I Thought I Was Fine. Turns Out I Was Just Really Good at Managing.

 

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. I've been thinking about whether to share this for a while. And I finally decided yes. Because if this helps even one person, it was worth saying out loud.

Here's the thing. I am genuinely a happy person. I always have been. I love my life, my family, my team, this brand. I wake up excited most days.

But there was always this friction underneath it.

Situations I quietly avoided. Opportunities I couldn't act on. Decisions I delayed. Conversations I dreaded, even when I knew they needed to happen.

I just thought that was normal. I thought everyone felt that way.

 

When My Body Finally Got My Attention

The weight had been creeping on for six or seven years. Slowly, quietly. Same with the sleep. Nothing dramatic. Just never quite right. I had normalized all of it so thoroughly that I didn't even have words for how tired I was.

And then, within weeks of each other, I tore my ACL and had a hysterectomy to remove a potentially cancerous mass. The hysterectomy had the best possible outcome. Cancer-free. I am so grateful for that.

But the back-to-back surgeries did something to me I wasn't prepared for.

I felt really down. My motivation was gone. I literally just wanted to stay in bed, long past when I needed to. That wasn't like me at all. I'm a go, go, go person. I didn't recognize myself.

I was in my mid-forties and I thought: is this just what this is now? Is this what getting older feels like?

I felt like my body was failing me. But honestly? I had been failing it. I had been running on empty for years and calling it fine.

 

The Appointment That Changed Everything

I found a provider who gave me a whole hour.

She wasn't trying to diagnose a problem. She wasn't rushing me out the door with a referral. She sat with me and asked how I was actually feeling. What my days looked like. How I was sleeping. What was hard.

We talked about how low I had been feeling since the surgeries. I was honest in a way I hadn't been before. Not because I was hiding anything, but because no one had really asked. Not like that. Not a medical provider who had an hour and actually meant it.

We discovered my hormones were out of balance. I was estrogen-heavy and needed progesterone. I cannot overstate what that did for my sleep. I had spent years lying awake, mind racing, waking up at 3am and just getting straight to work because I couldn't fall back asleep. Within weeks of getting that balanced, I could fall asleep. And I could stay asleep.

If you have never experienced that shift after years of broken sleep, I don't know how to explain it except to say it felt like getting a part of myself back.

She also suggested I try an SSRI. I want to be honest about this because there is still so much stigma around it, and I think that stigma keeps a lot of women suffering longer than they need to. I had never taken anything like it in my life. I thought I would take it for a little while to get through the low I was feeling after a really hard year, and then I'd be done. That was honestly how I justified it in my head, because I felt some kind of shame about it, like I was somehow failing.

That was two years ago. And I fully expected to get off it once I felt better. Once the low from the surgeries lifted, I figured I'd be done.

That's not what happened.

What happened was quieter than I expected. It didn't change my personality. It didn't make me feel different in some dramatic way. It just reduced the friction. The post-surgery low lifted, like I thought it would. But then something else started to lift too. Something I hadn't even known was there.

My anxiety started to fall away.

And here's the thing. I didn't know I had anxiety. Not in any way I would have called it that. I just thought that was who I was. How I managed things. There were plenty of situations that were hard for me, and I had just accepted that as my personality. The sleeplessness, the waking up at 3am with my mind already going, the things I avoided, the energy it cost me to show up in certain situations. I thought that was just life. I thought everyone felt that way.

It wasn't until it started to fall away that I realized it had been there at all.

And once I could see it clearly, I could see the whole picture. The anxiety and the sleep issues and the hormone imbalance were all tangled together. Perimenopause had probably been playing a role for years. None of it had ever felt severe enough to bring up with a doctor. None of it had ever felt like it warranted a conversation. I was functioning. I was happy. I was fine.

I just didn't know how much easier it could be.

My family has a history of this. I can see that now looking back. I just didn't have the language for what I was carrying because I had never known anything else. What started as getting through a hard year turned into something I didn't go looking for and couldn't imagine going back from.

 

The Brain That Never Stops

Nobody has ever handed me a formal ADHD diagnosis. But everyone who knows me has smiled and nodded when the subject comes up.

My brain does not stop. It never has. I have ideas in the shower. I have ideas on walks. I jump between topics in meetings. I can have fifty things going at once and somehow keep track of most of them. It's absurd how many tabs I have open at any given moment. I like to move fast. Sometimes that's good. Sometimes it's not.

For most of my life, I managed around this. I built systems. I hired people who could hold the details I would drop. I apologized for the jumping around. I made it work.

What I didn't have was a system that could actually keep up with the way my brain moves.

And then two things happened within a few months of each other that I didn't see coming.

My provider and I made another adjustment. A second medication, added for one reason, that turned out to help with something else entirely. And I felt the shift immediately. The kind of shift where you think: oh. So this is what it feels like when your brain is not working against you. Turns out it also helps with ADHD. I didn't go looking for that. It just showed up.

And around the same time, I started really learning how to use AI.

I don't mean using it to generate generic content. I mean using it the way my brain actually works. Jumping in, picking up a thread, going somewhere else, coming back. AI doesn't get confused when I change direction. It doesn't lose context. It holds everything and meets me wherever I am when I'm ready to return.

For the first time in my life, I have a system that moves as fast as I do. I cannot fully explain how much that has changed what I'm able to build.

 

 

 

What's Different Now

I want to give you the specifics. Because that's what I needed to hear when I was in it.

I used to avoid public speaking. Not just prefer to avoid it. Truly avoid it, at all costs. I had said no my whole life, going all the way back to high school presentations. I found every reason not to put myself in front of a room. I couldn't even get up and say two sentences at my own sister's wedding. I just couldn't.

This year, I walked into my son's middle school and gave a Career Day talk to a room full of eighth graders. And I loved it. I could not have done that before.

I've been going to networking events where you stand up and introduce yourself to a room full of strangers. It doesn't phase me anymore. I actually want to keep talking.

I'm going live on Whatnot. I'm showing up on camera. I'm having the hard conversations at work instead of circling around them.

We have regular team meetings now. That sounds small. It is not small. The structure that used to make my anxiety close in on me now feels like momentum. I genuinely love them.

I don't shy away from uncomfortable situations the way I used to. Not because I got tougher. Because the cost came down. Things that used to take enormous energy now just take normal energy.

TikTok Live is next. We'll see. Lol.

 

 

 

It Was Never Just One Thing

It wasn't one thing. I want to be clear about that.

It was the provider who listened. It was the hormones getting balanced. It was the SSRI I almost didn't take. It was the second medication I didn't expect. It was finally having a system for my brain that could keep up.

And it was movement. Every single day. I can feel it now when I don't move. The difference is physical and it is real. Walks, Pvolve, just getting my body doing something. That is part of the maintenance now in a way it never was before.

It was the podcasts. The meditation. The me time. The small quiet things I finally have time for now that my kids are getting older and I stopped putting myself last on the list.

None of it alone would have done it. All of it together did.

I didn't know I could feel this way. I genuinely did not know this version of myself was available to me.

My only regret is not asking sooner.

 

 

If Something Here Resonated

You don't have to be in crisis to ask for help.

You don't have to be falling apart. You don't have to have a diagnosis or a label. You just have to notice that things are costing more than they should. That you're managing around yourself. That there's friction you've learned to live with that you don't actually have to.

I see my provider at One Medical. My sister is a nurse there, which is how I heard about it. I don't see my sister, but that recommendation was enough for me to try it. What I love is how easy it is. I can text my provider directly. I can see all my lab results in the app, track my trends over time, handle everything in one place. It costs about $100 a year and it has been one of the best things I have done for myself. If you're looking for a starting point and there's a location near you, I have a link at the bottom of this post.

But even if One Medical isn't your path, find the provider who gives you the whole hour. Who asks how you are actually feeling and means it. They exist. It took me longer than it should have to find one. It was worth every minute of looking, even though I wish I hadn't waited so long.

I am a better mother, friend, wife, and founder this year than I have ever been. More present, more willing to take risks, more able to show up fully for the people who matter most to me. I think it is all related.

If it is Mental Health Awareness Month and you have been on the fence about something, consider this your nudge. There is no shame in getting the help you need.

Do it for your future self.

With love, Heather Founder, Tula Blue

 

 

P.S. - If this story resonated, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment or send me a message. You are not alone, and neither am I.

If you want to try One Medical, try it here.

Shop the jewelry I wear every single day, through workouts, hard days, and all the good ones too.