About Jae

My name is Jae, and I believe that mental health is necessary for human health. Much like a recipe for physical health, mental health requires our time, attention, and understanding. And to do that we need information. Information about our basic emotional needs. Information about the emotional relief to fulfill those needs. As well as information about how to address the symptoms that arise when those needs aren’t fulfilled. Just like with our physical needs like food, water, and sleep. 

I started Truth Serum to share the mechanics of my journey to mental health. To shed some light on the information that is helping me change my life and overcome my self-doubt, inner critic, depression, anxiety, insecurities, and more. Truth Serum is about the lessons I’ve learned and observed. Lessons I’m now sharing by laying out the intimate truths that are helping me rewrite my own mind’s script. To serve as a mirror for others to consider the depths of their own truth without feeling wholly alone. As they read or watch with the knowledge that the vulnerability on the page or video is mine and not their own. In hopes of easing the path for others to start shedding the strings that tie them down.

The breakdown

After a life of checking the boxes towards what I thought led to a happy life, i.e. making sacrifices, working hard, going to school, graduating, practicing law, and so on, I had a mental breakdown. A decline in my mental and physical health left me forced to leave my career as a new attorney to start a mental health journey that I did not want or feel prepared for. At that time I felt frustrated and confused. I believed my mental health was fine because for so long I’d gotten by doing the same thing. Whenever I had unwanted feelings I distracted from them, I brushed off difficult thoughts by focusing on work, and even when I wasn’t ok I managed to convince others that I was.

After much therapy, I came to understand what did me in. Avoiding what I felt for so long didn’t mean I had mental health, it meant I lacked it. Regardless of what I’d done, learned, and accomplished in life, that also wasn’t a sign of mental health, I still had to work to obtain it. I had unaddressed emotional needs that had been weighing me down for a really long time. And they were going to continue to do so until I started understanding and addressing them directly. In time and after years of introspective work, I was able to map out the unhealthy psychological infrastructure that led me to crumble and that inevitably changed my life.   

Through Truth Serum I share about that infrastructure and the steps I’ve taken to rebuild a healthier mental framework where the old one succumbed. I share the fruits of my emotional labor because we are not born with mental health, we must learn it, and maintain it.  

Jae’s Truth Serum

Truth Serum is divided intro three parts, Mental Mechanics, Inner Truths, and Endurance Motivation. These parts are my way of sharing how I came to improve my feelings, thoughts, and actions by practicing emotional literacy, that is the capacity to stop and think about what you feel to find why you feel it. When I came to understand why I felt an unwanted feeling and the need driving the feeling, I was able to address both the feeling and fulfill the need. I then used this information to systematically change my feelings, thoughts, and actions. With time, this helped me gain mental health and change my life, where insecurity, self-doubt, and feelings of stress, depression, and anxiety are manageable and no longer derail and burden my every day. 

Mental Mechanics 

Mental Mechanics reflects what feels like the mental math of my journey. It is about the tools I use to become an active participant in my own mind and change the parts of my life that don’t serve me. This encompasses the mental steps, the questions I ask, the patterns, processes, and connections that I’ve observed and use to help me understand my basic emotional needs and how to fulfill them. This also helps me identify and address the deficiencies in those needs that resulted in my inner critic, insecurities, and unhealthy coping mechanisms as well as my symptoms of depression, anxiety, and more. Mental Mechanics functions to help me understand myself by providing a method to listen to myself better. Which for me, has also had the effect of helping me better understand, interact, and listen to others.

Inner Truths 

Inner Truths seeks to facilitate introspection, emotional exploration, and discovery by confronting the parts of my mind that have held me back for so long. Here I spotlight common every day mental events like the inner critic, perfectionism, or the need to be right. Exploring the information that drives them to unearth the needs they represent. It speaks to the truths that are often hard to admit to ourselves. That eclipse our emotional growth until they are acknowledged. Inner truths is about unmasking and shedding the information that holds us back in life. So that we can be free to make different choices and experience feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that are more suitable to the life we want to live. 

Endurance Motivation 

Endurance Motivation works to build emotional endurance. In order to understand why we feel things in our every day life, first we must observe what we feel. In order to do that we have to build our capacity to bear uncomfortable feelings. This is a gradual process, that starts with sitting with our feelings. This includes the feel good feelings but also the ugly, difficult, and unwanted feelings. Endurance Motivation seeks to establish a sense of control by finding familiarity in the hard feelings we often encounter. Easing us into a space of comfort in the uncomfortable. The endurance this builds helps me better manage difficult feelings. Allowing me more space to make choices that are feeling-informed but not feeling-controlled.

Living proof that we can change

Truth Serum is my contribution to demystifying mental health and helping lift away the shame, guilt, and fear that surround it today. So that we can begin to unburden ourselves of the silent struggles we carry around every day and instead start relevant conversations with ourselves. It is a place to help us learn to take control over obstacles like self-doubt and insecurity. It’s about healing trauma and humanizing illness like depression and anxiety. It’s about welcoming the neurodivergent, and finally, it’s about all the ways mental health can help improve our relationship with ourselves, our life, and those around us.

Truth Serum is about growing in our understanding of our own mind so that we can become active participants in our life, by using our capacity for thought to stop merely living on automatic, running away from what we feel, and succumbing to seemingly inexplicable and unhealthy thoughts and actions that do not serve us. It is living proof that we can change and that we have evolved to think about what we feel so that we can actively shed the mental hurdles that hold everyone one of us back everyday. To inform ourselves and gain the choice to self-evolve. To live a life that’s consistent and fulfilling, a life that’s true to us. 

 

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