Trigger Warning: This story mentions anxiety, intrusive thoughts, mental health struggles, medication, difficult workplace experiences, and weight gain. Please read with care.
There was a time when things were really bad for Megha. She has since been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and now takes medication for it, but when it all started, she wasn’t on any. She was in therapy, caught in thoughts she couldn’t stop. They would spiral until it felt like they weren’t hers to control anymore. Rather, the thoughts were controlling her. She lost her ability to focus and moved through a constant mental fog.
When something triggered her, she could freeze completely, unable to get up or get her work done. It wasn’t just disappointment. A trigger could pull her back into the past and make her go through what happened and why it happened again. Sometimes, even a single word could do it. It could happen in the middle of a meeting or while catching up with a friend, sometimes even while talking to a stranger. She would feel a pulse between her eyebrows and lose track of the conversation around her. With people close to her, she would sometimes ask them to repeat themselves just to give herself time to come back. It could take her fifteen to thirty minutes to settle, and on some days, she would leave the office so no one would notice what she was going through.
In the middle of all this, she often had to sit with an inner child who was crying out for attention. She lost a lot of time tending to it. When some of the people she relied on turned their backs on her, she felt that she had hit rock bottom again.
Megha decided to switch therapists to get a fresh perspective, and her new therapist suggested gratitude journaling. She wasn’t a natural writer. When she was younger, her parents had read her diaries, and that experience made her wary of putting her thoughts on paper again. She thought something on her phone would feel safer because nobody else would have access to it. She simply searched and came across the Gratitude app in 2023. She found it easy to use and started treating it as a safe space to journal privately.
“Gratitude has always been like the star which is guiding me all through this journey.”
~ Megha
Gratitude was one practice Megha kept holding on to right from the start of her spiraling thoughts. When she felt at her worst, she would remind herself that the thought wasn’t always true. If she was anxious or upset with someone, she would think back to the things that person had done to help her. This helped soften some of the negative thoughts she had around the situation. Seeing her gratitude written down also made things feel clearer. Writing helped organize her thoughts and simplify what had felt complicated in her head. Even answering small, basic questions gave her a good feeling.
At first, some of what Megha was experiencing could look like ordinary stress. But it eventually reached a point where she did not know what was happening and felt helpless inside it. From the outside, she looked fine. She came to work and dressed well, so people often assumed nothing was wrong. She felt that people expected struggle to be visible. What they could not see were the intrusive thoughts, mental fog, and loneliness she was experiencing.
“Making a pattern inside your thoughts, like a house you can go into and feel, ‘This is my space, and I don’t have to feel worried here.'”
~ Megha
Megha tried several things alongside journaling. Dialectical behavior therapy was one practice that really helped her. She started meditating and practicing something called tapping on pressure points. She also practiced yoga. Some mornings, she would wake up early to stretch her body and prepare herself for the day so that if something triggered her, she felt she could handle it better.
She also wrote down three things she did well each day, or three times someone had thanked her. These small moments gave her something else to focus on when she started overthinking or feeling worthless. She even used the app to take a picture and write a story around it. Sometimes, she would find a prompt for a specific mood and write both sides of what happened, when things went well and when they did not, to understand how she had found her way through it.
Around this time, Megha’s job had also become toxic. She felt sidelined at work, and opportunities she had worked toward sometimes went to someone else. Some situations with her colleagues kept pulling her back into the same thought spirals. Eventually, giving herself permission to leave became important, and she quit the job. One mistake Megha used to make was telling herself that her thinking was wrong. Now, she would tell someone else not to immediately dismiss their thoughts that way. For her, acknowledging a thought became more important than striking it down because telling herself a thought was wrong often initiated more negative thinking. She learned to hear the thought instead of immediately rejecting it. If something genuinely wasn’t right, she could admit that and find a way through it.
“Your thoughts deserve to be acknowledged. Admitting them and creating a path through them is what makes them easier to live with.”
~ Megha
Megha’s advice for anyone going through a tough time is to make small things feel special. She suggests putting on some music or finding something funny around a word or thought that is bothering you so it feels a little less heavy. Sometimes, she simply goes for a walk outside. She also turns to novels. If she finds one sentence that connects with her own story, she keeps it and sometimes uses it later to express something she could not find the words for herself. For Megha, it is about building a space inside your own thoughts where you feel safe, somewhere you can return to when things get loud again.
Today in 2026, Megha is doing a lot better. She is in a relationship again after a long time, and her work is going well. The medication has also come with a side effect she isn’t happy about. Her body weight increased from 130 pounds to 180 pounds. She is working on it, but she does not pretend that part feels resolved. At the same time, her life feels more peaceful now. For Megha, learning to accept the different sides of life has become an important part of how she sees things now, even when not everything feels easy.
This is Megha’s story, shared in her own words and curated with care to preserve its truest form. I’d love to hear your story too. Write to me at preeti@gratefulness.me 💌
Every story is a reminder to notice the good that already exists.
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