Explore how anxiety can show up in your life, work, and relationships
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Why You Need Another Dang Tee
Remember the 80's and 90's? When you’d go see a concert and buy the shirts? When it was one of the few ways to get a band shirt that didn’t look totally fake?
When you saw someone else with the same shirt, you felt an immediate sense of belonging, unity, and a wash of whatever the music made you feel.
That’s what this shirt will do. But only until January 17th...
Ten Reasons to wear a ship on your chest.
10. Revive the feelings of awesome band shirts.
Remember the 80's and 90's? When you’d go see a concert and buy the shirts? When it was one of the few ways to get a band shirt that didn’t look totally fake?
When you saw someone else with the same shirt, you felt an immediate sense of belonging, unity, and a wash of whatever the music made you feel.
That’s what this shirt will do.
9. You’re sick of how mental health is currently covered by the media.
When you wear this shirt, you’ll incite curiosity, not avoidance. Perhaps people around you will Google “Beautiful Voyager” and see:
8. This sign is hanging outside of a place that intrigues you, but you realize you’re only wearing shoes.
Man, you really need a shirt. That place looks COOL.
7. You appear on the Beautiful Voyager Lighthouse Map of Overthinkers, and you want to represent IRL.
There are hundreds of you, by the way. All over the world. How cool would it be to run into each other in person…or just see each other across the airport?
6. You’re at that certain point in your t-shirt collection life cycle.
You’re sick of everything in your drawer, face it.
5. You’re reading this in a place that cares about writing, which means you care about writing. Teaching young girls to write sounds like an amazing nonprofit to support.
That’s what the t-shirt proceeds go to: Girls Write Now.
4. You believe that awakening our country’s self-awareness around stress, anxiety, and pain is more important now than ever.
3. You also believe that it needs to be done in the right, non-heavy handed way.
2. You want to send out a ray of positivity and good vibes in the start of 2017.
Every time you wear the shirt, you will be sending out good feelings, both to yourself and others.
1. You have a vivid imagination, and will spin incredible tales about the adventures you took aboard the ole Beautiful Voyager.
Cotton Bureau is where you can get the first-ever, limited edition Beautiful Voyager shirt. But it’s only until January 17! After that, it’s over!
Buy the shirt.
For all the reasons I described above, or another amazing one you’ll create yourself.
Cause if you’re a Beautiful Voyager you have creativity just waiting to burst out of you.
My answer to "Can you recommend a therapist to help with my anxiety?"
I’m honored when people reach out for advice in a pivotal moment. On the other, the path to self- (and anxiety) awareness is littered with false starts and confusion. It can be hard to know exactly what to say. I confront my ambivalence about therapy and come up with the response I want to share with a friend. Now I share it with you, friends!
Last weekend, I got the following text from a friend of mine. She had recently moved in with her boyfriend of a year and she needed advice:
"[Boyfriend} I talked about his anxiety. We both think it’s time for him to start talking to someone. Any suggestions on a therapist? Need advice."
What a challenge!
Though I’m honored when people reach out in a pivotal moment, I feel extremely ambivalent about recommending therapists. It's so easy to find the wrong one. (As I've written about before, I went to numerous therapists who never diagnosed me with anxiety.) It's not that I'm against therapy. It's just that I think it's only one part of the equation.
So before I continuing down the therapy route, I started with this question to get her thinking:
"Does {Boyfriend} have neck or back pain? Is he weird about schedules and a little Type A?"
She said, "Not sure. Yes. Yes. How did you know?"
I told her that his symptoms sounded very familiar. I suspected he was a fellow member of the overthinking tribe.
I told my friend: "Getting to know the self you’ve been pushing away is an uncomfortable, messy process. If seeing a therapist feels like it can help with clarity, your boyfriend should do it. But therapy is one of many changes that will probably need to happen, and it might not even be the most important one." I told her that he should focus on finding a cognitive behavioral therapist who, sadly, tend to be even more expensive than regular therapists.
Then I shared this reading list with my friend, as well as an in-depth interview from Like-Minded Magazine that described my early path to anxiety awareness to help spark her thinking. I told her that she and her boyfriend were embarking on a new journey together that would take many forms. Medication, meditation, and communication were the treatments I found that worked best for me right now. Here was my list of action items:
- explore meditation immediately
- begin reading the book on the list that appealed to him
- experiment with trying to describe what he was feeling in simple sentences to her. Anxiety makes us even worse at it than humans normally are.
- research cognitive behavioral therapy and see what he thought
- accept the following, because it's true:
"Finally, I want to share the good part of this news," I said to my friend. "By realizing something’s wrong — by knowing there’s a disconnect — your guy is already partway there."
"And he’s very lucky to have you at his side."
This post first appeared in the BV newsletter. Subscribe here.