001: dear diary.
I have so much to say, mainly on the topic of grief.
I launched my first blog over ten years ago. It was hosted on WordPress and called The Enclyfeclopedia. Not a name that easily rolls of the tongue per say, but here’s where my head was at. Why not create an encyclopedia of sorts that includes anecdotal stories and experiences that shape mental health?
en·cy·clo·pe·di·a /inˌsīkləˈpēdēə,enˌsīkləˈpēdēə/
noun
a book or set of books giving information on many subjects or on many aspects of one subject and typically arranged alphabetically.
life /līf/
noun
noun: life; plural noun: lives; noun: one’s life; plural noun: one’s lifes
the period between the birth and death of a living thing, especially a human being.
I was 19 years old and taking a semester off of school to take care of something that was most definitely not spoken about in everyday conversation back then … my mental health. From the outside, my life was perfect, it had always looked that way. But I felt far from perfect on the inside. In fact, I felt empty. I had drifted so far from my emotions by that point in my life that I hit a breaking point.
And it all made sense. Growing up, suppressing emotions was rewarded more than expressing them. Crying felt like weakness, stress felt like being ungrateful, and needing support felt like failure. That had manifested as chronic stomach issues, perfectionism, and an underlying anxiety that had started showing long before I had the vocabulary to express what I was feeling. Life felt heavy, but I kept pushing through because that’s all I knew how to do. I didn’t have the tools to feel my feelings.
Push came to shove and I ended up having a bit of a menty b, but that’s not what this post is about. This one is an entry in my diary for you to read because I share vulnerable things that I think are important. And I think you might find them important, too. But back to the Enclyfeclopedia. I started that blog as a public diary so to speak because I realized there was a large gap in the conversation around mental health. I shared my struggles in real time, what it was like having spent 24 hours in a psychiatric hospital at 19, and little bits of wisdom I learned on the journey.
It was met with skepticism from my parents and warnings of “you’ll have a hard time finding a job” and “people are going to question this”. Parents are protectors, I totally understood their sentiment. But I also knew that I would never want to work for or be friends with people who couldn’t accept me entirely. Let’s be honest, have you ever met a young adult who wasn’t on the struggle bus at one point or another?!
I was met with nothing but praise, connection from strangers, opportunities coming out of the woodwork, for simply speaking about mental health for what it is - a universal experience. If you’re reading this right now, you have a brain. With a brain, you have emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and, drumroll please … something that needs just as much tender loving care as the rest of your body. Mental health. Trust me when I say I still get uncomfortable every now and then talking about it because it sometimes feels like speaking a foreign language others don’t understand, until I remember what it took to get to the point of feeling safe enough to be vulnerable talking about something you can’t see.
Then one day I deleted the blog. The entire damn thing by complete accident. I was heartbroken. I posted all over social media for someone who was well versed in WordPress asking for help, incessantly contacted their customer support, and tried everything possible to recover the words I had poured my heart into, but it was unsalvageable. It was gone forever. I still think about it to this day because it housed some of my most vulnerable experiences and a perspective I’ll never have again - that of a 19 year old.
I have to laugh because my brother recently turned 30. While I’ve been living with what feels like half a brain, I still boasted to him about how life is really just beginning in your 30’s. The funny part is that here I am at 32 years old having just had one of the hardest, darkest years of my life two years into my thirties, going on and on about how amazing they are. It’s funny, you can laugh, I’m laughing! But like, also crying because wtf was this past year?!
This year for me is calculated from the day my nervous system collapsed on April 13, 2025 so technically there are a few weeks left in the year I’m referencing. April 13 changed my life forever. I’m not even sure I can describe what happened in a few sentences other than while attempting to do something for my health, taper off of SSRIs, I was injured by the very thing. Physically, neurologically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. It’s the day the old me died and I’ve been forced to build the new me brick by brick. It also was the day that marked the beginning of unsurmountable grief I was to experience over the span of the year beyond grieving life as I knew it being so quickly taken away from me.
Someone like a niece to me was tragically killed in a car accident that same day, April 13. As my mom was telling me the news, I couldn’t stand up straight, couldn’t cognitively process what she was saying, couldn’t open my eyes because lights were too bright. It felt like I had a traumatic brain injury without impact. I attended the funeral from my bed days later. It would be months before I could begin to process the gravity of what had happened.
I was bed bound and homebound for months after. I tried pushing myself and gaslighting myself into thinking what had happened was all in my head, but what had actually happened was an iatrogenic injury from medication. I can’t even explain the hell that I was living in. I had over 100 symptoms at one point including cognitive dysfunction, dysautonomia, tinnitus, akathisia, disequilibrium, the list goes on. I was at the absolute worst point in my life simply trying to survive everyday. Through it all, I intuitively knew I was going to heal and that’s what kept me going.
July rolled around and I was preparing to go on my first trip since becoming a near vegetable. It was a big deal. I’m normally someone who can bop around and jetset all of the time, but this was a beast to prepare for. If you know SSRI withdrawal, you know. I was going to one of my favorite places on lake Muskoka to be with my family and boyfriend at the time which was 50% of the thing getting me there, but when you’re not feeling safe in your body, it’s hard to imagine feeling safe anywhere. The flight was creeping up and 2 days before it was time to go, my boyfriend broke up with me.
Cue a collapse on top of the collapse. The amount of people who reached out to me asking how the heck I got through a breakup while being in the depths of SSRI withdrawal … um I’m still not sure if I’m being completely honest. A breakup is really hard on a normal day. A breakup during the hell that is SSRI withdrawal, there are no words. Again, I still couldn’t even process what was happening when it did because I was trying to simply survive. Talk about feeling helpless, worthless, and heartbroken. I was working to build trust in my body while slowly losing trust in anybody but myself. Alas, we kept going.
September is when my healing began turning a more noticeable corner. I was becoming more confident in the fact that things were happening behind the scenes and my brain and nervous system were beginning to recognize my baseline again. A big milestone was being able to go for a walk while wearing headphones and listening to music (prior to, it was way too overstimulating). There still weren’t many (if any) days where I woke up feeling totally like me, but everything was moving in the right direction. Yay! But we had to put one of my family dogs to sleep. He was the one who laid on top of my all day on April 13 recognizing something was very wrong before I even did. At this point, I couldn’t comprehend why, during a such a terrible season of my life, was I also dealing with the most tangible grief? I had never dealt with grief like this before.
Finally, December came around and I sat in a restaurant for the first time in 9 months. 9 full months I was unable to sit in a restaurant without my body going absolutely haywire. And no, this wasn’t “just anxiety”. This was a severe misfiring in my brain, constantly telling my body I was in danger while simply living. Perspective perspective perspective … back to perspective. I was working so hard to retrain my brain to properly signal to my body again, but it takes time. A painfully long time with most of it feeling like nothing is actually happening. Let me tell you, I didn’t see any improvements unless I looked over a matter of months past.
The last week of December was my annual family vacation and I was going to make this one no matter how I felt because my brother was getting engaged!!! Finally, something exciting to look forward to. Traveling was really hard on my body and the trip was not easy, but I did it. I got in the reps (nervous system retraining is all about getting in reps) and it was a really beautiful trip celebrating my brother and soon to be sister-in-law. Grief was really hitting me though. The grief of losing my health, the grief of death, the grief of the end of a relationship when you were looking forward to healing and building a life with them. It was heavy, it was hard, but it was another milestone in healing seeing as I was beginning to be able to process everything.
I sobbed uncontrollably when the clock struck midnight on New Years. I could not wait to be out of 2025 and into 2026. Sadly grief was to come rolling in yet again with the passing of my aunt. I hadn’t been able to travel to see her in April of 2025 since I was so sick nor was I able to travel to say goodbye to her in January after my family trip due to my health. I was heartbroken. She was just so beautiful. My dad’s only sibling, they were a unit. She loved me, my brother and sister unconditionally and we knew it. A love like hers is rare and to have not had the chance to say goodbye to her due to protracted SSRI withdrawal ripped me apart. I think it will always weigh heavy on me, but I have to find comfort in knowing she is watching over me. I sometimes feel her presence and have to believe it really is her.
Back to the theme of perspective. I’m not sure what 19 year old me would have thought about all of this and how she would have viewed it. She most likely would have acted like she wasn’t as bothered as she really was. I can tell you that 32 year old me learned what grief is in it’s truest form since April 13, 2025. Grief is love with nowhere to go. A love so big it is physically painful. Your brain constantly trying to close a loop that is not able to be closed because you don’t just stop loving, you don’t just stop missing. Whether that is a season of life, a person, or an experience, grief has to be felt.
You know, my brain is still trying to understand the concept of my body being safe enough to feel emotions because it was not something it learned to do ever before. It’s a very confusing thing, but at the end of the day, I continue to be grateful for this experience of SSRI withdrawal (sounds absolutely crazy I know). Not because it has been pleasant, like, at all, but because it has changed my life ultimately for the better. It is showing me what is important, who will weather any storm with me no strings attached, and most importantly, how to trust myself. I’ve lived my entire life based on what I was taught life should look like, not based on how it made me feel. I think that’s the most important piece to longevity and wellness that a lot of people miss, alignment. We will go into that another day. Until then, if you’ve made it to the end of this post, wow! Great job. This tangent was a long one.
"Grief is not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith... It is the price of love." — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
xx, ariella