Bethany: Living with PCOS

Bethany Ashlyn, blogs on mental health and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). It is something I had never heard of. I catch up with Bethany about her life dealing with mental health and PCOS.

Bethany, welcome, and let’s start by talking about you. Tell me a little about you?

First off, thank you so much for allowing me to talk a little about myself and what I do! It is an honor!

To start things off, my name is Bethany Ashlyn, and I come from a small town in the middle of the United States. I’m 26 years old, engaged to the love of my life (fall wedding 2020), and am currently following my passion for writing and helping others.

My likes include reading, doing any form of outdoor activity, and board games. In fact, my fiancé and I currently purchased a 1000 count puzzle and have become quite obsessed with the new hobby. My friends and family like to say I’m a 90-year-old in a 26-year-old body.

About two years ago, I had started a blog, The Graceful Klutz, on a whim. I was working a job I hated, was in a constant state of anxiety, and felt utterly lost. So, I started writing as a way to get out of my head. The blog was about relationships, fashion, beauty, and lifestyle.

The more I wrote about, the more I started finding myself again. It was a few months in that I decided to do something crazy. I quit my job to pursue my dreams of writing. At that time, I was not making any money from my blog, but I knew something had to change, and I was so desperate to feel better that it seemed worth the risk.

Luckily I had a boyfriend (now fiancé) who was willing to help me follow this passion of mine. I worked day and night for a little over a year on this blog until I suffered a terrible burnout. I had worked so much and was writing about things I didn’t genuinely care about that I experienced a mental breakdown.

I didn’t get out of bed for several days and would burst into tears for no reason. A couple of weeks later, I stopped blogging, got a job at a local garden shop, and worked on waking up and getting out of bed each day.

The garden shop saved my mental health in a lot of ways. By forcing me to go outside and be around others, I was starting to see the old me again, the one filled with a passion for writing.

By bettering myself, both physically and mentally, I realized that I was genuinely passionate about helping myself and others who suffer from all the stresses life brings our way. So, I decided to take all the research I was already doing and turn it into a community for others.

That is when my new blog, Bethany Ashlyn, was born. It’s not just a blog but a community for others to learn about ways to reduce anxiety, improve their wellbeing, and feel a little less alone.

Currently, writing is my full-time job, and I have never been happier. While I’m still working on myself, I have finally found a passion I love and am so excited every day to share it with the world.

Are you a perfectionist? A surviving perfectionist? Help me understand the challenges you face as a perfectionist?

I’d like to think of myself as a recovering perfectionist in a sense. I still have that small bubble of anxiety come up when I write an article or start a project. It’s like a nagging in my brain telling me that I’m not good enough and that I need to do better.

Not to put blame on anyone, but I do feel like part of this came from my childhood. I had a father who was nowhere near the father of the year. He regularly made me feel like I was not good enough. No matter how clean I kept my room or how many praises I got from my teachers, it was never enough for him.

While I have forgiven him and moved on from this toxic mindset, it still created a deep-seated need to prove to everyone that I am good enough. It has taken years to break that thought process of needing everything to be perfect.

I think what most perfectionists face is needing to control everything in life. I’m not in control of what other people think about me, and I never will be. This used to cause such anxiety to the point of me not sharing anything about myself with others.

It’s not an easy journey, but learning to focus on what you can control has helped me open up about my life and do things without fear of judgment or criticism. I cannot control if someone thinks I’m dumb, but what I can control is not letting it affect me.

What is PCOS? What are the causes and symptoms? Is there a cure?

PCOS, or Polycystic ovary syndrome, is a hormonal disorder that affects 1 in 10 women worldwide. It can cause a range of symptoms like infertility, irregular periods, excessive hair growth or hair loss, weight gain, diabetes, acne, depression, and so much more. Women can suffer from all, none, or just a few of these symptoms. Due to the range of symptoms and the lack of talk about PCOS in the media, most women go undiagnosed.

Typically, women with PCOS suffer from insulin resistance. Insulin is a hormone created by the pancreas. Foods we eat get broken down into sugars, or glucose, and then it gets absorbed into the blood. Insulin helps by getting the glucose into cells to be used as energy. When our body doesn’t have enough insulin or doesn’t use it properly, we get higher blood sugar levels.

When this happens, our entire body starts becoming unbalanced. It can cause our ovaries to produce excessive amounts of testosterone, which leads to the thinning scalp and unwanted hair growth. This is also why women with PCOS have a higher risk of developing diabetes, another insulin-related disease.

Right now, there is no cure for PCOS. While it is possible to manage symptoms, it is not something you can ever cure. PCOS is the reason I started my website because I wanted to help women who were suffering from this hormonal imbalance. What a lot of people don’t realize is that it isn’t just a hormonal disorder. It can wreak havoc on a woman’s mental and physical health.

For instance, I didn’t know until I was 22 that I had PCOS. For years I felt like something was wrong with me. I had to shave my face regularly to keep my chin hairs from being seen, I would skip periods for months at a time, and I was gaining weight while eating less than other girls in my school.

I felt ugly, ashamed, and alone. One day I came across a Youtuber, Sarah’s Day, and watched a couple of her videos. She talked about PCOS and some of the things it causes, and I remember mentally check-marking all the symptoms off in my head. After that, I went into a research craze where I read every article I could get my hands on.

It was like a lightbulb had gone off! I wasn’t alone anymore. I had this thing, PCOS, to blame for things going on in my body. It was as if knowing this finally gave me a reason to fight. Instead of being in the dark, I finally had information to help my body.

Then I realized that, while so many women suffered from this, a lot of them were in the dark like I was. I’ve read countless testimonies of doctors just pushing birth control on someone or telling them to lose weight. It is so infuriating having someone tell you that you need to lose weight when your PCOS makes it so difficult to do that.

This doesn’t mean all doctors are going to act this way or that this medication doesn’t work, but I do think there is a lack of understanding in the medical field that we need to fix. There are so many different treatments out there that doctors don’t tell their patients about that are scientifically proven to help.

That is why I’m trying to bring PCOS information out into the public. For me, I’ve been fortunate to have a fantastic group of people to help me through this, both professionally and personally. Not everyone has that. I know learning about PCOS has helped change my life. I hope to be that for other women out there who are silently suffering from PCOS.

Let us talk about mental health. What is it? Why is it so important?

I could write for days on mental health. It makes me so happy that we are in a place now that mental health is finally being talked about more openly. For years, going to a therapist meant you were crazy, and mental health equated to something being wrong with you. While we still have a long way to go, I think that definition has slowly been changing.

Mental health, to me, is the ground floor to everything we do in our life. We start cultivating how we react and what we react to from the time we are babies. By watching our parents, environment, and friends, we start creating different habits and behaviors that we take with us into our adult years.

For instance, I watched my mother suffer from low self-esteem for her entire life. She always felt fat and ugly and would go on fad diets to lose weight quickly. She was anxious about everything and had childhood problems that she dealt with unhealthily. While she never meant to give these characteristics to me, they rubbed off nonetheless.

I remember I was eight years old when I first felt fat. It was picture day, and I was wearing a cute purple blouse with denim jeans. When I saw the photos for the first time, I looked at them and noticed a bulge in my stomach that other girls didn’t have. This moment was the first time I felt self-conscious about my body.

Being self-conscious about my appearance started giving me anxiety. I was worried other people were judging my body the way I was, and that made me feel worse. It was a snowball effect that has grown throughout the years.

Everybody has a story about mental health, but we don’t ever talk about it. We will go through life silently suffering because that is what our parents did and what their parents did before that. Instead of fixing myself, I pretended it was normal to feel this way and continued to live life in a constant state of worry and panic.

This mindset can be so easy to take on but can take a lifetime to restructure. My anxiety is one of the reasons my PCOS symptoms worsened over the years. I lost my period, gained weight, and started growing more facial hair. I was living proof that our mental state can change our physical health.

It is so important, in my opinion, to be open and honest about mental health. By sharing these stories and talking about our sadness and anxiety we face, we can start making the topic less taboo. Creating a community of people to talk to can also make us feel less alone. Sometimes the simple act of having your problems heard is enough to help us start our path to bettering ourselves.

Thanks for being real, open, and honest about anxiety, sadness, and the challenges you face. Walk me through the shoes you are wearing?

I’m a firm believer nowadays that being open and honest is the best way to heal yourself. I spent most of my adolescence believing I had to be silent about my emotions. I see now that it was such a toxic mentality to live in, but so many people do.

With social media these days it can feel like everyone has a better life than you. Even my social life can sometimes seem that way. My blog, for example, might look like a woman who has life figured out. However, you don’t see the nights I cried myself to sleep because I was worried I was wasting my time on this dream that would go nowhere.

Nowadays, I like to think I’ve done better at managing these judgmental thoughts that pop up. Especially for this new year, I have made it my mission to focus on my mental health. One of the main ways I do that is managing my PCOS symptoms (which can cause anxiety and depression).

I’ve started eating better, adding needed supplements to my diet, and working out. I’ve also added meditation and yoga into my daily routine. That’s the most significant change in my life, a daily routine. I’ve realized I’m not that person who can go with the flow every day. Structure and routine help me feel in control. In turn, this routine helps me manage my stress levels.

I’m not happy every day all the time; no one is. I have bad days and good days. There are still days where I wake up and have anxiety creep up and tell me I’m not good enough. However, now I’m more aware of when this happens and force myself to do something to get out of that mentality before it consumes my entire day.

I personally find writing cathartic. How about you? Has it helped with your PCOS?

I agree wholeheartedly with this. I’ve always been a writer and will always write until my last day on this planet. Even if it makes no sense, putting words to paper has always helped me get out of my head and find some clarity. I sometimes get so deep in my anxiety bubble that it can be hard to find a way out. By writing, I can start to unravel all the thoughts in my head and see the source of the struggle or pain I am going through.

Personally, I think everyone should write. You don’t need to create a novel or share it with the public, but put words to paper. It doesn’t even have to make sense. When my dad left my family, I remember going through a phase of pure hatred for the man. Though it was probably a good thing he left, I was enraged that he would up and leave his entire family without any remorse.

I spent years hating him and feeling exhausted from the pain he was causing me. Then one day I decided to write him a letter. It was pages upon pages of how he made me feel, how I felt he failed me as a father and everything I could never tell him to his face. At the end of it, I felt elated. It was like writing it out made it drift off my shoulders and onto the page.

It was that day that I forgave him. I don’t believe he was ever supposed to be a father. I could see this now that I had moved the curtain of hatred from my mind. I never sent him this letter. It was never really meant for him, but for me to move on from the pain of that entire situation.

Writing gave me the perspective I needed in that situation and so many others. For others, it might be painting a picture or playing an instrument. I think art, in general, is cathartic because it allows you to share emotions you might’ve never known you had.

I loved your article 7 ways to feel sexier. I honestly think you are beautiful. Why did you feel you were a slob?

Thank you! I was actually extremely nervous posting that article. With how much hate people get for saying the wrong thing, I felt like that article might hit people the wrong way. As if I was telling people they weren’t beautiful the way they were. It’s funny, but I feel like body positivity is such a great and bad thing these days.

I think it’s so beautiful that we are now teaching girls and boys to accept themselves and love their bodies. They should! We are all so beautiful and unique and should celebrate that on a daily. However, I feel like this body positivity can also make people feel guilty for not loving themselves every second of every day.

I find myself feeling self-conscious about my weight only to feel guilty about feeling that way. It’s a vicious cycle that can be hard to get out of once started. If the best thing I can say to myself is, “I am alive and breathing,” then that is okay. I don’t know a single soul who feels sexy every moment of their life.

While I’m so much happier now and have learned to love my body, I still have days where I feel ugly. I’ll look in the mirror and hate what I see staring back at me for no reason. I might always struggle with this, and that is okay too. It’s definitely a journey to break down old behaviors and learn new ones like self-acceptance.

I wrote 7 Ways to Feel Sexier for those people out there who are on that journey as well. Sometimes it can be difficult at the moment to see our beauty. Those small things like fixing your hair or buying a new outfit can help show that inner critic that you are beautiful and deserving of these things.

We all feel down and sick at times. What are some of the tricks we can use to fight this state of thinking?

First off, I think knowing that we all feel that way is such a great trick to fight that state of thinking. By knowing you are not alone in your thoughts and emotions can sometimes be enough to push you out of that frame of mind. This past year I’ve probably done the most transformation when it comes to my mental health.

What kicked it off, believe it or not, was a book titled The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck by Mark Manson. It was the first self-help book I had ever read, and it opened a door for me to look at myself differently. He discusses how we have the choice to react to things and that no one else can choose that for us.

Let’s say someone just dented your car. You can become mad about the fact or choose to stay calm. It sounds so simple and so complicated at the same time, but it really did empower me to look at things differently. I think reading these self-improvement books are a great way to get you out of your head and changing perspectives.

A lot of the time, we just need a new perspective to get out of those toxic emotions. I think whatever can help you get out of your head is an excellent tool for feeling better. This could be as simple as watching one of your favorite movies to reading a book or going on a walk.

Recently, I have found exercising to be quite cathartic for me. When I’m feeling down on myself, I’ll put on some workout clothes, and either follow a workout video or go on a jog. It might sound cheesy, but that pain and sweat I get from working out can feel so rewarding. I know I’m doing something good for myself, and it makes me happier.

How important is it for us to become intentional about dealing with our mental health?

I think putting a focus on our mental health is possibly the most important thing we could do. When we are in a constant state of anxiety and worry, we stop caring about everything around us. I watched this impact an aunt of mine to the point that she was unable to pay her bills, have relationships with others, and she barely even got up off the couch for days on end.

When we don’t feel our best, we stop caring about everything else. We’ll survive for the sake of surviving. So many people spend their entire life doing this without realizing that there is more to life than just surviving.

Health is essential, whether it is physical or mental. When you neglect one, the other will start to deteriorate as well. We all deserve to live a happy and authentic life. However, you cannot achieve that without a little work, self-love, and patience with yourself.

Congrats on your engagement. Talk to me about how this has changed you as a person. Are you still looking for perfection in a relationship?

Thank you! We’ve been dating for a little over seven years, so I’m definitely excited for this new stage in our lives. It might sound so silly, but my fiancé has completely changed my life. He is the main reason I am talking with you about mental health and living a fulfilled life. I never thought I could ever pursue a career in writing because I had told myself years ago I was not good enough.

He has always pushed me to follow my dreams and, while it sounds so simple, has given me encouragement on the smallest of accomplishments. Not to blame my family, but accomplishing something was never praised. It was when you did something terrible that you got any notice.

I think the simplicity of him praising me when I chose to start blogging or when I got my first subscriber helped push me to do more and not get too down on myself. It also is a great feeling to know someone unconditionally loves you and chose to do so. By knowing someone could find a reason to love me forever gave me the capacity to love myself.

Our relationship is not a romance film, though. I think I learned in this relationship that there is no such thing as perfection in a relationship, and that is actually a good thing. I feel like a lot of marriages and relationships end because people think it is supposed to be easy. While it shouldn’t be a constant upward battle, a relationship is going to take work.

However, this work has also helped us grow together. We face obstacles together and come out stronger. We take turns pushing each other to do things to better our lives, even if we sometimes don’t want to do them but need to. I’ll get angry with my fiancé for forcing me to take a risk, but feel so grateful afterward that he pushed me to do so.

You learn to compromise on matters that don’t mean as much to you for your partner. I’ve learned what it feels like to love someone enough to want what is best for them, even if that meant not being with me. Luckily, however, he does want to be with me, and I’m so excited to start this new chapter of life.