Sarah Fader on Stigma Fighters, Panic Disorder, and Recovery

 Sarah Fader I am the CEO and Founder of Stigma Fighters. Stigma Fighters is a non-profit organization dedicated to giving people with mental illness a voice and it began when I told my story about living with panic disorder on the Huffington Post so I had my first panic attack when I was 15 and I can distinctly remember that day because I was reading a comic called “Books of Magic” and so that had a profound effect on me and I started to feel my heart race and I felt unable to breathe and I reached out for my mom and I said “I need to go outside right now” and I knew something was very wrong with me but I didn’t know what it was and my mom turned to me and said, “You’re having an anxiety attack” and after that anxiety attack I felt different from my peers and I felt like I had to hide what it was like to be anxious and so I became a very good actress and I pretended to be normal and so I was playing this role of Sarah who doesn’t have anxieties, Sarah who is an honor student, who is good at the theater, who is sort of an introvert and but I wasn’t normal and that was the thing- I was concealing this very a significant part of myself but when I was 18 I was so utterly exhausted from dealing with panic and depression that I made the choice to see a psychiatrist and get on medication. I can vividly remember opening the Prozac that I was given, putting it in orange juice, taking half a dose to try to get on you know the regimen, drinking that orange juice and then feeling like something was changing. I could actually feel. I felt different. I remember the next day looking at the trees outside and it was Springtime and realizing there was no more noise in my head and I felt like for the first time there was quiet and I could actually think and so I decided after living with the shame of having anxiety I wanted to be open about this so I told my story in the most public way that I could and that was on the Healthy Living section of HuffPost. I wanted to see if there was a centralized location for people to share their stories online and I searched the internet and I couldn’t find one so I created one myself and that Stigma Fighters.com last year we published an anthology of the personal essays from the site and it’s called the Stigma Fighters Anthology and that’s what Stigma Fighters is about so it’s about really being authentic to yourself and being able to speak your truth and have it out there for the public to read for public consumption.  In order to live a fulfilling life, you need to be true to yourself. You will be able to achieve what you want and your goals in life if you’re authentic to yourself and you give fewer fucks about what people think Be true to yourself. Go for what you want and only care about the people that are important to you and you are okay.As found on YouTubeDiscover the First-To-Market Revolutionary SPR “Static” Conversion Tech Which Dramatically Speeds Up & Secures Existing WordPress Sites & Cloud Affiliate Pages With Just A Few Clicks