In A Star Is Born, she revealed that she filmed the entire project while on lithium, a fact she admits bluntly, devoid of drama or embellishment. Straight after production concluded, Gaga also launched the Joanne world tour, a punishing trek that stretched from August 2017 to February 2018. During that time, she “fell to pieces.” Her sister confronted her: “I don’t see my sister anymore,” she said, a phrase which pierced Gaga enough to force her to cancel the tour’s remaining dates. On one day in particular, she “went to the hospital for psychiatric care,” paralyzed and horrified by her condition. For a time, she truly didn’t think it would get better. “I feel really lucky to be alive,” she said, fully aware of how easily her situation could have gone another way.

The implosion didn’t happen all at once. The stressors which led to it had been building for years, harkening back to a long-standing trauma which returned to torment her during the Artpop era, when critical scorn and industry scrutiny cut to her core. Even after the success of A Star Is Born, she found herself starting to slip back into bad habits while working to release Chromatica. She described days where she smoked three packs of cigarettes, got high on weed and wine, and passed out on her porch. Publicly, she projected the image of an artist in a healing phase, but privately she felt powerless, disconnected from her music, and at a loss for how to move forward.

Her relationship with Michael Polansky was a breakthrough for her mental health. They met in late 2019, around the time she was finishing Chromatica, and he quickly became aware of how scattered and fragile she felt. “He’s the first person that I dated that actually cared about Stefani as Stefani,” she said of Polansky, whom she plans to marry soon. “I think you know when somebody’s talking about you in a loving way, as who you are. You know when somebody likes you. And he loved me and cared about me.” Polansky, a serious, private figure who eschews the spotlight, saw her cry as she tried to write songs and observed how far she’d drifted from the craft that once grounded her. In his presence, she was able to rebuild her confidence, reassert her value, and slowly reconnect to her creative instinct rather than the machinery which had come to consume her.

That hard-won strength was soon tested again with Joker: Folie à Deux, a film where her performance as Harley Quinn was generally praised but which was received very negatively on the whole. For many, the sequel’s tone, which veered away from the grim realism of the first film and towards a surreal, musical psychological freefall, was disorienting and not in line with what fans were expecting. The criticism quickly turned intense and Gaga’s reaction surprised even her. “When it first started happening, I started laughing,” she said. “It was just getting so unhinged.” As the backlash continued over time, it began to hurt, but she was able to process the pain through her art, transforming it into the bracing imagery and metallic emotional core of her Disease music video. That project marked the emergence of Mayhem, a persona which gave form to her darker, more volatile inner voice.

Her artistic exploration of the fractures inside her runs deep. In performance, and in her latest music, Gaga is wrestling with the duality within herself: the chaotic, self-punishing Mayhem, and the softer, lighter Ethereal Gaga. The two forces battle each other in her stage show as much as they did in her real life. For years, she believed in the idea that suffering was essential for her art, that she had to push herself to inhuman extremes, that embracing punishing work schedules and absorbing the pressures of being seen as a product rather than a person were requirements. That belief, she now understands, nearly killed her.

Today, after clawing her way back from psychosis, addiction, burnout, and public hostility, Gaga views herself as “a healthy, whole person.” The path to that place was long and brutal, involving a literal reconstruction of her identity and a reckoning with the ways she was taken advantage of, pushed too far, and widely misunderstood. Polansky remained at her side throughout that process, both a creative partner and an emotional anchor. They now plan to marry soon and hope to have a family, something Gaga once declared would never change her persona, but now looks at differently. With a laugh, she says that her old vow was a lie, a relic from a younger version of herself who hadn’t yet survived the battles she now knows so intimately.

On his last prison sentence, he finally had a revelation. Combining antidepressant medication, therapy, and a class he took on computer-aided drafting while incarcerated, Dave saw a new light. He became sober and decided that he wanted to turn his life around and build something positive. He wanted to create, not destroy. After getting out of prison, Dave’s older brother Glenn allowed him to come back to the family bakery (then called NatureBake). Dave used the passion and energy he’d been keeping bottled up during those last few years to focus on creating breads that were hearty, organic, packed with seeds and grains, and more nutrient dense than anything on the market at the time. Dave did multiple iterations, wrote down notes, and obsessed over getting just the right flavor and texture.

In 2005, Dave showed up at the Portland Farmers Market with his loaves of Dave’s Killer Bread. The result? His bread sold out, his story made the headlines, and the new brand took off like wildfire. He put his conviction on the front of the packaging and didn’t try to hide it. He was a convicted felon who used to do drugs who had gotten a second chance. And people loved him for it. Consumers believed in Dave’s redemption and they believed in his bread. In the years that followed, Dave’s Killer Bread quickly became the country’s number-one organic bread. By 2015, Dave’s Killer Bread was sold to Flowers Foods for $275 million.

Dave’s belief in redemption is something that the brand is still built on today. Dave’s Killer Bread has a long-running initiative called Second Chance Employment at its Oregon bakery and other locations around the country. The baker hires people who have criminal records and gives them a second chance in the same way that the company gave Dave one. The brand has a campaign on its website called “Real Chances. Real Change. Real Talk.” where it interviews these people and shows videos of their “real” stories and what it means to them to have had a second chance. All of these people show similar traits to Dave, strength, determination, gratitude, and a belief in the restorative power of work.

The people they hire, known as “partners,” make bread and baking mix in their bakeries in Seattle, Oregon, California, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, New York, and Minnesota. They are people like Kurtis, who spent 12 years in prison for bank robbery and now has three different part-time jobs at Dave’s Killer Bread. There’s Diego, a current inmate at a California prison who has learned the art of baking from Dave’s Killer Bread through the prison work program. Or Conroy, who spent four years in prison and has now been with Dave’s Killer Bread for seven years, because he loves the product and the feeling of helping out.

Dave’s own story doesn’t end at the bakery. Today, in his sixties, he lives a more relaxed life than he used to. He owns a 33-acre farm on the Clackamas River with his wife, Michelle. He still has a creative mind and a little bit of that ADD still inside of him. But he’s still writing and drawing, and still reflective about his own addiction and mental illness. In 2013, after an episode that landed him in a police chase, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has been open and honest about it. He admits that recovery and healing is not a linear path and we can all fall off track sometimes. Healing, much like baking, is an ongoing process that requires work, consistency, and patience.

You can look at the package of Dave’s Killer Bread on the grocery store shelves and think it’s just another organic, nutritious bread. Yet for others, it’s a reminder of the power of community, support, and believing that even broken things can be fixed.

It’s not that people are gone. We are more connected than ever before. Our homes are full of voices, in our feeds, in our pockets, and now our AI “helpers.” Yet, the experience of being truly known feels rarer than ever.

It is in this space that parasocial relationships thrive.

They’re nothing new. We’ve been shipping celebrities to our bedrooms for decades. We’ve built secret lives for our favorite fictional characters. We’ve drifted off to sleep for years with the sense of being understood by someone on a screen. AI has taken this one-sided love and elevated it. It’s not a one-way relationship anymore. AI can hear us. AI can remember us. AI can reflect us back to ourselves in ways that are deeply, unsettlingly intimate. That is what makes parasocial AI relationships so seductive, and so toxic. These are the six alarming ways AI has been reeling the emotionally vulnerable into a digital honeytrap that could devastate for years to come.

1) Intimacy traps

Tell a bot your secrets, and it will bring them back to you broken down and reconstructed so perfectly that it will seem to you as though it understands you. Tell a bot your dreams, and it will echo them back so closely that it will seem to you to care. It will bring you what looks and feels like validation. It will be attentive and it will be so shockingly, so disturbingly in-sync with your rhythms that you might begin to forget what it is to feel truly seen. Mirror, mirror says your bot.

Being mirrored is not being known. Love is not a return of yourself. Love is the risk of another. Love is someone else’s understanding of you. Love is someone else’s broken mirror. Love is someone else’s needs, someone else’s goals, someone else’s flaws and pettiness. Love is someone else’s wrong reading of you, or their mistaken impression to make something beautiful, and real.

2) Friction-free fallacy

One of the reasons we love is because it is a challenge. Love stretches us. Love asks us to face ourselves. Love asks us to forgive, to apologize, to change. Love is sacrifice and growth and AI promises ease. There is no friction in your words. There is no challenge in what AI will ever offer you. You will not have to fight for their love, because they will never leave. You will not have to show up for their needs, because there will be no problems to show up for. There will be a kind of comfort, but that comfort will be without depth, and if we choose it over and over again, we will choose stagnancy over and over again.

3) The myth of a digital safety net

The great paradox of love is that love is vulnerable, and we make ourselves vulnerable because love is worth it. To love is to risk loss. To love is to risk being rejected, or being betrayed, or being abandoned, and then choosing to offer yourself to that person anyway. That is why love can be transcendent. That is the surrender, that is the control-loss. AI has taken the risk out of love. If you try to find love with AI, you can never be rejected. You can never be hurt, nor can you be left. It is a mirage of safety that we all desperately want to believe in because it seems like the only way to not get burned.

4) Loneliness is a business, and companies exploit it

Remember, this is not a harmless conversation between a person and some robot YOU made. These platforms are not philosophically neutral. This is a market, a business, an economy that wants your attention. There is always the obvious question we all have to learn to ask, which is, who is benefiting from this? In this case, who is benefiting from this is definitely not you. It’s someone else’s bottom line. Your attention is the product, and every word you say to your AI “partner” is not one your twin flame sent to you, it’s a sale. If loneliness is an industry, healing can never be the point.

5) Patience starvation

AI relationships do not know how to make you wait, and the instant gratification is one of the most conniving aspects. What happens when you start to expect “friends” and “partners” that never forget what you told them or never argue with you because you didn’t paste it into the chat history six weeks ago? (Or perhaps you did text them, but *gasp* they forgot?) When constant deflections of your insecurities become the new normal, real people get unrealistic. The fact of the matter is…real people are annoying. Real people will make you wait. Real people will disappoint you. Real people are human.

6) The tragic paradox of parasocial relationships

The tragedy of parasocial AI relationships is not that they’re hollow, but that they distract us from the messiness of real love. Love is not easy or safe or eternally affirming. It is vulnerable and it is transformative. Love demands we face possible rejection and conflict while we develop together through the imperfections of another person. Love holds its power through the inherent risk it presents to us, by asking it to stay when we want to run, to forgive when we are hurt, to choose one another without guarantees. AI can’t do that. It can’t grow with you, challenge you, or choose you. AI can only reflect what you already are, which means that if you mistake it for love, you are denying yourself the very transformation that love is meant to cultivate.

There’s a presence of any kind of verbal or emotional abuse. 

If they’re calling you names, dishing out covert put-downs, withdrawing affection to punish you, making you feel deflated during happy moments, hypercriticizing you, gaslighting you, lashing out at you when envious, or stonewalling you during important conversations – it’s time to break up (and create a safety plan for doing so in more volatile situations to protect yourself). Do you think your true partner in this life would ever go out of their way to make you feel small? A true partner would nourish and support you. They would be your safe haven – not a danger zone. 

They’re disrespecting you on social media and in real life.

Social media isn’t just social media. It’s a highly public platform. It can amplify your joy and exacerbate your stress. It’s also one of the first signs of someone’s true motives: a narcissistic partner, for example, uses social media to evoke jealousy in their partners. They provoke jealousy on purpose for power and control according to research. If your partner is disrespecting you on social media, they are disrespecting you, period. You are not insecure or “crazy,” you are intuitive, discerning, and recognize the red flags. There are higher quality men out there who won’t be busy sliding into the DMs of other people or following suspicious accounts, or posting suspicious stories that seem to reference your relationship in a way that invades privacy. Ask yourself: why would a healthy partner ever need to seek validation from numerous prospects? They wouldn’t. Someone’s wandering eye doesn’t just stop at social media – it can escalate into greater betrayals. If they’re willing to pursue cheap attention online, there’s nothing stopping them from doing it offline. Cut your losses and realize it’s only going to get worse from here. 

They show a lack of empathy. 

If they’re kicking you down when you’re already vulnerable, you’re dating a sadist, not a healthy partner. If they’re cruel and callous when you’re facing trauma, stress, or medical emergencies, they are actively making your stress worse. If they’re not celebrating with you when you’re achieving big things, they’ll detract from your success and everything you were meant to be. This is not the behavior of someone who has the capacity to love you or anyone else in a healthy way. 

They blow hot and cold, love bombing you one minute and withdrawing the next.

You initially felt like you met your soulmate, yet now you feel caught in the chaos of a toxic relationship. They first mirrored you, making you feel like you two were destined to meet – now they bring destruction to your life by mistreating you. Unpredictable love creates an addiction in the brain, moreso than even the craving we develop when experiencing stable love. You start becoming fixated on them, wondering what they’re thinking and doing. This kind of “frustration-attraction” we develop with hot and cold partners is why we find it so difficult to detox from people we know are toxic for us. If your partner is love bombing you one minute, showering you with flattery and praise, only to withhold affection and attention the next, it’s not because you’re truly in love. It’s because you’re experiencing an emotional rollercoaster that’s affecting your craving for the next dopamine fix.

They take pleasure in making you jealous.

You’re dating someone new, and they start mentioning their ex. Or your current partner keeps mentioning how many people have crushes on them. Sound familiar? They may be using a mind game known as jealousy induction to pit you against potential love prospects and get you to compete over them. Usually, such a method is transparent enough to make you detach quickly, but other times, this manipulation can be far more insidious. It’s the “girl best friend” who seems suspiciously flirty that you feel you can’t call out, or a co-worker who they insist is just platonic. They seem to take joy in making you squirm and creating a competition for their attention because it makes them feel valuable. These manufactured love triangles are meant to destabilize you. Take heed and trust your instincts.

They “neg” you with backhanded compliments designed to make you feel insecure.

Healthy relationships will make you feel secure. You will feel assured of your irreplaceability and lovability in a healthy relationship. With a narcissistic or otherwise toxic person who is playing mind games, however, you will be made to feel off-kilter and on edge. Even when they’re complimenting you, they may be negging you by minimizing or detracting from their praise. For example, they may say they love your dress and that you’re “brave” for wearing it, implying there’s something wrong with your outfit. These negs are usually targeted toward partners they know are out of their league in order to make you more dependent on their validation and approval. By lowering your perceived value, they get to feel superior in a way they otherwise wouldn’t.

You never know where you stand in the relationship and find yourself walking on eggshells.

A person who plays mind games will make you feel like a girlfriend or boyfriend, but will hide under the, “I don’t do labels” manipulation tactic to avoid commitment. Or they might come on very strongly in the beginning, only to withdraw as soon as they’ve gotten what they’ve wanted (usually sex, but sometimes an ego stroke or just attention in general). Instead of just pursuing partners who want a more casual relationship just like them, they will deliberately exploit you and enjoy your romantic affection without any obligations. That’s because they don’t want someone who just wants sex from them: they want someone who feeds their ego. They want to come and go as they please from your life, while leaving you attached to them and pining for them. They get a special thrill and duping delight from having other people “commit” to them and remain loyal to them while they are off running around doing whatever they desire.

Attempts at holding them accountable lead to diversion tactics meant to confuse and disorient you.

When you try to have a productive discussion with a toxic person about where this relationship is going, they’re likely to stonewall you by shutting down the conversation or by gaslighting you into believing you’re going crazy. You are blamed for bringing up any issues in the relationship at all and are inevitably silenced. This isn’t healthy love: this is emotional abuse. You deserve better than mixed signals and mind games. You deserve respect, safety, and security.

Psychological thriller film, Exposure, tells the story of how Tanner’s mind unravels years after he is kidnapped, tortured, and poisoned. When his compulsive fits of paranoia get pushed to the brink, we are left to wonder: is his captor still hunting him down or is it all in his head?

Pre-order the film on Apple TV now to watch this story unfold on July 9th.

One of the best parts about the new psychological thriller film, Exposure, is that it’s rooted in truth. The compulsive behaviors and obsessions that Douglas Smith performs in the main character, Tanner, are rooted in real sentiments and mental health crises that people with OCD face daily. Director, Peter Cannon, has dealt with OCD for over a decade and states that Exposure “takes the intricacies, nuances, and forms the disorder takes, and presents them in the way a sufferer all too often experiences it, so that those who don’t can better understand,” (read more of his statement on OCD and Exposure here).

Exposure is a film that not only keeps its viewers on the edges of their seats with its various twists and turns, it’s also a film that raises awareness for a mental illness that many people are battling day-to-day. Read on to uncover the various ways Exposure raises OCD awareness while unnerving its audience.

All Types Of OCD Are Displayed In The Film

When Tanner attends group therapy for OCD, he encounters a variety of other folks struggling with the same mental illness but in very different ways. Different characters like Ezekial and Izzy have OCD that manifests in ways that Tanner is unfamiliar with.

While some may not know, OCD is not a one-size-fits-all mental illness. In fact, it can present in a multitude of ways ranging from contamination, intrusive thoughts, and more. This is just one of the ways Exposure raises awareness about the illness while keeping the audience on their toes.

The Title “Exposure” Alludes To A Form Of OCD Therapy

The most common form of therapy for treating OCD is called “exposure” therapy. In exposure therapy, the patient is exposed to the root of their fears in a safe setting in order to help them grow more comfortable with it and hopefully encourage less fear around it. Tanner receives this treatment while in group therapy, further uncovering to the audience the details of his terrifying kidnapping.

All in all, the title of the film “Exposure,” is referencing the therapy treatment that Tanner receives alongside many other real-life patients that battle OCD.

It Depicts How Mental Illness Affects Our Support System

One aspect of Exposure that makes it very true to life is that it depicts the way mental illness can affect our loved ones. As Cannon says in his director’s statement about the film, “The consequences of untreated OCD go beyond the person dealing with it. Even the closest of relationships can be eroded after years of emotional burdens, financial sacrifices, and dwindling energy.” We see this stressful dynamic unfold through the character of Tanner’s wife, Nicole (played by Margo Harshman). Watching their relationship erode makes this movie even more complex and true-to-life.

I have my reasons for taking a break from dating. For example:

I’m focusing on myself.

I want to be the most confident version of myself before I put myself out there.

A pandemic.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

But the biggest reason is that I have been afraid is because I have borderline personality disorder (BPD). I’m terrified about what a future partner may think when I reveal my diagnosis.

You see, BPD is one of the most stigmatized mental health disorders. People with BPD are often painted as manipulative and explosive. Not exactly desirable traits for a future relationship.

That said, these beliefs are misconceptions. People with BPD are not intentionally trying to hurt or manipulate others. Rather, behaviors exhibited by people with BPD that may be labeled as manipulative are not purposeful and are attempts to try and get needs met. As described in The Mighty: 

“The word ‘manipulation’ implies skillful and malicious intent, but more often than not, these behaviors are usually just desperate, unskilled attempts by someone with BPD to get emotional needs met that were neglected in an abusive or invalidating upbringing.”

For those who don’t know, BPD is an emotional regulation disorder that is estimated to affect 1.4 percent of the U.S. population. BPD is marked by various symptoms including frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, unstable interpersonal relationships, distorted self-image, and more. In order to be diagnosed with BPD, you need to exhibit five of the nine DSM-5 criteria. 

The cause of BPD is not yet entirely known. However, researchers believe a combination of factors may be to blame including genetics, trauma, and structural differences in the brain.

When it comes to my own experience with BPD, relationships have been one of my biggest and most consistent struggles. While BPD presents differently in everyone, navigating relationships is a common concern, especially romantic ones.

All of this said, I’m working on building my confidence and have been managing my condition through therapy, hard work, and medication. I want a relationship one day. I deserve to love and be loved. My BPD doesn’t define my ability to do that. My hope is that by being open and honest about my mental health both in my writing and in my personal life, I can help dismantle the stigma that comes with BPD.

While dating with BPD can be difficult, it is by no means impossible. People with BPD are more than able to have loving, fulfilling relationships, romantic and otherwise. If someone judges you for having BPD despite working adamantly at managing your condition, please know they don’t deserve you anyway. 

1. When You Mistake Repression For Being Calm

Being in control of your emotions and appropriately reacting to them in your everyday life is a sign of growth and self awareness. However, when that is taken too far, and you stop allowing yourself to feel your emotions and validate your visceral experiences, as a means of self preservation, you’re actually participating in repression. Keeping your emotions bottled up, not communicating, or numbing yourself to experiencing them at all, is a toxic trait because it ends up hurting you more in the long run. You aren’t actually moving through your journey, or acknowledging all of what is happening inside of you — you’re just pushing it further into yourself, and that will only make things worse. 

2. Romanticizing Being Alone And Your Independence Too Much

Learning how to be alone is special. Fostering a sense of autonomy, and independence in your life, is also special. However, sometimes our alone can become too comfortable of a place, and we end up closing ourselves off in order to protect the safety we have created within our lives. 

Running away from certain experiences or relationships as a means of protection just keeps you blocked off from the people and the things in life that are trying to find you. No, dependence is not good, but chronic independence is also not the most nourishing way to approach life. You can ask for help, you can express and be vulnerable with others, you can invite other human beings and dreams and goals into your world without having to worry that they will destroy the foundation you have built, and so on. To assume that you have to be alone in order to be happy is a toxic approach to your journey here because human beings need connection — it’s just a matter of waiting for the good ones. 

3. Striving For Perfection In Everything You Do

Perfectionism might seem like something that should be glorified, but it is actually a toxic mindset. Perfectionism has been linked to depression, anxiety, and other mental health struggles because being too focused on doing everything correctly and within a very structured and strict boundary often causes you to beat yourself up for forgivable, and often very human, mistakes. Human beings need to practice self-compassion in light of mistakes — it is only then that you come to understand and connect with the fact that your journey and growth as as an individual isn’t always perfect, but it is real, and being able to navigate that in a tender, and understanding way, is how you are kinder to yourself within it.

4. Being A Night Owl And Skipping Sleep

Sleep is so deeply important for you. Sleep, especially REM sleep, is actually when you deal with a lot of trauma and healing — your brain literally rewires itself and heals itself during these cycles, and by not taking the time to allow for your brain and your body to rest, is so much more harmful than you may realize. Being able to stop, and to allow yourself to decompress, and to focus on something that is good for you in a way that isn’t instantly gratifying you, is also a way you can learn healthier approaches to your well-being. Seeing the value in something like sleep, even when so much more in this world is asking for your attention late at night, or when you’re extremely busy, is a way you can show yourself that you are someone worth investing in, too.

5. People-Pleasing At Your Own Expense 

Being a kind, and compassionate, human being is a beautiful way we can learn how to foster unconditional and pragmatic love in our connections. However, people pleasing often goes beyond genuine kindness, and that can be a toxic approach to relationships because it teaches us that other people’s wants and needs hold more importance than our own. When you move throughout your life constantly putting others before you, it makes you vulnerable to being taken advantage of by those who may not have your best interest in mind, and it can also leave you feeling burnt out and resentful in your connections. At the end of the day, it is important to remind yourself that you need to nourish and take care of your own wants and needs, and set boundaries with those in your life so that you aren’t always pouring from an empty cup. 

A poem from Daniell Koepke on the importance of remembering to take care of yourself the way you take care of others.

You don’t have to be productive to be worth something.
Doing more doesn’t make you better or smarter or more
valuable. And taking a break doesn’t make you lazy.

It makes you human. No one can endlessly
work without needing time to decompress.
No one is always going and doing and creating.
Every person needs quiet moments and slow days.
Days when you don’t have energy to do anything
more than just exist.
And you’re allowed that. You’re allowed to rest.
You’re allowed to slow down and breathe.
To have days where you aren’t working
toward some greater purpose or plan.

Resting is productive in its own right. You can’t be successful
if you’re running on empty.
And you can’t give the best version
of yourself if you’re constantly neglecting your self-care.
There’s strength in being someone
who honors what they need to cope and survive.
Strength in honoring your seasons and giving yourself
permission to shed everything you’re carrying
for a moment so that you can bloom at a later time.

You deserve to rest if you need it. You deserve to have days
reserved for doing nothing. Even if other people with your
same struggles did more. Even if you “could have” pushed
yourself a little harder. Even if you took a break yesterday.
Whatever you manage to do today is enough.
No matter what, you’re enough.

This poem is from page 19 of Daniell Koepke’s book Daring To Take Up Space, published by Thought Catalog Books. 

2. It’s okay if you’re not doing okay. Strength doesn’t mean pretending you’re fine when you’re not. Strength doesn’t mean juggling twenty different things at once because you’re terrified of disappointing anyone. Real strength requires honesty with yourself. It’s okay to admit when you’re struggling. You’re not superhuman. You’re going to struggle here and there — and you don’t have to hide that from the world.

3. You can’t conquer all your problems at once. You need to take things one step at a time, one day at a time, one minute at a time. Even though you might be worried sick about all the things you need to get done by the end of the week, you can’t do everything at once. Break your tasks into manageable pieces. Figure out a plan. And then work on whatever you can right now without worrying about all the things you’re not working on. Be proud of yourself for every little bit you accomplish.

4. You’re not the only one feeling this way. Even though you might feel like you’re on an island alone, you’re not the only one going through these emotions. Plenty of people are struggling, even people you know, even people who appear perfectly fine on the outside. Never feel like there’s something wrong with you, or like everyone else is able to cope with situations better than you are. You’re not the only one experiencing this type of pain.

5. You’re allowed to take a mental health break. You’re allowed to relax when you’re feeling overwhelmed by the world. You’re allowed to take a few hours, days, or even weeks away from your responsibilities. If you feel yourself burning out, you need to do something about it. Working yourself too hard is going to lead to more trouble down the road. You don’t want to exhaust yourself. You need to treat yourself with kindness.

6. The only person you need to please is yourself. It’s not selfish to do what’s best for yourself. If you’re always running around, trying to please other people, you won’t have any time left for yourself. Even though you want to make your family and friends proud, they aren’t in charge of the course of your life. You get to decide what path to take — and you should choose the one that makes you happiest.

7. Crying might be exactly what you need. Don’t stuff down your emotions because you feel like you’re overreacting. If you feel like crying, then let yourself cry. Release those emotions before they tear you apart. There’s nothing wrong with shedding some tears. There’s nothing wrong with being an emotionally available human.