Tag: mental-health
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Slow is Still Forward
I was certain I was going to file. I had reached that place — the place where your mind feels resolved, your heart feels quiet, and you think, this is it. I’m ready. And then my birthday came. And the waves came with it. More than anything in the days prior, I had been steady.…
Jessica Blake
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Self-abandonment Disguised as Virtue
There is a particular kind of goodness women are taught. It looks like patience. It sounds like forgiveness. It wears the soft voice of “understanding” and the quiet smile of “it’s okay.” It is praised. It is rewarded. It is often called strength. But underneath the gold star language lives something much darker: Self-abandonment. We…
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Pathological People Pleaser
(Yes, I do speak in Taylor Swift lyrics…don’t judge me) There is a quiet moment that comes before a life changes. It doesn’t look dramatic.It doesn’t announce itself.It doesn’t come with fireworks or certainty. It comes in small realizations. In questions you don’t ask out loud.In pauses that feel heavier than words.In the ache of…
Jessica Blake
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Wild & Rooted

Every day, I am becoming more myself. My time.My body.My mind.My space.My creativity. For a long time, I tried to make myself fit into a life that wasn’t meant for me — shrinking, editing, and smoothing my edges to survive in places that questioned my right to exist fully. “Why is your stuff everywhere?”“Why do…
Jessica Blake
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Slowness is Healing
There are very few people in my life who truly know what I am walking through. Oddly enough, I like it that way. There is a reason for this season of quiet. I am healing — not just from my marriage, not just from the constant tension my body has lived inside of — but…
Jessica Blake
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Building Flowers in a Burning Room.

My kitchen table is covered in tiny plastic petals.Yellow, blush, ivory, sage.My hands are snapping together LEGO flowers while my life feels like it’s quietly imploding in the background. The world I live inside right now is loud.Emotionally unpredictable.Heavy with tension.Full of things that make my nervous system brace itself even when nothing is “happening.”…
Jessica Blake
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A Level of Irony I Couldn’t Make Up if I Tried.
Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! This is one of the gifts my husband got me. You know… me living in the soft-launch home version of Gilead. Gilead the prequel. I laughed so hard and he didn’t know why. Of course I followed it with “Thank You.” He said, “well we never finished the show…
Jessica Blake
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Small Voices, Big Reminders

I was organizing the house for Christmas — the quiet, in-between kind of organizing where nothing is actually finished, but everything feels like it’s slowly finding its place again. Half-sorted toys sat in wild piles that became more chaotic as the boys dug through them. The boys were doing their usual parallel play, where they…
Jessica Blake
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Healing, But Make It Both Witchy and Well-Researched

For a long time, I thought I had “outgrown” my old interests. The books on witchcraft. The obsession with psychology and neuroscience. The quiet rituals that helped me regulate my nervous system before I had language for what that even meant. Somewhere along the way, curiosity got labeled as impractical, intuition as silly, and rest…
Jessica Blake
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Love, Without the Game

Last night, my husband was on a solo trip… My nervous system was able to relax, even the boys were able to relax. I sat up thinking about my non-negotiables for myself. Coincidentally, yesterday, I picked up a sticker out of my prize box for my students. I had just gotten some new ones and…
Jessica Blake
