in your life that you're considering setting a boundary with,

Make sure that the reason you're setting the boundary or making this change is because of you and that you're not making decisions for them.

I'll give you an example,

OK?

In a manic state,

A lot of people can be angry.

I fortunately in my manic episode didn't have any displays of anger,

But it happens a lot.

And when you are having a manic episode,

Depending on how bad it is,

You might not remember.

So there are people then who after that episode,

When they come back down,

They have to deal with the aftermath of their behavior.

And people in their life want to be there for them because they're dealing with mental health and there's a million and one reasons why they might have had an episode and they don't want to just leave this person out to dry.

But if that person is causing detriment to you in your life,

You are able to set a boundary of explanation with them.

So my uncle,

Who is married to my aunt with late onset,

He is always honest.

That's the rule.

He always tells my aunt the truth,

But he doesn't just let her do whatever she wants because she has bipolar disorder.

He's setting boundaries about when he will choose to help and engage with her and certain lines that she will cross that will cause him to pull his help away.

He's never going to leave my aunt.

He's never going to allow her to be out on her own in an unsafe situation,

But he's also not going to follow her around and let her do whatever she wants.

And I think that's how you need to think about the people in your life,

Whether you're the one with the mental health disorder or you're around someone with a mental health disorder or just people in general.

You do not need to put up with people treating you a way you don't want to be treated,

But you also can't control other people.

So boundaries need to be set in a way where they're set by you and about you as opposed to you putting boundaries on other people.

Does that make sense?

Yeah,

It does.

And I love,

I wrote down opt in and opt out.

Serious.

What you give people the invitation to do is like,

You can opt into this boundary or opt out of this boundary.

This is something I have to do frequently when I travel because I forget that not everybody in the world has like eight different alarms that go off in the morning.

And I don't mean eight different alarms that all go off at the same time.

I mean,

You know,

755,

6,

605,

607.

And so they get back and I'm supposed to do different things at different times.

And this is the way I've,

People think I'm crazy,

But this is the way I've structured my life so that I can get enough accomplished in the morning that by the time I go to job number one or job number two or job number three,

I've done things for myself and for this business that need to get accomplished.

And I can focus on where I'm actually supposed to be in real life.

And so when I travel,

I warn people that I'm with,

There's going to be about eight alarms that go off in the morning and they're all different sounds.

I can bring some earplugs for you or I can sleep in another room or like on the couch or something like that.

And so it's kind of this like opt in opt out to their experience of me because I know that it's not how everybody chooses to live their life.

And I forget until I'm reminded on vacation by people like my sister who likes to sleep in until 10 because she's on vacation.

And I appreciate this about her,

But I can't and choose not to live my life that way.

And I just love how it comes in with mental health too and with grief too because I think people struggle to set boundaries in grief because this perception in grief is that we constantly need the help of other people or we need the support of other people or we need to be lifted up by other people.

And we talked about this on one of the Patreon broadcasts either last month or the month before we talked about this tendency of society to infantilize grievers of you must not be capable of making decisions or cooking your own food or taking the kids to school.

And in some ways this help is appreciated,

Especially in the early days.

But as the weeks and months go on,

There's this continued,

You know,

Kind of nagging that others place on grievers.

And at some point it's okay to say,

I think I got this one or I think I can make decisions by about the end of his life even though he didn't dictate somebody to do that,

But I'm his spouse.

Or,

You know,

I think it's okay if I start putting the kids to bed again.

I think it's okay if I X,

Y,

Z.

To just again circle back to that idea of putting trust and faith back into yourself after something hard or difficult has happened.

So I appreciate that in you.

What a lot of listeners will not know unless you've read Permission to Grieve is that Emily is the person who I've credited not once but twice in the back of the book for reading multiple drafts.

And she has literally been my eyeballs and now has a copy of Permission to Grieve here in studio with us today.

We sure do.

My first official copy.

First official copy.

In print.

And I don't know if there's anything that you want to dive into in the book that continues to speak to you and stick out to you,

But having read it as many times as you have,

I would love to kind of dig in for a moment,

Especially as we're talking about identity and permission today.

Okay,

So I randomly opened to this page,

Permission to Do is the chapter.

So I wrote in the margin here,

Sharing breeds strength.

That is so important to me when it comes to my new version of myself.

And I think a lot of grievers can probably relate to this.

You don't want to walk around and tell everyone your grief story,

But in so many ways when you share even with a handful of people,

You're creating that space for you to be more of your true and authentic self.

Right?

And so for me,

We'll come back to my fortunate situations.

I was an established player at work.

I felt very confident in the work that I had done up to my diagnosis.

And I felt like people knew me enough that the diagnosis wouldn't necessarily change their perception of me.

But that was still a risk,

Right?

You don't know people's perception.

But for me,

Being open and sharing with my boss and my teammates what had happened allows me to feel confident when I send that email that says,

I got to cancel for tomorrow because I'm going to therapy.

Can we reschedule?

Or whatever it is I needed to be telling the truth to feel comfortable.

You don't need to tell the truth.

That's not what I'm saying.

But I do think you need to create the space for yourself for what this new version is.

And for me,

That was about telling my truth.

Now,

The thing is about this,

It goes on to the next page and I wrote,

You have no requirement to teach and heal the world.

Now,

Here's the other side of that,

Right?

Okay.

I am working right now,

As Shelby knows,

To try to birth my story into the world and be an advocate from my perspective and talk about my experiences and how they might be different than what some people think of when they hear bipolar.

But something that I need to always remind myself is just because I have a diagnosis,

Just because I can and enjoy talking about this doesn't mean that it's my job to teach and heal everyone else.

And I think that's important in grief too.

There are going to be days where you feel like you have got your grief under control and you love this version of yourself.

And there are other days where everything is to shit and you can pick and choose what days you come and be your true and authentic self.

And that doesn't make it any less legitimate,

But the first person you have to be honest with is yourself.

And if you don't feel comfortable sharing or being open or guiding someone who's spreading wrong information,

You do not need to be the one running around and doing that all day every day.

You need to be the one who's making sure that you're okay.

I love that you said,

I'm like nodding my head.

I know grief growers can't see us.

I'm nodding my head to this because this is something that I've bumped up against in my own work.

And I've heard from so many of you listening as well is that I feel this enormous pressure to educate my family and friends about what grief is and how to deal with me as a greever.

And we're both,

Emily and I are here to tell you it's nice,

But it's not your job.

And I've gotten a lot of requests over the years to create a course for friends of greevers,

But also to create a course for greevers who are talking to people about educating them about their grief for the first time.

Because in grief,

We're not only students of grief and we're learning from the experience,

But at some point we become teachers as well because people say,

How can I help?

How can I help?

How can I help?

And we have nothing to offer them because it's like,

We've just learned a language.

Now we have to teach it to other people.

I'm like,

I don't even know my verbs yet.

I'm still trying to conjugate the adjectives or whatever it is.

It's like,

I don't know what that means.

And then you go off and expect me to teach other people.

So I love that you said this idea of sharing breeds strength and of course bring other people into your story and tell them all about it.

But it's also not your job to educate people about exactly what this is and be the voice and the authority and blah,

Blah,

Blah.

Grief growers,

There are others of us out here who are doing this work.

So when I take a day off,

I trust that you've got it.

And when you're taking a day off,

Trust that I've got it and vice versa.

There are so many of us and this is something I love.

And I want to pivot into what you're building to tell your story about having bipolar because there are already so many people in the world who are talking about bipolar,

But still not enough.

And we haven't reached this tipping point because I think when we think of bipolar,

We think of,

I can't offer I think of the movie off the top of my head,

But like these movies where people are going crazy with knives and then all of a sudden laying in bed for 12 days and all this other and just the pictures that we have very similar to grief are not correct,

Or they're not the whole possibility of what can encompass somebody with that experience.

So tell us about what you're making.

Yeah,

I'm excited.

So I've always been a storyteller.

I love writing.

And that has been a cathartic experience for me through this whole process.

And so I decided,

You know,

All of the storytelling that I do person to person or,

You know,

In the safety of my home just to get my feelings out might help some other people.

And I've decided that I'm going to launch an advocacy account where my main goal is really just to tell my experience and my story.

And there's three things I really want to do.

The first thing I want to do is I want to humanize what bipolar looks like.

And I don't mean that I am what bipolar looks like.

I mean,

I am what bipolar can look like.

And I want to share that experience.

I also want to start the conversation that talks about life of mental health and what that role should be in all of our lives,

Diagnosis or not.

I say that I am grateful for my diagnosis because it brought so many important things to the forefront for me that helped me stay in control.

But this advocacy account that I'm hoping to launch is really just to make people understand that whether you have a diagnosis or not,

We all are dealing with the same life struggles that can cause an up or a down.

We're all dealing with relationships that can be positive,

Strenuous,

You know,

The whole gamut.

And we're all dealing with this concept of work-life balance.

For me,

My diagnosis has made my work-life balance healthier,

My relationships stronger.

So I want to talk about that experience and I want to give people hope that navigating mental health can be positive for them,

For their relationships,

For their work.

And I would love to get to a place where people feel comfortable and confident sharing the version of who they are so that they can be better understood by those around them.

And I think stigma right now breeds from lack of knowledge.

That really is where stigma comes from.

And people get opinions about things or they think they know about things based on one experience or one story they've been told.

And I just want to be another version of what bipolar looks like.

And I want people to understand that I am not bipolar.

I have bipolar.

And people who have bipolar or anxiety or PTSD or depression,

That does not make them a bad person.

That doesn't mean that they can't have a happy life.

That means that they probably have a better understanding of what's going on inside of them.

And not that everyone is actively working on it,

But acknowledging that you have mental health to address and work on is going to bring us all to a healthier place.

Yeah.

That's powerful.

Because that's,

I know you've been sharing a lot of tips on this episode about what we can all do,

But mental health so often puts the burden of care,

The burden of maintenance,

The burden of living on,

On the person with the mental health diagnosis and gives no prescription for the people and the life surrounding them.

But what you're saying here today is that we need to actively be supporting giving grace to space,

Giving spaces of non-judgment,

Which is really,

Really powerful and helpful for grief as well.

Yeah.

That's some,

Those are some big words.

The one thing in grief work that has resonated with me so much that also parallels mental health is this concept that you talk about a lot where you sometimes need to ask for what you need in grief because people don't necessarily know.

You have to do that with your mental health as well.

And I'll say this to everyone,

Diagnosis or not,

We've all had moments in our life where we should be prioritizing our mental health and everyone needs to be more active in looking out for that and asking for that because it will give you the space to understand when other people need it.

But you need.

And I think it's so fascinating that people try to help but in the worst ways and it doesn't matter what we're going through.

And that's why that conversation is so valuable between the people who are experiencing the grief or the loss or the significant change is you have to focus on yourself first.

You can't educate everyone.

That's not your job.

But you do need to ask for what you need in order to get what you need a lot of the time.

So I have two questions for you.

Well,

The first one's not a question,

It's just a statement.

Based on what you said,

You're allowed to have expectations of other people but no one's going to save you but you.

And I did a piece on this probably two years ago.

It's on YouTube somewhere now but it's just called No One's Going to Save You,

Shelby for Cithia.

So if you want to go look it up,

I'm talking about how no one can save you from this.

And I don't remember what I said but I remember the thesis was no one's going to save you.

And how the work of coming back must be done by you and can only be done by you.

And that's as it should be.

But at the same time,

You can also expect the people around you to be supportive and to continue to show up.

And I think that's a reasonable request,

Whether it's to grief or with mental health or both.

The next question I have for you is kind of a funny,

Funny not so funny one,

But this is something I see coming up in our society a lot.

Is mental health used jokingly or like as adjectives like,

Oh my god,

The weather's so bipolar.

Someone said that to me today.

Believe it or not,

Someone said that to me today.

And you know,

I choose not to attack everyone that does that even though I want to inside of me.

And you know what,

Here's the thing,

No one does it on purpose,

Right?

I think of years ago,

The conversation around not saying that's so retarded or that's so gay and how we all had to really just like bash people over the head with how stupid they were for using those words.

And you know,

When all the shootings were happening a few months ago,

There was this one schizophrenia advocate who was doing a lot of work about how she's schizophrenic and has never tried to kill anyone.

And how it's really awful that we take these situations and we make assumptions or claims like they must have been mentally unstable to do something like this.

And that then classifies mentally unstable people as people who might just show up and kill someone.

And that's just not true.

It's a big leap.

It's a huge leap.

It's a huge leap.

And all we can really do,

I think,

Is when we have the energy,

Call people out when they do that sort of thing.

But again,

It's not our job to run around and do that.

And I just hope that the more people that feel comfortable and confident talking about their version of whatever that mental health issue is,

We will start to understand as a culture what those mental health illnesses actually look like instead of what we believe them to look like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That makes a lot of sense.

And oh,

It's just so frustrating.

And what's hard is that it's much easier to place the blame on mental health and to acknowledge that perfectly quote unquote sane people kill people.

Right.

Yeah.

Because that's scarier to all of us.

Right.

That a normal quote unquote person would do something like that.

That's so terrifying.

But I'll tell you what,

There are more people in this world living with diagnosis than you think.

And if you really think that all of those people are the ones you need to be worried about,

Then you haven't been keeping up.

I mean,

The facts just aren't there.

The facts aren't there.

And most people struggling with mental health are struggling so much more internally than they ever are externally.