As my day services is having a mental health resource fair this morning for mental health month, something that is for mental health month as well as the 10^th anniversary of our new building and the start of summer, I am now understanding the necessity of having a better summer rather than the past two years which have been extremely damaging to my mental health.

For far too long as I stated in yesterday’s blog post, I have ignored the necessity of taking care of my mental health as an autistic adult that lives independently and has mental health challenges. For me, as a TikTok creator has stated, I need to take ownership of my diagnoses and manage them in the way that is necessary for an optimal quality of life.

Ignoring the treatment only makes me miserable and irritable because by brain is imbalanced and I know that because I have taken the time to not only educate myself but also see what happens by not taking care of my mental health can as it is portrayed in TV shows. YouTube creators are amazing at highlighting behaviors and the necessity of medication, especially as others care for the one that needs to be medicated and how damaging it can be if they are not adhered to.

There is so much I can do that by being properly medicated allows me to do. For far too long I have ignored the fact that when I was not taking my medication in years past I was missing out of so much along with being out of balance in the process where I was just surviving instead of thriving. While the last two years were amazing in many areas, they were equally imperfect, and I was unwilling to see the damage it was doing to myself and others until I took my mental health more seriously and invested in it the way that I needed to.

I used to think that things were such a bummer because of things that my brain allowed me to think about medications and having to curtail things down, but eventually I learned that I was not a superpower like when I was unwell and that I too needed to do things like sleep and take care of myself, something that I wasn’t always doing when I was unwell. Now I see that, and it has made my quality of life so much more manageable. It is having goals to do things that I may enjoy outside of my home instead of being cooped up all the time. There is a world of possibilities, and I do have access to them if I just take the chance. It is even better when I am mentally stable when I am doing those things.

It is up to me if I want to make this summer better. Granted, not every day is going to be perfect, but I must be willing to invest in myself and do the work that I need to do to stay mentally well even if it means having to do things that I may think are childish in nature in the process. There should never be any shame of taking care of my mental health regardless of if that is medication or sleep. It is also advantageous to do what is necessary to combat those side effects as they too may also provide me with some other opportunities in the process.