An Introduction to Kinda Unprofessional by The Petty Cow

 

I don’t have a $10K a month blog, but I’d like to. It may not seem like that
has much to do with mental health, but it does. It is also my goal and that’s
good for my mental health. So, I’m off to a decent start. 

How am I supposed to reach that goal of creating a$10k a month blog?
According to all my hours of obsession, research, editing, and insanity it all
depends on the questions the millions of other people out there are asking
Google. 

Traffic comes from people searching for answers. Writers gain financially
from the advertising they do on sites that already attract free traffic because
they create or host something that the audience wants to come to
understand. 

While YouTube and the ads you can’t afford to skip will tell you that you
can create a million-dollar platform in a handful of days to change your life
in months, my reality is not that. 

It’s taken me three years just to get my sites functional. My content is
always in editing or on a list somewhere. My internet is as slow as the last
thing available to the free world. My tech skills are bullshit, and my information.
There is just so much of it. 

It was in my quest to build and plan my “Kinda
Unprofessional” project that I learned about the business aspect of blogging
and the algorithm of human interest that is keyword research and search engine
optimization. That’s not what this article is about by the way. I’m just
getting started. 

Google already keeps up with all the questions we ask and can literally tell
us the best way to profit from answering the questions that the masses are
searching for. If I wanted to live my own life and write, it seems all I have
to do is be able to logically provide a respectable answer to a question about
a topic people are interested in. 

I just need to know something they want to know. The problem is that after a
career in social science, social work, clinical therapy, and courtroom
testimony; the only things I know are those I’ve listed. The millions of
reasons why none of it is working, why the world seems to be falling apart, and
how to keep living through it. Those topics are angry and depressing. They are
the things that people don’t know they need to know. They are not the things
people want to know…unless they’re angry or depressed and have no resources.
Those are my kind of people.

I just need to know something they want to know. The problem is that after a
career in social science, social work, clinical therapy, and courtroom
testimony; the only things I know are those I’ve listed. The millions of
reasons why none of it is working, why the world seems to be falling apart, and
how to keep living through it. Those topics are angry and depressing. They are
the things that people don’t know they need to know. They are not the things
people want to know…unless they’re angry or depressed and have no resources.
Those are my kind of people.

I learned what a blog was about the time I moved to Austin, TX to start my
life over and write a novel in 2016. People working from home, in their own
time, fueling their artisan, and being paid astronomical amounts of money for
it became my secret heroes. There wasn’t any internet when I was a kid. How was
I supposed to know that’s what I really wanted to be when I grew up? I wanted
to try products and write about travel and food. I just couldn’t afford my rent,
much less either of those things. Blogging started as a fleeting fantasy
thought and later a dismissive afterthought as I worked to climb the rungs in
the healthcare rat race. It has now become something I have to pursue
now. 

Maybe I was delusional when the idea of blogging got a hold of me. Maybe I
was just in a bad place and susceptible to schemes. Those are possibilities.
Wishful thinking in dark times leads to all kinds of stupid decisions. In time
even the realist in me couldn’t help but think logically, “Who would want to
spend life punching the clock forty hours a week when they could do what they
wanted and were good at while earning triple the income in half the time?”
There had to be a catch. 

For three years I created plans and outlines for different projects in hopes
to push my business plan beyond fantasy while I dissolved mentally and
financially.

Blogging seemed like the viable answer. I just needed to know a lot about
something worth knowing about.  It seemed all that I knew was therapy,
diagnostics, trauma, tragedy, and debt. I was burnt out at work when my
roommate, my only sister, was murdered and lacking more than three days
bereavement leave I was forced to step down from my full-time position. A job I
had been really good at and mostly enjoyed. I’d been a social worker for over a
decade. I’d been doing clinical work in psychiatric hospitals and mental health
courts for last five years. 

I worked hard. I’d lived a life I didn’t talk about. My patients and their
reality and my ability to come up with the right words on a bad day were all I
had to sink my independence, purpose, and confidence into. I’d already lost everything
in a lifetime, written a book about it and started my life over. I was grateful
to have the only thing that I had, my education and career. I’d already “bounced
back” as pop culture would say. I never expected to have to do it again.

As my angst with the state of our human services festered it imploded with the
“what the fuck” type of luck that I lived with.  I was at the top of my
game and about to test for private practice licensure. 

Then one morning I went to work and that evening my sister was murdered. In
a blur of leave policy and autopsy, I found myself unemployable, destitute, and
cognitively impaired by compound post-traumatic stress disorder. 

I did the best I could do to maintain my footing as Covid-19 began and the
city locked us in for the year. I drank melted snow in Austin when the grid
left us without water the next winter. I buried my mother and her literally
broken heart by the fall. I took business and blog classes, I heard voices, and
couldn’t afford to get to where my children were for nine months. 

Eleven months into my eviction in Austin TX 2021 I was still working to
build my websites and products. I didn’t know if I would be able to go back
into the mental health industry as a clinician. I could barely read sometimes,
and I wasn’t oriented to date and day for months. Time passed and I
dissociated.  I got by reselling items on Facebook and going to food banks
while I saved to join the South by Southwest Festival to network and take
classes in starting a small business. My credit score and monthly sales left me
unqualified for business credit or disaster relief as a sole proprietor. My
blog writing time turned into time I spent chasing grants, resources, and
sanity. Support small business my ass Austin. That felt like just another
bitter lesson I learned too late.

I understood grief, psychosis, trauma and circumstances. Each new stressor
shocked my threshold psychologically. I coped and self-cared the best I could.
By the time my mother died I had just started to process logically and
organized. Shortly after her sudden death my father remarried. I found myself
paranoid, delusional, catatonic, unable to communicate effectively with my
partner and unable to head out of one ear. My mind was turning on me and there
was nothing else I could do but keep trying to take the best care of myself
that I could and keep living in the tunnel as it narrowed. 

I kept making products, taking classes, drafting outlines, and believing
there was still potential for another life outside of the place I felt stuck
for so long. The trial for my sister’s killer taunted me as extensions were
granted for the killer to plead insanity and go to the psych hospital while I couldn’t
get therapy because my psychiatrist didn’t want to sign the Crime Victims
Compensation papers the state required to cover my mental health treatment
after the murder. 

  I kept not being able to afford advertising, not making sales,
and being evicted. Chronic stress shadow boxed with my reality. I asked my
partner to move out so I could focus on myself before I lost my ability to
stabilize myself. I grieved the loss of a breakup equivalent to my divorce,
fought to keep my home, optimized my website and sold a few hats and canvases
to feed my spirit. It wouldn’t sustain me, and my content wasn’t ready enough
for publication. I couldn’t commit to a schedule. I couldn’t commit to a city
when I was future planning logically. My only other friend died suddenly in
January 2022, taking most of my platonic entrepreneurial support system with
him in the blink of an eye. 

It took three years to build and optimize my websites, much less load them
with content. It was disheartening and at more than a few times, literally
insane. That’s what trauma, grief, and time do to a mind. 

It’s a contemporary American fantasy to believe hallucinations and delusion
stem only from someone’s socioeconomic choice or substance use. The members of
the public that don’t understand psychosis need to be able to explain it away
to themselves in a way that makes sense to them. It reassures them with the
comfort of believing those things will not come to happen to their status quo
minds of less complicated and tragic personal experiences. 

.

That doesn’t help anyone. Just education to the fact that it can and will
organically happen to anyone in times of stress, death, or hormonal imbalance
might comfort some who have the insight to work through symptoms that most
laymen believe you cannot work through. The problem still becomes that the
mental health services in America are so dangerously liable and classist that
those who want and need help still can’t get it. It’s mostly inappropriate when
sliding scale or state funded. It often makes the problems worse. 

2019 my work and plans to go into clinical practice independently were train
wrecked by my sister’s murder, hospital politics, and my forgetting to change
my address with the board cost me my current license without a fair hearing.
Suddenly my career was over too. At times that was the hardest loss to get over
and move on from. 

While I’ve worked to recover and move on in financial security and purpose,
I haven’t been able to. At first, I was mostly angry that I spent all those
years learning, working, and helping people. Finding I couldn’t afford to feed
myself or keep my housing after someone else made the choice to kill the person
I was living with during what the peeking of my clinical career was the
ultimate slap in spiritual face.

How was I supposed to spend the rest of my life? Where was my security? What
about everything I’d worked for? People and living through the shitty things
that we don’t talk about happening to us was all I knew. It was all I was good
for. All I’d trained for. I had already rebuilt my life. Then life happened to
me again. The same way that it happens to everyone else; randomly, suddenly,
and violently. 

I shunned my previous discipline and vowed not to work for such a
dangerously ignorant and inhuman administration in order to cope with no longer
having a purpose or plan. Then one day I had what I’ll call an epiphany. 

Before I lost my job and state of mind I was training and working towards an
outpatient practice for high acuity trauma patients based using a case
management model with what I believe to be the coolest and most effective tool
I was ever trained in, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy,
EMDR. It was being used to treat some of the worst cases of military trauma and
having astonishing empirical results. I signed up for training the minute my
credentials and tax return qualified me to take the course. I was ready to
specialize and go into research on using it as a treatment for auditory
hallucinations and psychosis in complex cases. Watching the possibilities in
case studies and practice convinced me that for some we could provide a
functional future and a cure if we stopped misdiagnosing for policy’s sake and
truly give our best practices to everyone. 

I was frantically trying to repose my life and budget in a post homicide,
job loss, housing crisis in the middle of a pandemic when my partner had a
horrible anxiety episode. He acquired a brain injury in a professional fight
that retired him from the spot and left him with sometimes crippling
anxiety. 

While trying to talk him through it I thought of some self-soothing
techniques I had been trained in but stumbled over whether or not I could
ethically assist if I wasn’t practicing and tripped over the irony of how it
would be a conflict of interest if I was practicing. 

He looked me dead in the face in the midst of his struggle and tears and said,
“If you have something that can help me, you have to help me, don’t you? I
can’t live like this.” It may not have been ethically principled but the
humane thing to do is always right in front of me. So, we walked through the
same things I would have done if I were at work until he could calm himself
down and take over. 

I think about that now as I work auditing nursing and debating on how to
save the $1000.00 it will take to get to take the test and finish my private
practice license. I’m grateful to have a job at all. It doesn’t have to be
something I like doing or am great at paying the bills. While it pays the
bills, it’s not going to replace my car, get my kids braces, or allow me any
opportunity to save much less retire someday. 

I find myself going back to all my blogging research that tells me you just
have to have something to say that people want to know and dedicate your time
to it. It will make the part of you that needs to write stop incessantly
pounding your soul with the need to stand up or move around because you can’t
use a pen correctly anymore. It will get the worries and the important linear
thoughts out. It will help someone or accomplish your purpose, or it won’t. If
you don’t do it, you’ll never know.  Those are the thoughts I get lost in. 

Over the years I continue to find myself reminding myself that I may only
know mental health and social policy, but I know them very well in spite of
having to live through the catastrophes our systems gaps have wreaked havoc on
my life with. 

I try to find gratitude in having a job and home at all but am plagued by
the desire to do more for myself. I thought my stagnation was an energy issue. So,
I came to peace with the idea of quitting my blog and publishing missions to
focus on my day job and settle into the rest of my life. I just can’t seem to
make peace with that yet. 

Then I remembered my partner’s panic attack and his question in a new light.
How could I sit with a mind full of knowledge, experiences, answers, and ideas that
could change another’s life for the better and keep it to myself just because
the system is built to keep the information gated and complicated and I’m
exhausted from chronic poverty and crisis?

Maybe it’s more of moral angst than financial anxiety driving me to keep at
this. Regardless, it took less than half an hour to keyword search and
brainstorm over 200 topics related to mental health and our American reality
that people were looking for information and answers for. 

I can create useful information and do it for free. The hopes of ad revenue
and eventual sales of therapeutic tools I have designed to help people and
clinicians might very well replace my income and purpose in this world if I
find the words and energy to follow through.

They say if you build it, they will come. 

I already built it. I just need content and that takes time. 

So, I decided to start writing my 200 articles. 

The first topic being this introduction to what I am doing and why I am
doing it. 

The next 180 something are going to look like this:

How to Bounce Back 

Major Depressive Disorder

Financial Stress 

Seasonal Affective Disorder 

How to Heal

How to Make a Come Back 

Bipolar

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Anxiety

Intellectual and Developmental Delay Disorders

Depression 

Autism

Burnout

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Drugs v. Schizophrenia

Schizoaffective Disorder

Stages of Grief

Can Mental Health Issues Be Prevented

Depression in Females

Working with Mental Health Issues 

Intimacy Issues 

Sexual Dysfunction

Acceptance of Symptoms

Sleep Deprivation 

Narcissism

Memory loss

Insomnia

Postpartum depression

Coping Skills for Stress

Coping Skills for Depression 

Alcohol Detox at Home

Benzodiazepine Detox at Home

Coping with Grief and Loss

Transitions

Adjustment Disorder

Willingness 

Alcohol Treatment 

Becoming Disabled

End of Life Planning

What is Hospice?

Types of Resources Mental Health/Social

Symptoms Definitions 

Anxiety Attacks

Types of Therapy

Choosing a therapist

Inpatient Treatment 

Outpatient Treatment

How to Be Assertive

How to Be Resilient 

How to Self-Care

How to Recognize Progress

Goal Setting 

Choosing to End a Relationship 

How to Start Over

How Social Behavior Affects Everyone 

Codependency 

Passive Aggressiveness

System Fraud

System Malice 

Making Hard Choices

Group Trauma

Secondary Trauma

Types of Clinicians

County Mental Health Authorities

Consent to Treat

Mental Civil Court

Mental Criminal Court 

Age of Onset

Complex Bereavement 

Compound Trauma

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

Rational Self Analysis

Self-Soothing

Hypervigilance

Gun Ownership 

Protective Measures

Hope

What to Ask the Dr

Tracking Symptoms 

Reality Testing

Hallucinations, Trauma, Psychosis Grief

Potential to Thrive

Self-Tracking

Self-Reporting

Substance Management 

Imminent Risk

Duty to Warn

Divorce and Suicidality

Career Loss

Acceptance of Institutionalization 

Reality of Public Danger with Current System Gaps

Importance of Sleep

Recognizing Dissociation

Building Support Networks

Sexual Dysfunction in Relationships

Hallucinations and Trauma in Relationships

Committing to an Addict

How to Spot a Crazy Bitch for the Single

How to Spot a Killer for the Single

Head Injury and Sports

Brain Trauma

How to Help When Someone is Grieving

Surviving Homicide

Dangers of AA and Anonymous Recovery

Reality of Homelessness

Coping w Anxiety

Meditation

Mindfulness

Time Management 

Recognizing Psychosis

Raising Mentally Ill Child

Parenting with a Mental Illness

Non-Custodial Guilt

Your Kids Still Love You

Hope for Spirited Kids

Afraid of Dying

When You Are Scared to Lose Someone

Insecurity, Stalking Obsession

Borderline Personality Disorder

Generation Grandparenting

Child Protective Services in Reality

Recovery From Brain Trauma

Recovery From Trauma

Psych Meds

Choosing to Medicate

To the Veterans

To the Placement Kids

To the Trainwrecks

To the Borderline

To the Petty

Chronic Trauma and Stress

Inpatient Criteria

Outpatient Criteria 

Self-Regulating

Survivor’s Guilt

Waiting Life on the Docket

He’s Not Going to Change

Repurposing Yourself

Dissonance Identification

Dissociative Identity Disorder

How to Do It Anyway

Gratitude

Spirituality 

Considerations for Open Carry

Considerations in Consenting to Treat

How Doctors Get People Killed

Utilization Review

Stop Blaming Teachers

Active Shooter Training

Fight Flight Freeze

Accepting Setbacks

Choosing Progress

You Are Different, We Are All the Same

Why You Can’t Find Help

Why You Don’t Want Help

intuition v propaganda

Paranoia in Technical Society

Illnesses That Trigger Mental Health Episodes

Letting Go of the Chronically Ill

Caregiver Guilt

Chronic Circumstance

Finding Hope, Finding Proof

Community v Isolation

How to Make Friends 

How to Stop Hating Your Body

Saying No

Stop Ruminating

Reducing Insecurity

Cognitive Repair

Fear of Commitment

Love Doesn’t Feel Like Fire

Choosing to be a Better Partner

Recognizing Love

Accepting Singlehood

Hormones and Mental Health

How Long is 2 weeks

How Long is 3 weeks

What can I do helplessness?

How Can I Help

Hospital Trifecta: Relationships, Drugs. and System Gaps

Waiting in Crisis

How to Follow Up

Coping with Side Effects

Pros and Cons of Marijuana Management

Grief Cycle Checklist

It’s Okay to Quit

Don’t Quit You’ll Die in America

Hypersexuality

Hypervigilance

Intrusive Thoughts

Letting Go of the Chronically Ill

Tools That I Use