46. Silver Linings
When I was five or six years old, my mom used to never want to get out of bed and just kept saying she was sick. Finally, my stepdad took her to a hospital where she stayed for nearly a month. I thought it was so cool that her hospital let her do arts and crafts all the time. I remember telling her that I wished I could go to the hospital and draw all day.
She sat me down and told me that she hoped I would never get sick as she did, but that if I did, there’d be nothing wrong with needing help to get better, even if I had to go somewhere for a little while to do it. It wasn’t until I was probably 12 or 13 and didn’t want to get out of bed myself that it clicked. The truth was hard to swallow—the hospital she had gone to was a mental health hospital.
But because of her, I never feel ashamed about needing therapy when things get bad, or even just to maintain a healthy mindset.