Road To Legacy

 As time moves on, I realize that I am not the only one who has suffered through the lonely road of mental and eating disorders, Shannon Hannaway, a fellow titleholder based out of Colorado, was generous enough to share her story with all of us! 1: how has mental and eating disorders affected you?   Besides seeing it from the outside watching loved ones struggle and die by suicide, I have been impacted by mental illness for as long as I can remember. Growing up I had anxiety with panic attacks, but due to a lack of education and awareness I didn’t know that was what I was experiencing. It took a head injury and Children’s Hospital Colorado for me to get the help and diagnosis I needed from their concussion team. With their help, medication, and therapy I was able to get my anxiety managed and actually came off all of it completely by the time I graduated high school. Unfortunately, my freshman year of college I experienced severe emotional trauma that led to PTSD, and unipolar...

 Anxiety. It just isn't a stage fright where you have to imagine everyone in their underwear so you feel as if they are embarrassed and you are superior as you stand in the spotlight. Anxiety is so much more. From biting the inside of your cheek, to ticks, to knocking on the door a certain number of times. Anxiety has so much variety, that sometimes, it goes unchecked until it can ruin someone's life.  Anxiety hit me as a child, because I was a complete perfectionist. I NEEDED to make sure that my parents were proud of me, I was always impressing the adults at the different churches that we would go to, try make sure that the kids around me saw that I was the mother of the group. I let it consume me. As I grew up, anxiety attacks happened. They happened slowly with small tremors in my hands, my chest tightening up, and cold sweats. I would freak out at the slightest change in my grades, freak out at the .6 that would show up on the scale.  Anxiety was always induced becau...

 Whenever I recovered from Situational depression, anxiety and my eating disorder, I always knew that it would be a part of me. I am a soldier, a warrior and a survivor. But even a soldier has flashbacks.  I don't self harm anymore, and I don't starve myself anymore, and I don't lay in bed all day driven to that dark place because I don't feel good enough, but there are some days when I see the world a little grayer than usual.  Situational Depression is brought upon a person due to the situation(s) that they have been placed in by other people, friends, jobs, and/or themselves. It's somewhat harder to diagnose because it's brought on by an event for most, and not exactly a chemical imbalance in their brain.  There have been situations here recently that have made my day a little harder than most. A project that didn't make the grade I wanted, or waiting in the Emergency room for too long when ever I dislocated my pinkie toe. The main one was today, when a t...