Day #6 Finished First Book of 2019

I missed Day #5 as I didn't have any new experiences yesterday.  The first miss of 2019, is a learning experience and will teach me to figure out more in advance of what new experiences I want to do each day.

On today's experience, I am wanting to read at least 52 books this year, and I finished my first one called Turtles All the Way Down by John Green.  The book is about a high school who has mental health problems around thinking that every physical interaction is going to cause her to get micro organisms to invade the body and kill her over time.  She also is mostly stuck in her head and not really good at communication which causes her to not want to be involved with people on the physical level or understand what is going on in people's lives.  The sub plot is her best friend and her, learn about the disappearance of an old friend of the main character and the reward money.

I really enjoyed the book with the plot about mental health as this relates to my own mental health issues that I have been doing with for many many years.  I can relate to the main character as I am always stuck in my head and trying to figure out the situation before interacting.  Along with that, I am always behind in the conversation whenever I am talking in a group conversation face to face.

The main issue I have around mental health was back after high school, I was diagnosed with depression which comes up every now and then but not regularly.  I have learned over the years, if I start to feel that depression is coming up, I need to rethink my whole life and try to change this in some big way.

The second part, stuck in my head might be that I am not around enough different people.  This does cause me to be alone for most of my days which makes me feel lonely.  I do have people, I hang out with here and there but with people are always busy and is not easy to have friends who are available to hang out with.  I am hoping that this year, 2019, can really pushing me to do new experience with different groups of people.  If this is able to happen, I might not be in my head as often.

The third part, communications skills which are really rough around the edges.  I have never been a really social person so throughout the years, I have had to learn by doing to interact with people.  This has not always gone well as I have seen many times with friendships going south or people leaving groups, or people getting frustrated with the way I communicate.  There are many other problems with my communication, I don't even know are wrong.

With all of that said, the book really got me to explore my own mental health issues through someone else.  I really thought that was the best part of the book.  Putting mental health as the focus was great as the issue even in this day and age, isn't talked about enough.  People still go through the issues of mental health without support from anyone in their lives.

Overall, in my own experience, my parents did help me when I was first diagnosis with depression to see doctors.  Yet, none of what I went through with the drugs helped me.  I did do therapy which was super helpful.  Since, I have done the drugs and therapy work, my parents have said "I see no improvement in you", so they never saw therapy or other non-drug ways as helpful.  I have had to navigate my own mental health journey throughout the years which has been super hard and complicated.

Please write in the comments, what methods have helped you through your mental health journey?