Mental Health Awareness Month
I am writing this from the healed side. But I have not forgotten what it felt like to be on the other side of it...
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. And every year when it comes around, I have a choice: I can share something safe and general, or I can share something true. This year, I am choosing true. Because somewhere out there is a girl who is living in the middle of what I have already walked through, and if there is any chance that my story helps her feel less alone in hers, then this is worth every vulnerable word.
"Healing is not a highlight. It is a quiet, daily, sometimes brutal choice to keep coming back to yourself."
The years that were harder than I let on
I was bullied. Not in the subtle, easy-to-dismiss way that gets minimized when you try to name it to an adult. In the kind of way that gets inside your head and takes up permanent residence. The kind that makes you walk into a room and immediately scan. The kind that teaches you, very young, that you are something to be commented on, evaluated, measured, found wanting.
Words were said about my body. About how I looked. About whether I was enough. Thin enough, pretty enough, worthy enough of taking up the space I was standing in. And I was young enough and unguarded enough that those words found the deepest parts of me and planted themselves there like seeds I did not ask for and could not stop from growing.
Comparative thinking became the air I breathed. I could not look at another girl without measuring myself against her and I never came out ahead in my own mind. I could not eat a meal without a running commentary in my head that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the lies I had been told and had started telling myself. My relationship with food, with my body, with the mirror became something I am not fully proud to describe, but something I am no longer ashamed to name. I was struggling. Deeply. And for a long time, I did it alone and in silence.
The voices of the people who bullied me had become the loudest voice in my own head. And I had stopped being able to tell the difference between their words and my own thoughts. That is what untreated pain does. It blurs the line between what was done to you and what you start doing to yourself.
I want to pause here and say something to anyone reading this who recognizes that feeling: that is not your voice. Those thoughts were handed to you by someone else's cruelty, someone else's insecurity, someone else's need to make you small. They were never yours. And you do not have to keep carrying them.
"I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well."
The Turning Point:
How healing actually happened — gradually, then all at once
There was no single dramatic moment where everything changed. That is not how healing works, at least not in my experience. What happened instead was slower and, I think, more lasting. It was a combination of things, building on each other over time, until one day I looked up and realized the loudest voice in my head was finally mine.
Faith. Community. Time. All three.
Faith came first — or rather, faith came deeper. I had always believed. But there is a difference between believing in Jesus and actually letting Him into the broken rooms. At some point in the middle of my hardest seasons, I stopped trying to hold everything together on my own and started laying it down. Not all at once. Slowly. Piece by piece. The fear that I was not enough. The comparison. The way my body had become a problem to solve rather than a home to live in. I brought all of it to prayer, not to get neat answers, but to stop being alone with it. And something shifted. Slowly, it shifted.
Then came the people. The ones who spoke truth into me when I could not speak it to myself. The church community that held me in the seasons I did not have words for. The women who looked me in the eye and said: I see something in you that you cannot see yet. Keep going. Those voices: patient, consistent, grounded in love, began to compete with the ones that had been living in my head for years. And over time, the true voices got louder. The lies got quieter.
And then there was time. Healing required time and I had to stop being frustrated by that. Growth does not happen on a deadline. You cannot rush the process of learning to love the body you live in, learning to trust your own thoughts again, learning to walk into a room and feel like you belong there. It takes as long as it takes. And it is worth every slow, unglamorous, uninstagrammable day of it.
Writing from the other side
I am healed. I say that with full confidence and deep gratitude, not because the journey was easy, but because it is finished in a way I once genuinely could not imagine. The comparative thinking that used to own every single thought? It does not live here anymore. The relationship with my body that was once so painful? It is one of peace now. I live in this body like it is home, because it is, and because I finally believe that.
I stand on a pageant stage and feel genuinely comfortable in my own skin. I walk into a boardroom and do not spend one second measuring myself against the other people in the room. I look in the mirror and I am kind to the woman looking back. That is not a small thing. That is the result of years of choosing truth over the lies, faith over fear, and healing over the performance of being fine.
And I want to be careful here, because I know that some people reading this are not on the other side yet. Some of you are in the middle of it. Some of you are in the thick of the silence and the comparison and the pain that does not have a clean name yet. I see you. I was you. And I need you to know that where you are right now is not where the story ends.
"The voice that told you that you were not enough was never telling you the truth. It was only ever telling you its own damage."
Tips for the journey — from someone who has lived it
🙏 Let faith into the broken rooms, not just the presentable ones.
It is easy to bring your gratitude to God and keep your shame hidden. Real healing started for me when I stopped curating what I brought to prayer and started bringing the actual mess. The obsessive thoughts. The self-criticism. The moments I could not explain. Lay it down — not because it will instantly disappear, but because you were not designed to carry it alone.
🗣️ Tell someone. One person. That is all it takes to start.
Shame thrives in silence. The moment I named what I was struggling with to one person who was safe, not to fix it, just to witness it, something in me exhaled for the first time in years. You do not need to announce it to the world. You need one person who will hold it with you without flinching. Find that person. If you do not have one, that is the first thing worth praying for.
📵 Audit what you are consuming — especially online.
Comparative thinking does not heal in an environment that feeds comparison. I had to be very intentional about what I allowed into my eyes and my mind, whose content I followed, how much time I spent scrolling, what conversations I was walking away from feeling worse about myself. You have more control over your mental diet than you think. Use it.
📖 Replace the lies with something true — specifically and repeatedly.
The lies that took root in my mind during those years did not leave just because I wanted them to. They left because I replaced them, actively, intentionally, over and over again, with truth. Scripture. Words spoken over me by people I trusted. Reminders of who God says I am. Write them down. Put them where you will see them. Say them out loud even when they do not feel true yet. Especially then.
🤝 Find the people who make you more yourself and stay close to them.
Community saved me. Not community in the abstract, specific people with specific voices who spoke truth into me when I had lost access to my own. Protect those relationships. Invest in them. Show up for those people the way they show up for you. And if you do not have them yet, ask God for them. I have never prayed that prayer without it being answered.
🌿 Give yourself the grace you would give anyone else.
You would never speak to someone you love the way you speak to yourself on a hard day. You would never hold a friend to the impossible standard you hold yourself to. The healing starts when the compassion you extend outward finally turns inward. You are not a project to be fixed. You are a person to be loved, by God, by the people around you, and by yourself. Start practicing that last one.
"She is clothed with strength and dignity, and she laughs without fear of the future."
If you made it to the end of this, thank you for reading. I hope it found you at the right moment. I hope it gave something a name that needed naming. I hope it reminded you, even gently, that the story you are living right now is not finished and the next chapter can look completely different from this one.
I am living proof of that. The girl who could not look in the mirror without hearing someone else's cruel words, she is gone. The woman who replaced her is grounded, whole, anchored in something that does not move. And she got here through faith, through the people who refused to let her go, through time, and through the quiet daily choice to keep coming back to truth.
You can get here too. I promise you that.
"God did not design you to live in a war with yourself. He designed you for wholeness. Keep walking toward it."
With love, with honesty, and with hope
Taylor, Miss Mount Holly 2026
