Hi everyone, welcome to the unlabed voice. I'm your host Christy. Thank you so much for being here and for giving your time to this podcast. I upload a new episode every two weeks on Saturdays, so I hope you'll come back and join me again since this is the very first episode I'd like to start by introducing myself and sharing a little about why I decided to create this podcast. So, hi, I'm a high school student from Taiwan and I live with anxiety and disssociation for a long time. I feel like I was drowning and sometimes it was even worse than that. I feel like I did not exist at all. Like, I was physically here, but my mind and my heart fly away, and I'm not really present in my own life. It's a strange, and lonely feeling when my mind, and my body don't seem to belong to each other. So I've spent a lot of time and put so much effort trying to recover. I've tried therapies. I've tried medications. I've tried to convince myself to just calm down. But when I first tried to explain what I was going through, I feel so anxious and stressed to talk about these things. And the person who I was talking to often made it worse. My mom, for example, she used to believe that I wasn't really sick. She thought it was just puberty or that I was overplaying or even pretending. Hearing that from someone so close to me, hurts more than anything else, it made me question myself. It made me wonder if maybe I was just being dramatic. Maybe I was weak. Maybe I was the problem. Maybe I wasn't really sick. Or maybe yes, it's just because of the puberty stage. So honestly, the hardest part wasn't always the illness itself. The hardest part was the way people look at me when they found out, I was struggling with mental health issues. There's this invisible label that suddenly appears on you, and once people see it, they stop seeing you. They stop seeing you, but they start seeing you through those labels. So, I don't want anyone else to feel like their pain is fake just because other people cannot see it or judging anyone else because they are struggling. Through this podcast, I want to share my recovery journey, not as an expert, or who has everything figured out. But as a teenager who is struggling and thriving all these things. I also want to share my thoughts about teenager’s mental health issues. And more importantly, I want to create a space where people feel safe to speak, a place without labels, a place without judgment. This is why my podcast is called The Unlabeled Voice, because before we are patient, before we're diagnoses, we're a human beings, like any other people on this world. And our voice deserve to be heard. Each episode won’t be long, so you can listen while walking home from school, lying bad at night, during a quiet moment, or just in your spare time. I want to use my voice to bridge the gap between people who are struggling in a world that often refuses to listen. And maybe little by little, we can learn how to listen better, not only to others but also to ourselves. So if you ever feel labeled, if you ever feel misunderstood or if you ever feel invisible, this is a podcast for you. Thank you for being here with me. Let’s begin our journey. This is the unlabeled voice. Thank you for listening. I will see you in the next episode.