Hey, Alyssa. Hey Sam. Oh, I forgot one of those things.

Are you ready?

Okay. So today we have a viewer request. Our very first. Yeah, we're pretty big fucking deal now.

So on the day that we're recording this, it's Thursday. We released our first ever episode yesterday. And guys, we got to number one on top shows.

I cannot believe it. So we're really excited. Thank you guys so much for your support and for listening. And we're so happy like with the feedback and just that it's resonating with you guys. So mission accomplished. Now we can shut it down.

Thanks for coming up. See you next year. But with that aside, we have a listener request. So this is from Samantha. Great name. Love her already. She requested for us to go deeper into our experiences with depression and anxiety, which we talked about.

Not super briefly, but brief enough in our imposter syndrome episode. So today we're going to delve deep, deep dive, baby. Really get into the trauma. Yeah, which is interesting because I just had therapy this afternoon. Yeah.

Nice and fresh. The tears are not even dry yet. So I thought it would be interesting just a kind of detail. Our experiences of like how we came to understand that we were dealing with mental illness.

And I kind of would like you to go first because first of all, I feel like your story might be a little shorter than mine because I can really go on.

But also because I feel like for you, it's a lot more recent that you're dealing with having to come to terms with the fact that you are dealing with anxiety and all that kind of different stuff. So how did you come to understand or like find out that that's what was going on.

So I never like you said I never growing up had anxiety. I was always in like dance and acting and nothing bothered me like I was able to get up on stage. No problem.

I was in college and I was in college and I was in college and I had to get up and give this presentation. And I wasn't fully prepared for this presentation. I will say.

But I had the paper in front of me and I had a partner and everything like that. And when I got up there, I never felt this feeling before. And it was just what I now know of like being anxiety attack.

Yeah. And I just like my pulse quickened. My face was hot and red. I felt like I couldn't breathe. I couldn't speak. And anybody who knew me in that class did not know me to have anxiety. So they thought that I was like really, really sick.

And so and that's what I thought I was like, Oh, I'm just really sick. Like I don't know what's going on. And I actually ended up having to sit down and my partner had to do that presentation by themselves.

In that moment, did you have like any thought at all that it might be anxiety? No, I don't think so. And I'm not proud to say this. But people in my family dealt with anxiety when they were younger. And I was really not compassionate about it. Oh, for sure, for sure.

Yeah, I was like, why can't this I hate saying this? I do not like this about myself that this happened. But I would like think things like, why can't you just figure it out? Like, why can't you just do this?

Yes, you know what I mean? Because that's I really feel like that's how you feel about anxiety if you don't suffer from it.

Well, I think that's how you feel about mental illness if you don't suffer from it. Right.

Or if you just don't understand it enough. And I actually a friend of mine when I was in elementary school, which we were like quite young at that time.

So there was no talk of mental health or anything like that. It was in grade five and my good friend just stopped showing up to school, which was obviously very bizarre.

And it was really weird. And like our other friend, we were kind of like a group of three or other friend and I were just kind of getting like annoyed with her.

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