My senior year of high school was probably the most stressful year of my life. Preparing to transition to college and all its new challenges (among the most worrisome was making new friends) is hard enough, but on top of that, my school (Webster University in St. Louis, MO) was located more than 600 miles from my family in Seneca, SC and, once there, I would be continuing to play softball while pursuing a Biological Sciences major. As if all this wasn’t stressful enough, during this school year (or more like the last two months of it) my high school softball team was going to state so, while most sports teams had finished their seasons, I was still going to practice and games while stressing over graduation and all of the end-or-the-year senior events. I was taking both AP Calculus and AP Statistics at the time and had to prepare for my exams. I had recently realized that I was gay (and later nonbinary/trans) and managed to get into and out of my first same-sex relationship (all the while hiding it from my parents who I was not ready to come out to). I struggled with depression, anxiety, abandonment issues, a minor eating disorder, and self-harm due to the resulting pain of ending my relationship combined with all of the other stress I was experiencing. I realized, however, that if I wanted to be a successful college student, get over my relationship, and begin to repair myself, I needed to work on my mental health and that I needed help doing so. After I told my mom what I had been going through, I was able to begin seeing a therapist and start making my mental health a priority. One of the first things I learned about after beginning therapy was “self-talk”. My therapist taught me that my thoughts are different from my feelings and actions, because, while our feelings are out of our control and our actions are in our control, our thoughts are somewhere in between. We are unable to control some thoughts (like thinking about food when we’re hungry), but others we can control or stop ourselves from imagining (to demonstrate this my therapist told me to imagine a family member naked). Among our controllable thoughts is our “self-talk”, the thoughts we have about or tell ourselves over and over (mine, as you can probably guess, was pretty negative at the time). Although I still struggle with negative self-talk to this day, my therapist gave me many ways to express my thoughts, such as talking to the people closest in my life or even writing them down. She also taught me that practicing meditation was a great exercise to better control my thoughts. Once I was in college I began seeing a therapist at our university counseling center. From him, I learned more about expressing my feelings through things like talking them out, drawing, doing things I am passionate about (like playing the piano), or just having a good cry. He also taught me that it is not right to label feelings as “good” or “bad” since they are out of our control. We can’t control our feelings, but we can control how we react to them (actions). With the tools and knowledge I had gained from both of my therapists, when I experienced a big feeling like sadness, I was able to swap my destructive behaviors (like self-harm) for more constructive ones (like talking them out, going out for a bike ride, or not being hard on myself for just wanting to cry).