Day 2 - Women's Physical and Mental Health (Alt)
Since 2006, 14 Valentines has striven to both celebrate how far women have come, and to increase awareness for how far we still have to go for full equality, autonomy, and inclusion.
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Many thanks to druidspell for providing this essay!
I wanted to make this essay broad and informative when I first volunteered to write for this topic. Then depression resurfaced, and that's just not going to happen. Instead, this essay is going to be deeply personal.
In addition to major depression, I suffer from depersonalization disorder. What this means, for me, is that I don't feel like I inhabit my own body; I don't recognize myself in photographs or in the mirror; I feel like I'm living my life as if I'm watching it on a screen--two dimensional and distant. I'm awful at reading body language and non-verbal cues. I feel deeply disconnected from my emotions and from other people; what's more, I'm aware that these feelings aren't "real" which can make them worse.
My depersonalization affects my life in myriad physical ways, as well as emotionally. I don't feel as if I fully inhabit my body so it's easy to ignore signals like pain, exhaustion, hunger, or thirst--sometimes to extreme consequences (like the fallopian cyst I had to have removed last year that was large enough to place my fallopian tube at risk of rupture: I didn't realize anything was wrong until I couldn't move without a burning pain in my abdomen). I very rarely wear makeup because it makes me into a stranger in the mirror. I can't watch 3D movies because it escalates the sensation of watching my life on a screen and can trigger a dissociative episode.
I became a part of fandom because I needed something to focus on that wasn't the sensation of losing my grip on reality. I relied on this community of fen to carry me through when I couldn't feel my legs to carry myself.
My favorite health organization is the World Health Organization. They are working to reduce the incidence of disease, improve the health of women and children internationally, and decrease the suicide rate among all demographics.