soaring-beyond-the-diagnosis

What We Owe The People We Love

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:15:06 GMT

Cynthia Mobley Howell | Success, Growth & Mindset

You know somebody who's carrying something heavy right now. A brother, a cousin, a coworker, maybe even you. And most of us have no idea what to actually do when we see it — so we don't do anything, and we call that being respectful of their privacy. It isn't. It's fear wearing a polite outfit.

Identify. Don't deny. Act.

Three steps, and every one of them matters. Identify means paying attention when someone starts acting out of character — sleeping way too much or barely at all, withdrawing from people they used to be close to, eating in a way that doesn't look like them. We all have off days. This is different, and lingering, and it's information, not something to wait out.

Don't deny is exactly what it sounds like. Stop looking away because acknowledging it feels too real, too scary, too much like admitting something is actually wrong. Plenty of families have learned the hard way that silence never protected anyone. It just delayed the help that should have come sooner.

Act promptly means getting that person real support instead of hoping it resolves on its own. NAMI — the National Alliance on Mental Illness — is a solid place to start, with plain-language resources for families who have no idea where to begin.

And if it's a crisis, the number is 988. Not 911.

Write this down somewhere. Calling 911 sends law enforcement, and officers aren't trained the way a mental health professional is trained — we've all heard too many stories of a mental health crisis ending in tragedy because the wrong kind of responder showed up. Calling 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, connects you straight to someone equipped to help a person through exactly that moment. You may never need it. But if you do, it changes everything about how the moment unfolds.

Now let's talk about the couch.

There's a story that made me laugh and wince at the same time — a woman who got so bottom-heavy, in her own words, that her husband had to physically boost her up off the sofa. Not the forklift, she'd clarify, just him. And there's nothing wrong with a little junk in the trunk, she'd tell you. Her trunk was just a little overloaded, and she knew it, and she was honest enough to laugh about it instead of hiding from it.

Before she found her way out, she tried everything. Running miles a day. Cutting fish, then cutting more. A church fast that was supposed to be about drawing closer to God and, if she's honest, she was hoping it would drop a few pounds too — forty days, zero pounds lost. A husband who'd come home at midnight with chicken wings insisting she eat, even when she wasn't hungry, and her sitting up in bed at midnight eating anyway. None of it worked, because none of it came from a clear place yet.

Then life forced her hand. A separation. A move back to her hometown. A hurricane that displaced her all over again. And somewhere in the middle of starting over — completely over — she made one real decision: no more animal products, no more byproducts, walking two and a half miles a day. Within a week, the weight started moving. Seventy pounds later, years maintained, and she'll tell you she hasn't taken a vitamin or a pill since. She was exposed to COVID directly for days, living with someone who had it, and never caught it.

The lesson isn't her specific diet. It's that nothing she tried before actually stuck, no matter how disciplined she was about it, until the decision came from clarity instead of frustration. That's the part worth remembering — not the meal plan, the mindset shift underneath it.

Journaling isn't about writing something pretty. It's about getting it out.

If you've been curious about journaling but worried you're doing it wrong, here's the freedom in it: there is no wrong way. Say what you actually feel. Curse if you need to — that's between you and God. Write the thing you couldn't say to a therapist, a friend, or even yourself out loud. The page holds what your voice can't, and there's real relief in getting it out of your body and onto paper instead of carrying it silently.

The same goes for sitting with a hard feeling instead of running from it. Denial doesn't make anything disappear. It just delays the moment you eventually have to face it anyway — usually with less grace than if you'd faced it the first time. Feel it all the way through. Then keep moving.

Be who you are. Full stop.

There's a kind of elevation that has nothing to do with a title or an income bracket. It's knowing exactly who you are and being at peace walking around as that person, out loud, without editing yourself down to make somebody else comfortable. Pair that with staying open — don't count people out too fast, don't close a door just because the opportunity didn't arrive wrapped the way you expected. You never know who's going to be the one who moves you exactly where you're supposed to go next.

And when it's all said and done, let the legacy be joy.

Not the polite kind people perform once you're gone — the "God rest their soul" said out of obligation instead of truth. The real thing. Someone remembered as encouraging, motivating, full of vigor, someone who loved God and loved people, whose name still makes people smile years later. That's worth building toward every single day you're still here to build it.

We're Losing The Humanity Behind The Numbers

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:15:00 GMT

Chat with Christy Venable.

Layoff numbers, benefit cuts, restructuring announcements — they land on a screen looking clean and clinical, like spreadsheet math. But every single figure in that math is a person who woke up this morning with a mortgage, a family, a sense of who they were built around a job that might not be there tomorrow. Somewhere between the headline and the human, something essential keeps getting lost.

The workplace has always shaped mental health. We just never treated it that way.

Adults spend most of their waking hours at work, the same way kids spend most of theirs at school. And yet for years, the entire mental health strategy inside most workplaces amounted to one thing: a number to call if you're struggling, quietly tucked into a benefits packet nobody reads until they're desperate. No real prevention. No real conversation about anxiety or depression, even though those two conditions touch the overwhelming majority of people at some point. Just a hotline and the unspoken expectation that you'd fix yourself quietly and come back functional.

Toxic workplaces don't just affect the person clocking in. They ripple through everyone connected to them.

A stressed, unsupported employee doesn't leave that stress at the office door. It comes home. It shapes how they parent, how present they are, how much capacity they have left for anyone who needs them. When a workplace grinds someone down, the damage doesn't stay contained to business hours — it spreads into every relationship that person is responsible for holding together.

Forward-thinking isn't a buzzword. It's the difference between scrambling and being ready.

The organizations that weathered sudden, massive shifts well weren't the ones reacting in real time — they were the ones who'd already quietly built the infrastructure before anyone forced their hand. Telehealth capability in place before a pandemic made it mandatory. Wellness support built out before burnout became an undeniable crisis everyone was finally forced to name. Being ahead of the curve isn't about predicting the future perfectly. It's about taking the need seriously before the emergency makes it impossible to ignore.

Right now, real people are losing more than paychecks.

When someone loses a job, especially in a wave of layoffs affecting an entire agency or industry at once, they're not just losing income. They're losing benefits, structure, community, a piece of their identity that had nothing to do with a title and everything to do with purpose. And the mental health toll of that loss is not abstract — it is already showing up in the most devastating ways possible, in real families, in real workplaces, right now.

"We see you" has to be more than a phrase. It has to be a practice.

Real support doesn't look like a passive statement of solidarity. It looks like intentional, ongoing action — safe spaces built specifically for the people going through it, education pushed out consistently instead of once and forgotten, someone showing up in the community every month instead of disappearing after the initial headline fades. People experiencing this kind of loss need somewhere to actually land, not just somewhere to be acknowledged.

Self-care isn't a luxury reserved for people who have their lives fully together.

Whether you're actively job hunting, freshly laid off, or just trying to hold everything steady while everything around you shifts, taking care of yourself isn't the thing you get to once the crisis passes. It's the thing that determines whether you have anything left to offer once it does.

And underneath all of it is one simple, urgent truth:

Every statistic is a person. Every layoff number is someone's whole life quietly rearranging itself overnight. If workplaces, communities, and the people around them don't start treating mental health as essential instead of optional, the cost of that oversight will keep showing up in ways far more devastating than a number on a spreadsheet ever could.

Don't Let Your Past Paralyze Your Future

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:15:00 GMT

Chat with Anita Helm

Somebody smart once said the past makes a decent teacher but a terrible landlord. Most of us don't have trouble learning from what happened. We have trouble evicting it once the lesson's been learned.

Being book-smart doesn't protect you from being fooled.

There's a particular kind of shame that comes from realizing you were tricked — not because you're careless, but because you're intelligent, and somewhere along the way you assumed intelligence made you immune. It doesn't. Some of the sharpest, most capable people get caught by wolves in sheep's clothing precisely because they were too confident to imagine they could be. Vulnerability isn't a character flaw. It's just what happens when confidence and inexperience share the same room.

The insecurities you thought you buried in your twenties can still show up decades later.

There's something honest and a little unsettling about realizing that the same fears that plagued you at nineteen — am I likeable, am I too much, am I not enough — can quietly resurface even after years of growth, even after you thought you'd outgrown them completely. That doesn't mean the growth wasn't real. It means healing isn't a locked door. It's a door you sometimes have to walk back through and shut again, more than once, for the rest of your life.

Your mess, told honestly, becomes someone else's map.

There's real power in writing down the parts of your story you never planned on telling anyone — not the polished version, the actual version, including the mistakes you're not proud of. Doing that doesn't just process your own history. It hands the next woman coming up behind you a map through territory she doesn't have to walk blind. That's not oversharing. That's stewardship of your own story on behalf of someone who needs it.

Grief and purpose can share the same room, even when neither one is finished.

Sometimes the most meaningful work gets built in the middle of loss, not after it's resolved. Two people, both grieving, coming together to finish something because someone they loved believed it mattered — that's not waiting for the pain to end before doing something worthwhile with it. It's letting the work and the grief move forward together, neither one canceling out the other.

"I can't" is a mindset, not a fact.

There's a specific trap that shows up disguised as humility: I'm not smart enough, I don't have the resources, I can't do this. But not knowing how to do something and being incapable of learning it are two entirely different situations. The people who build things worth building usually aren't the ones who knew everything going in — they're the ones who said "I have to learn this" instead of "I can't," found the tutorial, called the person who'd done it before, and figured it out in motion instead of waiting to arrive already qualified.

Your rearview mirror exists for a reason. It's just not supposed to be bigger than your windshield.

Looking back has its place — that's where the lessons live. But if you spend more time studying what already happened than paying attention to where you're actually headed, you'll drive straight into the same wall twice. Glance back to learn. Then look forward, because forward is where you're actually going.

And if you ever get another chance at what once left you insecure, don't hand it the same power it had the first time.

Whatever version of you got hurt, fooled, or overlooked once doesn't get to run the show on your second, third, or fortieth attempt at something. You're allowed to notice the same old fear creeping back in and refuse to let it drive.

So here's the whole idea, boiled down:

Don't let your past paralyze your future. Learn everything it has to teach you, and then keep moving, because the story isn't finished, and neither are you.

You Can't Be Late Until You're Dead: Claiming Your Seat At The Table

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:58:59 GMT

Marisa Dickson: Triple E Podcast Exclusive Conversation

Girl, can we talk for a minute?

Because I had a conversation recently that would not leave me alone. It was about the difference between getting in the room and actually sitting down at the table like you belong there. And the more I sat with it, the more I realized how many of us are still standing near the door, arms crossed, waiting for permission we already have.

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're chasing that next promotion, that next certification, that next title. Getting in the room is one skill. Staying fulfilled once you're there is a completely different one. You can kill the interview, land the job, do the work well, and still feel like something in you is starving. That's not a flaw in you. That's information. Your soul is telling you that a paycheck and a purpose are not always the same thing, and it's okay to notice the gap.

So what do you do when you're the one collecting the check but your spirit is checked out?

You start with the soft skills you already have and you take them with you everywhere you go. The way you manage people, the way you understand how things work, the way you show up under pressure, none of that stays behind when you leave a job. It's yours. It travels with you. And sometimes it's exactly what carries you into the thing you were actually built for.

Sometimes the transition isn't gradual. Sometimes it's a push.

Not everybody gets a slow, comfortable runway into their purpose. Some of us get pushed. A door closes. A season ends. Grief shows up uninvited and rearranges the whole house. And in the middle of that mess, you're still expected to show up, make decisions, take care of people who are counting on you.

If that's you right now, hear this: you do not have to choose between grieving and growing. You can do both. Put first things first. Protect a little piece of your morning before the world gets its hands on you — even fifteen minutes of quiet, prayer, music, whatever settles your spirit. Let yourself cry when it shows up. Let yourself write when you need to get it out of your head. And then get up and do the next right thing anyway. That's not being strong by pretending you're fine. That's being strong because you're honest about what you need and you give it to yourself instead of waiting for someone else to.

Expansion looks like community, not independence.

Here's a truth a lot of us resist: you were never meant to build alone. Iron sharpens iron, and that only works when you're actually around people sharp enough to sharpen you. Look at your circle honestly. Who in there is a butter knife, and who's a steak knife? You need more of the second kind — people who are growing, who show up, who make you better just by being in proximity to them.

And to the woman who thinks she's too late.

You're not dead. That's it. That's the whole answer. You can't be late until you're dead.

Your mind will hand you a hundred reasons why now isn't the time, why you don't know how, why everyone else got there first. None of that is truth. It's your subconscious trying to protect you from the pain of trying and not succeeding — but the real pain was never in trying. The real pain is in never trying at all.

So counter it. Every time a limiting thought shows up, meet it with two true ones. Stand in the mirror if you have to and say it out loud: I'm accomplished. I'm capable. I'm surrounded by the right people, or I'm about to be. Ask for them. Pray for them. Look for them. And when you feel yourself spinning into doubt, notice it in your body — because it does show up there — and choose differently on purpose.

Give yourself grace before you go looking for it anywhere else. Do the work. Take the next step. And trust that when you move toward what you want, what you want has a way of moving toward you too.

Elevate. Expand. Explore. You've got this.