B e a r i n g Witness

As I write this, Nick and I are sitting at Starbucks. He's sitting across from me working on policies and procedures for our business....

Nick uttered (or sometimes yelled) these words to me more times than I can possibly count. "You don't understand!" became a daily phrase...

By now, we've all heard the rally cries to "end the stigma" surrounding mental illness. And while there is a stigma that surrounds mental...

Dear Daisy, You were the first one to know. You were my first confidant. You knew from the beginning that something was wrong. I watched...

Alcohol began to play a role in coping with Nick's mental illness - for both of us. That's not to say that either one of us ever met the...

May 1, 2020 will always be a day Nick and I celebrate. Beyond it being my mom's birthday (hi, Mom!) it's the day Nick started his next...

I've been delaying this topic for a while. It's hard to talk about for a multitude of reasons. Before I go on, I want to make it...

Imagine this: you work in an office and you have two bosses. One boss wants to expand the number of services the business offers. The...

So far, I've covered two of four mindset shifts: You can't solve an internal problem with external solutions. There's room for tough love...

Nick's daily schedule was starting to look a lot like this: sleep in (until hours I've never known him to sleep in to), get up, play...

Over the coming weeks, I'll be sharing some of the mindset shifts I had to make while supporting Nick through his mental illness. These...

Caregiving. It is hard, and few understand why. It is not for the meek, the mild, the despairing. It is not the day-to-day tasks, really:...

I'm going to pause sharing our story for a minute. From what you've read up until this point I'm sure you recognize that I felt...

When Nick was hospitalized, I was already in therapy. I was also knee-deep into Brené Brown's work on vulnerability. I had just finished...

I have mentioned that I didn't tell friends and family what was going on with Nick in the early stages. There's a handful of reasons for...

So we Baker Acted Nick. I got a call from him about an hour after the police drove off with him. He was screaming at me. "I can't believe...

We got married on February 1st, 2019. If I haven't mentioned it yet, I'm Canadian. All of my family is in Canada. I met Nick at an...

Once Nick had started Googling his symptoms, he eventually came across the diagnosis of somatic OCD: the hyperfocus on neutral physical...

In the summer of 2019, Nick developed tinnitus. He's been to countless music festivals and never really used proper ear protection. The...

Supporting my husband through mental illness was, by far, the hardest thing I've ever done. I'll get more into some specifics of his...