Wellness of all kinds is super important to me. I've dealt with mental health struggles in the past, and still do to a lesser extent, so advocating for health is something I feel we should all be doing. One really important thing that I like to emphasize is the connection between physical and mental health. Physical health is completely linked to your mental health; if you get your body moving in any way, you'll feel better mentally! The thing is, it's a whole lot easier to get your body moving in the first place if your mental health is good too. If you focus on improving both aspects of your health, instead of just one, the impact on your overall wellness will be way better. Although I have gotten a lot better, the main thing I struggle with mental health wise is the fact that I have OCD. OCD can become extremely debilitating very quickly after it first shows itself, so I was constantly fighting my own mind for years. After lots and lots of working with my therapist and support from my family, however, I have been able to almost fully take back control of my life! Of course, OCD is a developmental thing, so it can never go away entirely. Even so, there are now days where I'm feeling so good that my OCD doesn't get triggered a single time. Although it still pops up once in a while, it's nothing compared to what I was dealing with before. After experiencing it, though, it made me want to help people as much as I possibly could, because I don't want anybody to suffer through that. I also have a form of seasonal affective disorder that seems like it only affects my OCD, so it gets worse in the winter and better in the summer. That kind of made me really consider the effects of the season on both mental and physical wellness, because it really does have a big impact! It’s something that I like to test out solutions for, and I try to help others deal with seasonal changes, too. Now for physical wellness. It’s something I admittedly don’t focus on nearly enough, despite me knowing that it’s super important for wellbeing. I tend to be very sluggish some days, although that could just be because it's midwinter as I'm writing this. Sometimes I get very stuck doing something like scrolling on my phone or laying down, and it's a struggle to get myself moving. It's kind of like that one law of motion, "an object at rest stays at rest" except the object is me. I can definitely feel it impacting my mental health if I do it too much. I'm not completely stagnant, though, and I do move around a bit because I know just how important it is. I like to walk a lot, and that's my main form of staying active, especially in the winter. I've also started doing just ten or fifteen minutes of exercising each day, to get my blood flowing enough. I can already feel it making a difference to my mental health, and it's a lot easier to get myself to move around! Overall, my past experiences and struggles have shown me just how insanely important mental and physical wellness are to our ability to thrive as human beings, and now I want to make sure as many people know that as possible!

I've been regularly interacting with members of the LGBTQIA+ community for several years now (and am a part of it), but I'm going to write about the person I interacted with who helped me realize my gender was more complicated than I thought, through just one short conversation. Of all things, this story starts with Minecraft. Around a year or so ago, I was playing Minecraft on a public online server, where you were playing with many other people you didn't know, and could communicate through the public chat or private chats. I was just playing, minding my own business, when someone in the chat said something that only people who had done any sort of voice training would understand. Although I wasn't really questioning my gender at the time (or was I?), I was experimenting with my gender presentation, and had messed around with a few voice training videos on Youtube. I understood the reference, and responded to it in the chat (if you need to know, they said "heat from fire" and I responded with "fire from heat"). We laughed about it, and they invited me to chat. I accepted it, and after talking for a few minutes, I learned I was talking to a transgender woman, about my age. She asked me if I was trans, and I said that I wasn't, but I was experimenting with presentation. She didn't pressure me or anything, but as we talked, she said something along the lines of "you might want to look into that" when referring to gender. For the next twenty or thirty minutes, I kept playing as we continued to talk a little bit, but my mind was absolutely racing. I was thinking about things I had done since I was really young, and sort of realizing that they were absolutely NOT things that a cisgender male would do. That, my dear reader, is the story of how my egg was cracked by a stranger I met on Minecraft. I was already part of the LGBTQIA+ community at that point, being pansexual, but gender was a whole other beast entirely. Luckily, I have lots of friends who have supported me through this continuing journey, and my parents have been more or less accepting. When it first happened, I thought I was completely transfem, but as time went on and I continued soul-searching, it started to get even more complicated than that. Even now, I’m not entirely sure how I want to identify, but it’s brought me into contact with tons of new and amazing people, and given me so much more insight into our existence. It’s also made me change up my activism. Before, I would simply just celebrate our queer identities, because joy is so important! While I still do that because it’s awesome, my time learning about gender and the crazy ways it connects to sexuality and the rest of our lives has taught me so much. I’ve come to realize how interconnected every little part of our person is, and that has improved my activism and the ways I try to lift people up. Nowadays, I not only celebrate queer identities, but also the people behind those identities, because I’ve learned it’s honestly impossible to separate the two. It’s made my activism better, and I’ve built connections that are just as strong as the ones I described!

The absolute most significant challenge I've faced during my entire high school experience has been my own mind. To put that more specifically, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. If you don't really know what that is, it's a mental disorder causes a sort of turbo-anxiety about the tiniest (or literally nonexistent) things, and you have to do things in very specific patterns or rituals, known as compulsions, to calm it down and prevent a - made up - disaster from occurring. (Of course, doing them just feeds the anxiety so it becomes stronger every time you encounter it so the way to fight it is to ignore the urge to do compulsions, but I digress). Compulsions also don't actually work most of the time, because your brain has to make sure that they happen absolutely perfectly on an arbitrary scale. That means you might have to repeat the same thing dozens of times before you're finally let go. Because compulsions usually demand that you stop whatever you're doing to perform them, OCD can become EXTREMELY debilitating. OCD is with you from birth, but it normally only starts showing itself in your early teens. Mine first developed about a year before my freshman year of high school. It started up at the beginning of December, and the main topic for it was worrying that something bad would happen before Christmas. Basically every single day until the 25th was absolutely constant stress. I would develop stomach aches and headaches almost daily, and could barely function because I was on such high alert for the smallest things. I had a ritual I had to complete before I went to bed, and it could take me an entire hour some days. When Christmas finally came, I was exhausted, but relieved. I thought that since Christmas was here, the crazy stress I had been feeling would finally go away. Guess what happened? No, it didn't go away. It became less strong though, and I was finally able to consciously process what on earth had just happened to me. A few months later I was formally diagnosed with OCD. Stress can agitate OCD, making you more sensitive to being triggered by small things and less able to resist compulsions. With that in mind, let's go through my first year or so of high school. I was dealing with compulsions during school every day (before that, school was all online so it wasn't a big deal). Most of them were just me having to take weird roundabout routes to my classes and things like that, so not too bad, but there was one that was destroying me. If I thought the "wrong" thing while writing or typing, I would have to erase what I wrote and rewrite it, even having to rephrase it to 'avoid' the thought in the worst cases. It was stopping me from doing tons of things and, although it was less debilitating than the December event, it was getting dangerously close to being as stressful. Something had to change. I started practicing a special type of treatment I learned in therapy where you intentionally trigger the OCD and then resist doing the compulsions. Let me tell you, that's the strangest feeling ever. It's like a weird combo of unbearable agony and joy. I just kept going, destroying all those walls my brain had built, and over months and years, slowly, I started to gain ground in this crazy internal war I had going on. My most recent year of high school was the best I've ever had. I was happy, making tons of friends, and actually being able to focus in school. Although compulsions can still pop up when I'm under a lot of stress, some days go by without a single one worth noting. It's something I honestly never thought I would experience again, but it's just as nice as I remembered. My experience with OCD has permanently changed me, though. I learned so much about mental health and psychology, and I've really become a more empathetic and caring person. It's helped me understand what other people are going through, and most importantly, how to help them. It's even made me consider studying something psychology-related in college to keep helping others more effectively. To this day, I'm still fighting that never-ending war, and learning new things about myself and my wonderful mind. It's become a big part of my life that I find a lot of satisfaction in sharing, in the off-chance that someone else out there suffering in the same way might hear it. OCD isn't something I would wish on my worst enemy, but if I had the option to go back and erase it from myself, it would be a tough choice.