Don't expect many typos.
Even though I founded the most popular proofreading blog on the planet, I will be breaking a lot more than just grammar rules here.
Dear fellow counterculturalist,
Welcome to my first post on Substack!
I have written so many words and so often I've spent so much time thinking about writing before I start writing, only to write 20,000 words in a weekend, obsess over it and then…
… put it aside indefinitely.
I used to be a freelance proofreader, and I've taught thousands of people how to become freelance proofreaders, too. Writing a blog on a proofreading website burned me out.
Instead of just writing and sharing, I censored myself to keep other people comfortable. I didn't say what I wanted out of fear. I obsessively read and reread my words to make sure they flowed elegantly and in a way that would resonate with lots of people.
But I forgot that if I resonate with myself, then even if I don't resonate with the most people, I'll resonate with the best people — the people who get it, the people who've been there, too, and the people who are there now.
I'm excited to start writing again. Don't expect many typos (for obvious reasons), but don't expect perfection either. These are my real thoughts, uncensored and untamed and wild (do those three words mean different things?). Grammar is a human construct we've collectively agreed upon… but that doesn't mean my thoughts have to fit into that construct.
My thoughts know no bounds.
Thoughts are magic. A thought is the root of everything. If you don't believe that, you're probably mentally ill 😅
And mental illness is another human construct that I refuse to shrink myself into.
A few years ago, I almost lost my life to Western “mental healthcare,” aka the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex.
Many people don't know that “mental health,” as told by psychiatry, isn't fact, it's theory. Nothing about psychiatry — which means soul healing — helps the soul, nor is it based on hard science. Psychiatry is based purely on beliefs, interpretations, assumptions, and subjective, often pharma-funded opinions disguised as “science” in medical journals. Yet people believe it’s legit because they've been so heavily brainwashed by pharma companies with multibillion-dollar marketing budgets to believe anything that comes out of the mouths of somebody wearing a collared white coat with their name stitched into it.
If you believe you're mentally ill, you're much more likely to suffer more intense symptoms, which consequently makes you more likely to need drugs and other “treatments.”
A lot of work goes into convincing us we're mentally ill, and it's become so normal that people don't even question it.
More people are mentally ill now than ever before, so how advanced is our medical care, really? Or are we just marketed to so incredibly well that we simply believe it's advanced and effective?
Western psychiatric medicine likes to pretend that everything else that isn't them is invalid quackery, but they're the real quacks.
This horrifying mental “health” system that thrives on ignorance about the real causes of the symptoms they’ve so cleverly labeled “mental illness.”
They’re the real quacks.
Imagine that.
And what do these modern quacks do?
They sell pills made of synthetic chemicals and advertise symptoms on TV to convince us we're sick so we call our local drug dealers (aka doctors) to get on a subscription to a transparent orange bottle of toxin-laden, petroleum-based pharmaceuticals that never heal but only make more parts of our bodies sicker.
They program us to believe doctors are the only people qualified to talk about mental illness with any authority… so we don't listen to people who've experienced the symptoms and recovered (such people must be lying, crazy, or mistaken if they've healed from an illness that Big Pharma’s scientists assert there's no cure for)!
They silence people who try to tell the truth: that it is possible to recover from mental illnesses — without pharmaceuticals.
This isn’t medical advice. This isn’t misinformation.
It’s just a fact.
People recover from diagnosed mental “disorders” all the time, but psychiatry doesn’t talk about it. Medical schools don’t teach about it. Mental hospitals don’t tell their patients.
Because they all stand to lose a ton of money when people find out the truth about mental illness.
National organizations like NIMH and NAMI don’t talk about it. Because those organizations are controlled and/or funded by pharmaceutical companies who
That’s why psychiatry is such a fraud.
I know this because I was diagnosed with seven different “mental disorders” by half a dozen “psychiatrists” — not one of them who could tell me why I was experiencing the symptoms.
It wasn’t until I crossed paths with Daniel Amen, M.D. and the Medical Medium information that I really got it.
Mental illness symptoms are caused by physical things.
Environment
Food
Toxic relationships
And brain damage due to all of the above.
It’s possible to recover fully from mental illness because the brain can heal.
Didn’t know that? Neither did I, at first, and neither do the vast majority of the people I’m hoping will find this publication one day when they’re searching desperately for answers on how to cure X, Y, Z lifelong mental disorder they’ve been told was lying dormant in their body as if it’s some kind of insidious virus that hides out and attacks unexpectedly.
My symptoms were normal for what I was going through at the time. My marriage was falling apart but I was so relieved when he finally asked for a divorce I almost lost my marbles.
So much pent-up emotion from years of people-pleasing and self-abandonment.
Why wouldn’t it explode? It’s so exhausting to perform all the time, but it can be so automatic that you don’t realize you’re doing it — so you don’t know any other way to live.
You don’t know what you don’t know.
But there was always this undercurrent of blah. This low hum of Is this all there is?
I didn’t feel “real” — not in a derealization kind of way, but an inauthentic kind of way. I’d spent more time trying to be what other people (parents, teachers, friends, etc.) expected me to be than I spent really figuring out who I am… and being that.
I tried to do both at the same time a lot. Like the time in college when I was part of an evangelical church group of other 20-somethings who were heavy into “purity culture” and tying a woman’s worth to her sexual history but then I also went to Germany for two semesters as an exchange student and fell in love with a cute Russian guy who was into robots. I felt so much unnecessary guilt and shame instead of just being in love and living in freedom that I swear it’s the reason I started sprouting gray hairs that same year.
It’s stressful to pretend you’re someone you’re not just because you’re afraid of what the people who think they know you will think about what you have to say if you’re really honest.
Fuck what they think.
(Not the same as “fuck them,” by the way… I’m just saying fuck what they THINK.)
I don't need to be afraid anymore. I was only ever afraid of uncomfortable emotions (mine or somebody else’s). Nobody who truly cares about me, sees me for who I am and knows my heart will reject me for saying the things I'll be saying here.
I want to write like I used to write on my teen open diary, live journal, and xanga pages. Like I wrote on my blogspot when I lived in Germany as a college student (but not as sexually repressed).
My life has changed so much since then, and I've learned so much. So, in a way, I'm writing something that young women in 2007 desperately needed to read. Something she didn't know but that would've helped her a lot in overcoming her fear of living her life the way she wanted to.
I've learned that the world doesn't happen to me; it happens for me. There's a way to be so much more free than we’ve been taught to believe.
Free is a fantastic way to live — knowing you're not here to impress anybody, entertain anyone, or satisfy anyone else's demands. You can live your life exactly the way you want to. Don't say “But that takes money” like you’re some kind of victim.
We choose to be victims of “not enough money.”
If you’re reading this, you can make more money. I taught people how to do it for years. There is always a way for you to make money. Money has no power without you. You are the power.
When you stop thinking money is power and start thinking you have power, you'll see how simple it is to change anything you want in your life.
Thoughts create reality. With high-quality thinking, you become more open to receiving the solutions you need, more money, new relationships, wisdom and ideas — instead of spending so much energy fearing that what you need isn’t out there waiting for you to be able to see it.
Thoughts create reality.
And that truth might not be recognized as “scientific” yet… but it’s still more scientific than psychiatry.
See you next time,
Cait
P.S. — I have several free resources on my website, SelfTransformation.com — if you click on “Start Here,” you can even get two ebooks I wrote about mental illness for free :)
P.P.S — Thank you to my friend Kristina for the inspiration and encouragement to get me to start writing here :)
I LOVE YOU!!! Welcome to Substack 🚐🚐🚐