Trigger Warning: This episode contains personal reflections and discussions around anxiety, depression, burnout, and disordered eating. Please take care while listening and skip any sections that feel too heavy for you right now.

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, I’m sharing my honest journey through mental health — from childhood anxiety and growing up with separated parents to how people pleasing and perfectionism led me straight into burnout.

I talk about what it was like to navigate different rules and routines between households, internalizing anxiety at a young age, and believing my struggles were character flaws I had to hide. I also open up about the therapy journey — the real one — where I cycled through different approaches and therapists before finally finding what worked for me.

In this episode, I get into:

• The emotional toll of switching homes and identities as a child

• How people pleasing turned into perfectionism

• What unmanaged anxiety looked like before I had language for it

• The overlap of mental health and disordered eating patterns

• How changing my self-talk changed my life

• Learning to sync my routines to my menstrual cycle

• How journaling helps me work through racing thoughts — even when I don’t feel like it

• Doing what works for you, not what works for TikTok

I close the episode with a journal prompt to support your own self-reflection and healing.

Mental health isn’t a trend — it’s a lifelong journey. This is my story.

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