Mental Health

This past month has been an absolute roller coaster. I moved out on August 1 with my twin sister and two weeks ago, my grandma suffered a heart attack (she's getting better now).  My mental and physical health have definitely been tested these past few weeks and I have to say with the support of family, friends, and a lot of coffee, I've managed to stay pretty positive. With all of that, my blog was put on the back burner. While I've had no time to post, I'm happy to announce that I'm getting back into the groove.

Today I am introducing the topic of mental health to my blog.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, nurse, or psychiatrist of any sort. I am simply speaking to my experience working in the mental health field (as a communications assistant) and from life experience with family members and friends who have a mental illness. Please accept my blog posts simply as opinion pieces rather than medical advice. If you have a mental health concern, I urge you to speak to someone about it. To learn more about mental health, visit: www.ementalhealth.ca. 

As you can probably tell, fashion is a big passion of mine. I love the way clothes help me to feel confident, beautiful and unique. I believe that clothes and fashion are a part of who I am and are a way of expressing my personality and creativity. I strongly believe that how you feel on the outside is linked to how you feel on the inside and vice-versa. Feeling beautiful and loving the way I look certainly helps me to feel confident on the inside. Just like everyone else, I don't always love my outfit or my size or how my hair looks but I try my best to love myself no matter what. Feeling happy and confident reflects how we see ourselves. This is why our mental health is so important: it affects more than just the brain.

Mental health is something I'm very passionate about. This passion, however, is not fueled by fur or sequins but by experience. I've witnessed a number of family members and friends struggle with mental illness as well as heard the stories of many others. While a mental illness can be treated and symptoms can be managed, a lot of people who struggle with mental illness say the stigma attached to it is worse than the illness itself. This just makes me mad. It's hard enough having any illness without feeling scared or ashamed to talk about it and get help. I think the stigma associated with mental illness comes from many things, one being the fact that it deals with emotions and emotions are often tied to personality traits and characteristics of people. And while a mental illness can sometimes, and often times, be misunderstood as having bad character traits or personality flaws, it's important to remember that a mental illness is just that: an illness. And a mental illness is hard enough without having to deal with the judgement of others. My experience living with family who has a mental illness is where my passion to get involved came about. 

From seeing the way a mental illness affects day-to-day life plus having to deal with the stigma, I've become very passionate about promoting awareness, reducing stigma as well as being a lot more understanding as a person. The stigma really fires me up and makes me mad but I've managed to turn my anger into a drive to create change.

I've wanted to introduce this topic with you for a while now yet couldn't figure out how to introduce the topic of mental health into a fashion blog. However, I knew I had to find a way as mental health is literally as big (if not bigger) part of my life as fashion. As I got to thinking, I realized that fashion and mental health are connected; it's the connection between physical health and mental health. Feeling stressed, upset, or anxious can be emotionally and physically draining. And low energy leads to less motivation to take care of your physical health, and in turn a reduced level of confidence. When you dislike how you look, it can affect how you feel. I want to explore the two topics together and hopefully give you some insight into mental health and why it's so important to take good care of your mind. I also want let you know that you're strong, you're beautiful and you matter.

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Express Yourself: The Magic of Clothing

I think that fashion is something that contains millions of sub-topics. It's not just about clothes or money or runways and parties. Those are a few of the sub-topics. Fashion for me has a lot to do with emotion. How many of you dress based on your mood? I certainly do. Weather and daily events are taken into consideration as well but I'd say that most days it's what I'm feeling like that predicts my outfit. Some days, my emotions control the outfit. Others, my outfit controls my emotions. Clothes make me feel different emotions. The more I like my outfit, the more confident I tend to feel. Certain colours, textures and styles make me feel a certain way. I love the power that clothes have to not only transform the way I look but the way I feel. For example, bright colours and sequins lift my mood and make me feel cheery and bright. 

Summer 2011? Vintage dress from Value Village, Aldo shoes. 

The same can be said about confidence. Your confidence can dictate how you dress and how you dress will influence your confidence.  It's not always about what you're wearing but how the clothes make you feel. I don't like the so-called guidebook or 'rules' of style. For lack of a better cliche, rules are meant to be broken. I dress for myself, in expressing my creativity and love for fashion. I try to encourage people I meet to just wear what they want, regardless of what people may think. If you like how you look in something, or how it makes you feel, then WEAR it. I agree that certain styles will flatter different body shapes but fashion for me isn't always about flattering my shape but being creative and wearing whatever I want. And what is creative to me may not be creative to others. Personal style is exactly that: it's personal. If wearing grey is a jump from black for a person, then so be it. If I feel like wearing a fur vest, turban, and glittery shoes, I will without hesitation. 

Sequin jacket and shoes from Value Village.

 Whenever I'm wearing something that's eccentric and starts a conversation, I constantly hear the other person saying a variation of "I could never pull that off". I always say "YES YOU CAN!". I don't like the idea of "pulling it off". It's as easy as putting it on and being fearless. When I put on something strangely cool or different, it gives me this weird rush of confidence and I feel fearless. I also don't understand the point in saving things for special occasions or events when you can live everyday like it's a special day!

Vintage beaded dress. 

 Confidence is so important to me and only recently did I realize how important. It literally affects almost everything in daily life from how you interact with people and make decisions to how you walk and the way you speak. Confidence to me is feeling comfortable expressing myself without the fear of what people will think or say. I'm used to receiving just about every outfit comment possible and all of them, good or bad, make me happy for some reason.  Some comments even make me burst into laughter. I was once called a gorilla for wearing a black fur vest and a martini waiter for wearing a bow tie (funny, no?).

I think what holds some people back from dressing how they want is the fear of opening the possibility of receiving comments. However, if you feel truly confident in what you're wearing, what people think or say won't matter. And if you don't feel confident but you do like what you're wearing, then fake the confidence. Shift your inner voice and talk to yourself. Tell yourself you're beautiful and stylish, and creative and unique. Act confident. What I'm trying to say is just dress how you want and the confidence will eventually come. It takes time and I can say there are days when I'm not confident, but that's when my clothes step in. 

My heaven: the thrift store.

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