The Life of a Mentally Ill Musician- Day 1

Beginnings of a blog about my mental health and career! 😀

Hello!

I guess this is the beginning of me hopefully blogging about my life as a musician with mental illness. For a bit of background, I have been diagnosed with both anxiety and depression and struggle on a daily basis with it. Of course, I know I’m not alone with this battle in my brain, but I feel like within the music community, it’s still a bit taboo to talk about. So many musicians struggle with mental health, but no one really talks about it. This can be super isolating, speaking from experience. It’s like I’m the only one struggling to do basic things, let alone practice for a few hours. I can recall all the way back to kindergarten struggling with anxiety, and depression hit hard in high school. Neither have left me alone since. Both continued to fluctuate during my undergrad and are doing the same now that I’m getting my masters- though I have started taking my mental health as more of a priority, beginning medications and now this.

The idea of starting this blog came a few weeks ago, after speaking with my professor. A suggestion she had was doing some sort of journaling to help me see my progress and help with my mental health as well as help me to give myself some grace. This is also something I’ve done in the past while going to therapy that helped. But I started thinking and thought instead of just journaling and helping myself, I could try blogging it- putting my thoughts and feelings out into the world. This way maybe I’ll help other musicians like me out there and create some sort of supportive community. Now, the idea of sharing my feelings to the world is absolutely terrifying- especially because I DESPISE talking about my feelings with other people. But if it can help at least one other person out there, I think it’ll be worth it. Plus, writing my feelings is a lot less scary than talking in person about them.

So, I don’t really know exactly where this is going to go. It’ll basically be an online journal for me, though I’ll probably not think about the fact other people may read this. It’ll be my life, wholly. I’m a wordy person when it comes to writing- so I guess prepare for that, there will probably be lots to read. I don’t know how much I’ll share, but I’ll try to be open for all of us, truly sharing when I’m struggling. It’s probably bad timing to start this now, as I have a whole like 3 weeks left of school, then break. But maybe it’s a good thing and this will motivate me to actually practice over a break lol. For some reason, my goal is to blog daily, but I know that’s definitely not always going to happen, but I’ll try my best.

I guess I should put an actual introduction on here for those that don’t know me. I’m Juniper, a 22 year old musician currently in school to get my masters in music performance. I did my undergrad at Western Kentucky University, which I enjoyed and am now farther from home attending West Virginia University. For the next few weeks, I’ll still also be a graduate teaching assistant for the biology department, though I wasn’t re-hired so that portion of my life will come to a pause. On a happier note, not having the assistantship will likely give me more time for other things. I began playing flute in middle school and now am also beginning to compose pieces. Since this is a blog of my life, I’ll likely talk about my other interests, whether that be my dog, Piper, doing something stupid, or my favorite k-pop group coming out with a new song. And of course, you’ll get to read all about my daily struggle with my mental health.

Let’s go!