Who, What, Why - All About The Opal

Welcome! This blog post is coming from Victoria, creator of The Opal Zine. Read on to hear a little more about me and the motivation behind this project. 

What is The Opal? 

Inspired by the Opal journal publication made by psychiatric patients in 1851, The Opal/The Opal Zine (2025) is a space for those who live outside of the “typical” mental health presentation. 

This space is for sharing education, art, and reflections on navigating life alongside mental health struggles. 

Issue One is out now, and more will be coming soon!

If there’s anything mental health-related that you want to see discussed, feel free to message me! 

I want this to be able to be collaborative and hear what’s on people’s minds. 

Psychiatric survivors, this space is for you.

This space will be here for resource sharing, storytelling, expressions of hope, despair, and everything in between.

Who is The Opal?

Me! Hi, I’m Victoria (@sillycreativexx). 

I live with bipolar 2, PMDD (along with other fun stuff), and have for 12+ years. 

I’ve experienced multiple adolescent psych hospital admissions. 

I’m a very out and proud lesbian. 

I’ve experienced suicide loss. 

I’m working on my peer specialist certification while getting my degree. 

I’ve worked in craft workshop spaces and in special education with children. 

I love using art for wellness, tinkering around with different creative mediums, and talking about the realities of recovery. 

Why was The Opal Created?

I experienced multiple psychiatric hospital admissions as a teenager and lived in residential treatment at my therapeutic high school for a year. 

I witnessed and experienced things that should have never happened and were unacceptable that I continue to unpack in my adulthood.

As I started my peer support specialist courses, I found myself feeling so validated about what I had before seen as my “radical” views of the mental health industrial complex, fueled by the trauma I experienced. 

The focus on person-centered techniques were a breath of fresh air. 

As I began to learn about the psychiatric survivor movement, I felt so passionate about diving deeper into this world.

I continue to seek treatment for my mental health conditions and feel passionate about skill-sharing with those who have experienced the same, which is why I started this project.

It’s time to leave the shame behind, come together, and share our experiences.

Let’s talk about the taboo, our frustrations, OUR viewpoints.

Mental health shouldn’t be so far behind. Treatment should not be traumatizing.

I hope you’ll join this journey as I continue to learn more about myself and share my story and others.

From Victoria’s heart,

I hesitated to start this project as I’ve been in such a difficult episode, and doing much of anything has been hard. But I can't ignore the conversations I’ve been having with myself in my own mind and how much passion has been sparked by what I’ve been learning recently. New realizations that have come to me through my peer support training have been a glimmer of hope for me. 

As financial situations become more difficult for most people, and mental health care becomes harder to access, littered with funding cuts and increased costs, I feel a responsibility to do what we can to make things a little easier for each other and our peers, whether it’s referrals to safe resources for mental health help or sharing perspectives. 

Thus, the Opal Zine was born! The Opal Zine was created to center the voices of those living with mental health conditions, neurodiversity, and/or madness; specifically, those who have experienced harm in the mental health system.

Memories of Inpatient Adolescent Psych Hospitalization & Forced Injection

By Victoria @sillycreativexx - written August 2025

Processing a lot [...] talk of the past was shocking. I’m sweating thinking about it. […] The “after” of the injection. I want to throw up thinking about it. How it was in my chart not to do that. How my “regular” hospital doctor and therapist were upset about it after the weekend. The threats from hospital staff and my mom having to sit me down and talk to me about keeping it together (stopping the hospitalization cycle), or I was going to be “taken away”. I feel really sick and dissociated thinking about it. I’ve told myself I was overreacting about all of it for so long. Now I’m realizing it was worse than I thought. I wasn't just bullied and pushed around and forced; they (my lovely parents) were, too.

I was violated beyond even what the inpatient doctor deemed acceptable. I am still dealing with the consequences of the “on and off” medication cycle from then, today. All of that has tainted any help I’ve received. 

Medication resistant or just medically abused? Psychiatrically toyed with until I continued to lose it more and more. Put on the good girl act eventually so I can be a star student; no need to worry about her. Go into residential for “structure” or “socialization”, or really to keep the psych-cops away? Because my struggling was a crime against normalcy, against the way a young woman is supposed to behave. Traumatize her enough, and she’ll fall in line and perform compliance the way you want her to, the way young girls ought to behave. Compliance to the abuser with a sign-in badge and script pad. Make her believe her suffering is her fault. Then no one will look at the chart directives being betrayed. 

When she cries in front of the psychiatrist that's insulting her later, they’ll say “look at her, she's such a mess” to my mother's face. 

You did this to me. You made my struggling into a crime and made sure I’d pay for it. 

So when they say, “It's okay not to be okay. Help is out there. Get help.” 

I say, the system you're telling me to turn to did this to me. They changed any future step I’d take for myself when they drugged me because my suffering was too big for their comfort. A piece of that little girl is left on the “quiet room” floor, where they grabbed my cut-up arms tightly and pushed the syringe in that would change everything. That’s what I got for seeking help. 

So I cry for the little girl who was too young to know it was so much worse and wrong than she could comprehend. 

For the twenty-five-year-old now who's struggling with her medication and doesn't know what to do with all of this; that just wants to live a meaningful and peaceful life that she feels proud of, that feels pushed around with her naivety taken advantage of. I cry with the realization that what my body has been trying to tell me was always right. And with no excuses for those who did know better than to hurt a hurting little girl.

To those who have experienced suicide loss,

An open letter from me to you

To those who have experienced suicide loss,

I’m sorry for all of the times you have to hear your loved one’s actions were selfish.

I’m sorry for all of the unanswered questions you hold.

I’m sorry for all of the assumptions you encounter that you feel like you can’t correct.

I’m sorry for the unchangeable truths that exist.

Let the grief hold you; it’s a reflection of love had.

All my love,

Someone who gets it

By Victoria @sillycreativexx - written July 2025

My Heavenly Friend, Tess

I wish this were her writing you were reading right now.

By Victoria @sillycreativexx

written April 2025

I’m trying to sit down, write a bit, and edit, and things aren't quite coming together. It's making me think about my friend, Tess. I can see it like a video in my mind: me sitting at my wooden desk in my freshman year dorm, eyes stinging, staring at my Google Docs page with the cursor flashing at me. Lucky for me, I had Tess Hurley on the phone, who was a TA for an English class at the time and also one of the wisest people I knew, beyond just knowing her shit with writing. Very lucky for me because I did not know what the fuck a rhetorical analysis was and I needed help desperately. It was my first college essay assignment, and I was already worried about being able to get through the semester. Tess and I met at our therapeutic high school for “emotionally fragile girls”, as the website said at the time, and in those years, I only did a handful of multi-page assignments. We didn't have homework, which was awesome because, of course, who wants to deal with that, but many of us were just trying our best to stay out of the hospital with varying degrees of success in doing so. Almost half of the girls attending were living in the residential program connected with the school, with no internet access, and that's where I got close to Tess. God bless her, I think she lived there all through high school. I just did a year. I don't know how she dealt with it.

Back to that first paper. Writing is something I still struggle with. It's something that held me back from going back to school after dropping out years ago. Very much like right now, I was staring at the screen not knowing what the fuck to do. But Tess did. Never was I so ecstatic to see a document littered with highlights and comments going all the way down the side of the page. Chatting on the phone, she talked me through it, multiple times, validated my confusion, and helped me realize that I didn't have to run away just because I needed to write an essay. I remember thanking her repeatedly, telling her I had no idea how I was going to get that done without her, basically that she saved my life via English 101 essay. I’m crying a bit while writing this now because I dream of what Tess’s life could have been without illness and family/housing issues taking it away from her. Issues that were way beyond what I could influence, but play through my mind every day because I wonder why one of the wisest people I ever met had to go that way. Circumstances that were so complicated and broader than suicide prevention can touch in the restrictions of our systems today that I don't even see it as self-inflicted in a way. But I try to see beyond her end, and that's part of why I’m writing this because I wish she could just live. I don't know how to celebrate her life, so I’m just trying my best. She didn't have the support that I am so lucky to have. I wish this were her writing you were reading. I wish I could reference her as my English professor friend. Imagine how lovely the full circle moment would have been, taking another shot at getting my degree, and her thriving in the career that she was so meant to do. Instead, I’m going back to school now, over four years after first trying during a grief-induced hypomanic episode after she died. When I think about her, the gratitude for being supported in my education and having a safe place to live with an emotionally safe family is overwhelming, and I try to bring her with me through her memory in my mind. That's all I know to do right now: for her and myself.

Thoughts from Depression after a Mixed Episode

By Victoria @sillycreativexx

Written March 8th, 2025 (in the thick of it)

I can't lie; the weight of bipolar feels like it’s crushing me. Every time I feel like I understand, I feel like she changes up on me. I possibly fucked up my meds a couple of weeks ago and wasn’t taking my lithium for a few days. That, plus many life circumstances, threw me into a mixed episode that brings that depression that surprises me again and again. And makes me feel foolish for being surprised. It makes me feel foolish for feeling like I was depressed before, but this is REALLY it. The crash from mixed episodes has gotten me into the worst places. Sometimes I get a little jealous of the bipolar girlies who “enjoy” their hypomania because for me, the ones I’m able to identify always spiral into a mixed episode quickly, which leads to disaster. But there have definitely been times when I felt like everything was coming together and felt so great, and I was having a spiritual moment. And just didn’t know until the crash came later. Bipolar comes with so much shame. I feel it within myself, from others, even in my treatment. A lot. The shame of feeling like it’s always “something” with you, feeling that people around you don't know quite what to do with you. Just the shame, shame of here we are again. The shame I feel talking about it when I do, like I should just stop saying it. But when I feel like I’m drowning, it's impossible because I don’t feel like myself, and I don’t like myself, and I started getting so frustrated. When it’s like this and it gets to where each moment just feels difficult and I feel like I’m doing all I am capable of, it’s hard not to feel like you’re just failing and weak. Even though I know I’m able to sit through a lot of shit from years of dealing with this. It’s just a waiting game sometimes, and it feels exhausting and old. It’s old and fucking tired. Having this be right in my face crushes me over and over. Because this isn’t what I want out of life, for me and the people who love me. But here we are. Always keeping myself safe and alright because I feel an obligation to myself and them to do that. But I’m just really tired and frustrated.

magazine collage made by Victoria in 2020

Written March 28th, 2025 (hopefully starting to come out of it)

Talking about how I deal with bipolar 2 is something I push myself to do consciously after holding it closer to my chest for a long time. It's still not something I voluntarily give up about myself in most spaces. Sometimes I lie and say I went to my typical local public school when I actually went to a therapeutic high school for mental health issues. You caught me! But I saw a quote I really loved a few days ago that said, “Shame dies when stories are told in safe places.” It made me think about group therapy and how it was invaluable to me in a way I never expected, because I could see people that I didn't already have a personal connection to, really see them, and see things in them and their struggles that I could also see in myself. I felt myself rooting for them and seeing the strengths they had that they couldn't quite feel yet. It showed me I’m not alone in a way I have never been able to truly feel before with mental health. It's cliché, but I didn't know the root of so many of my struggles was shame. So to keep myself okay, I know I need to stay connected to other people’s stories and not shy away from what I sometimes see as the darker side of myself. Because depression often makes me feel like a rotten human being, I know I'm not. Lately, I’ve been repeating to myself almost like a mantra, “I have a mental health disorder. I am taking care of myself. I enjoy life; I just have a mental health disorder that makes me feel like I don't right now.” I know that to get out of this and to have the future life I want, I need to be on my own side. Balancing the self-discipline I feel I need to have to keep showing up for myself and having compassion and grace through my pitfalls is not easy.

“What to Do When You Can't Do Anything” Zine

By Victoria @sillycreativexx

written July 2025

How I’ve been getting through hunkering down with depression

How do you come to peace with what feels like your system shutting down when every piece of pop-psychology advice tells you to get up, get out, and get moving to get your mind healthy?

It is true, movement and sunlight do help depression; it’s evidently proven. That’s why I feel even more like a failure when I just can’t. I feel like I have been bordering on catatonic at times. I think even some who have dealt with depression can't understand that, especially without the experience of bipolar. When the typical advice that seems so simple isn't possible, or is even harmful when you're in a state of conserving your energy, it can automatically feel like a failure.

The idea of pushing until you can't go anymore, fake it until you make it, if you act as your ideal self and if you keep working, it'll become true, is everywhere. It can be helpful. I’ve had times, whether a new job role or adjusting to changes, where I knew that I was capable and that strategy was helpful. Unfortunately, it's often not sustainable for those with chronic debilitating mental health diagnoses, at least not in every phase of them.

I’m not the easiest to deal with while in an episode, I’m the first to admit that. I’m not quite combative; my desire for wellness is typically still there, which helps, but I can come off a bit like Jax Taylor drowning in the lake at Big Bear in Vanderpump Rules.

I often shut down or minimize what is going on until it's too apparent that I need someone to step in. I know this has led to uneasiness for those around me; I’ve learned that over time.

Years of masking in childhood to protect myself from abusive policies in the mental health environments I was in have led me to be confusing and wishy-washy in what I need and where I’m at. Dealing with varying symptom presentation due to my bipolar also complicates that. Something my mom used to tell me when I was in college (first go around) while I'd be sobbing was, “I thought you were doing so well.” It used to drive me up a wall because usually,

1. I had been doing well.

or

2. I had been trudging along, barely holding it together, and trying to will myself to keep going so I wouldn't disappoint everyone and myself.

I couldn't handle what stepping back would look like because that meant I let everything fall apart, ruined by my mental health yet again. And then what would we do? We were both doing our best in a world that doesn't give you a guidebook on how to navigate shifting from adolescent to adult mental illness. I wanted to shed my tumultuous teenage past and finally be “successful”. She wanted to be a supportive mom; she was and still is.

So what has this period of hunkering down looked like for me lately?

First, it has required me to try to put the shame down. I put this first because it really is the foundation for everything in this shit show of getting through the survival stage. I can hate myself for not being able to do more or I can acknowledge that if I could, I probably would. Realistically, I usually do both of those.

Conserving my energy.

I’ve been running out of steam faster than ever before. I’ve had to separate the things that I need to do, things that I want to do, or wish I could do. Right now, #1 for me is keeping up on my online college class because I can’t manage the emotional, academic, or financial fallout that letting things slip would cause. I’ve been there before with college, and I vowed to myself this time would be different. I’m so close to being done with my associates after fighting so hard to get here.

Whether justified or not, I already feel like I’ve let so many aspects of my life fail, and I can’t handle letting this one go yet, even temporarily. Then comes all of the other lovely mandatory self-care things like eating, changing my clothes, and showering, with varying degrees of success, of course. Lately, there hasn’t really even been any “wants”, like having creative time or going out, so that helps and hurts with this one.

Resting.

I’ve been letting myself sleep past 12pm, something I normally despise thinking about, and fills me with shame. It goes against most mental health advice that advocates for early sleep/wake time and routine. I know I desperately need to rest, and in the name of harm reduction, for now, I’m okay with my days needing to be shorter to keep my sanity together a little more. I’m learning it is not the same as the typical depression, wallowing in bed. It's a protective measure as I adjust to medication changes. Reinstalling routines can come later.

Forcing myself to accept I’m going to let people down, especially myself.

I don't have the energy to agonize with “should I, shouldn't I” while in this survival mode. Mental illness is unfair, unreliable, and for me, constantly changing. Something that may be incredibly easy to accomplish one day can be beyond impossible to do the next week. I’ve found myself in spots lately where I think I’m doing a great job at accommodating myself, only to let myself down all over again. Each time wears on me more and more. I apologize, shift things where needed, and try to move on.

Keeping my safety #1 and finding reasons beyond the external to do so.

Something I didn't anticipate during this time is that my typical reasons to keep going would feel so foggy and disconnected in my mind. That scared me. I realized I was using fear to try to keep myself safe, and, in my numbness, it wasn't working. So I shifted to something more tangible. I’ve been continuing to do my online class, one of the few demands I can handle (barely), and at night, when I feel the urge to, I’ve let myself keep dreaming and working on projects that mirror what I’d want my future to look like. I’ve still been feeling passionate about connecting with others through my story (and theirs) and trying to have whatever water droplet-sized impact I can in the experience of dealing with mental health. I’ve been holding onto that tightly and sometimes it feels like all I have left.

Being radically honest.

I’ve had to force real answers out of myself when my therapist asks those typical “crisis time” hard-hitting questions. This goes against all that is natural for me. It also goes hand in hand with doing things you don't want to do. For me, this was giving my surplus of medication to a safe person. I felt so much resistance to this because I didn't want to cause unnecessary worry. But I needed to look at myself and get really honest with where I was at, that I’m not well and am not making decisions that my healthy self would. So, to keep myself safe during this time, I need to get real, face the truth, and safeguard against that. In the name of honesty, sometimes I regret the healthy choices I make, so this is a complicated one for me, but it is what’s gotten me this far in my journey.

Thinking back to a healthier self.

So much of my experience the last year has been, what feels like, frantically trying to set up the “next thing” so I can feel in control of my varying mental health and like I’m not letting things spiral. This has meant doing an intensive outpatient program, starting and stopping jobs, going back to college, starting peer specialist certification courses, weekly therapy, medication changes, and the list goes on. It has been difficult to come to terms with those things that may have helped, but I am still in this place. That girl I have been in the past, who was excited about life, I know she’s in there somewhere, I just don’t know how to get to her anymore. Thinking back to stable times has been difficult and sometimes leads to me feeling resentful. At the same time, I know it’s important to remember that girl existed.

Overall, meeting myself where I’m at is what makes any of this possible. It requires me to open my eyes and see it, the gunky, grimy, disgusting-feeling reality that is living in a period of mental health crisis. It’s not disillusioning myself with the version of myself I think I am or wish I could be, even though it is painful. It’s living in the truth of it so that the next steps truly make sense and can be productive. That means letting my family make me food, having extra water nearby for when I can’t get out of bed, keeping comfort items close, and being fucking realistic with my abilities right now.

All of this comes with the privilege of having safe people around. I’m not oblivious to that, and it's something I’m actively grateful for every single day. Sometimes it is further complicated by the guilt of making them witness me like this. That is one of the worst parts, and it makes me want to hide. I don’t have the answers or next steps, and I still feel extremely lost.