Struggles with low self-esteem, anxiety, & an eating disorder led to helping others with her story

[Music] foreign [Music] great to meet you today great to meet you as well yeah so I know you're affiliated with my mind tell me a little bit about minding your mind and also tell me why you're involved with it your mind is a non-profit organization that basically basic guides education around mental illness and moves from a crisis-based response to education so we have a variety of presentations that we can provide either from a peer perspective or a clinical perspective so we're getting a lot of different education and resources out to schools and communities great great and why are you involved with minding your mind what is your role in it so I'm involved with minding your mind because I absolutely love what they stand for I started off with minding your mind as a young adult speaker and essentially what mining reminds young adult speaker program is is they find young adults that have gone through a mental health condition and are feeling stable within their recovery and they want to share their story and I thought that that was really amazing that I could put my story into something that would help others so ever since then I've absolutely loved reading your mind and always been involved with it and later on I moved to California where I became the director So currently I'm in a spot where I can share my story and educate others and give others hope of recovery as well as get the word out about ending your mind and put it into schools excellent so tell me a little bit about you you know you said you had a mental health uh story would you mind sharing it here yeah absolutely so a lot of my mental health issues started when I was a teenager um this really happened around my relationships where I didn't really get into the best healthiest relationships with the right kind of people and because of this it's really manifested into me not feeling really all that great about myself so having such low self-esteem and high anxiety a lot of that manifested into an eating disorder where I became really obsessed with counting calories and over exercising and controlling my food and I think a lot of this had to do with the fact that my life in school and at home just felt so out of control that I needed to control something and before I knew it it became something that I couldn't really stop even if I wanted to it felt like it really controlled me so with some time I ended up getting sent to a residential treatment center out in Boston at the time thanks to my parents nursing something was up and me reaching out to them and that really gave me the tools to one recover physically because that's a huge thing about eating disorders is that it's really hard to recover the mental stuff if you're not nourishing your body so a lot of physical recovery along with really breaking down the eating disorder and understanding where it really came from and understanding that I am someone that has a lot of anxiety and I need to learn to manage that and at the time I was suffering from depression too so really breaking a lot of that down and recovering at the center and then also just keeping up with that recovery moving forward that is excellent so really your parents saw this that you needed help so they were the first step in getting you the right help yes yes I'm very lucky yeah that is excellent and why is mental health so important to you that you're spending so much time on it mental health just talking about it learning about it educating about it gives me this different kind of spark that no other topic really does and I think that's because I I know what it's like to suffer and I know what it's like to feel like you don't have anyone and I know what it's like to feel like there's no hope for the future and being able to make it yeah a lot of loneliness around the struggle right absolutely it's so lonely and I think loneliness can that itself can manifest into so many issues so showing people that they're not alone and that they can connect with others and they can connect back to themselves I think is so important and I think that they need to hear it from people that have been there in that spot yeah thank you Morgan for your time and I'm so glad that your life experience is actually being used for something useful thank you you and your and minding your mind thank you so much