Thank you, Megan. I have battled with chronic severe depression and anxiety for almost 30 years. If I've heard, "Everything happens for a reason," once, I've heard it a hundred times. I was 22 years old and naive when I was hospitalized and first diagnosed with depression/anxiety. I was ashamed, afraid, and uneducated about mental illness, and since I kept hearing those words, I assumed they were true. After years of waiting for an epiphany, I convinced myself the "reason" mental illness was visited upon me was because I was a horrible person. Thus began my journey of self-contempt, hurting myself, abandoning any type of self-care and being consumed with guilt about everything.
Words can be the deadliest weapons to people suffering from mental illness whether spoken by someone else or to ourselves. I remain in therapy to this day, still working on repairing the utter self-contempt I taught myself oh so well. With therapy and careful maintenance medication, I'm able to manage my illness and find joy in life, but I still have the occasional breakthrough of that monster illness and when those breakthroughs occur, the self-contempt often revisits as well.