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...

 Now that holidays are over, I can now give my full attention to my blog. We have started the new year,  finally, it feels like forever ago that the whole entire world turned upside down. Hopefully it's on the up and up now.  While the holidays were upon me, so were all of the holiday foods, desserts, cookies, eggnog, and hot chocolate. Being someone who works out on a daily basis, makes sure to get enough nutrients in my body to make sure I have the strength to lift the weights that I love to lift, having the gym closed was an absolute nightmare.  I thought that I'd be okay, but in truth, I wasn't. I felt as if all of my social media was filled with girls in matching gym sets, at their open gyms, working out and making sure that they don't lose their gains. Honestly, I was a little jealous, and found myself poking at my stomach a whole lot more. Watching the videos and seeing the posts really made me self conscious about what I looked like. I eventually stopped pili...

 As the number of degrees lower throughout the beginning of December, so do the number of finals on my plate. Finals have always been a dreaded time for me... most of the time. This time of year meant being away from my routine, people who were my support system and diving back into passive aggressiveness, fights, and verbal punches from relatives that I stayed with for the month and a half because of how I handled myself.  This was the story of every one of my winter breaks. My family didn't approve of my boyfriend, my degree change, or just the overall any type of decision I made for myself. I dreaded breaks, because I knew what it meant. It meant sleepless nights, walking on eggshells, and waking up to have an almost daily debate match between me and my parents.  Everyone knows that suicide rates increase during the holidays. Another type of Depression is also brought on by the winter time: Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). It is seen to be brought on by decreasing da...