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Welcome...

👋 Hi, I’m Kate. I am a human being, just like you. And more than anything, that is what this space is about — being, exploring, and reclaiming what it means to be fully human — together.

Although professionally I am a public health strategist at The Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and most people know me from my mental health advocacy, TEDx talk, and social media pages — Kate Speer and Wafflenugget — I don’t think of myself that way.

I think of myself as a messy human who is just trying to get out of bed and actually live a full life with mental illness.

More than that, and maybe most of all, I think of myself as a human who is determined to live well — to find herself, joy, meaning, and connection — while navigating mental illness by redefining what that means.

In this project, I embark on that adventure. I examine the human condition and humans’ conditioning. I share deeply honest stories from my lived experiences with mental illness, write the beauty that is the unabashed truth, and question just about everything I have been taught about health, wellness, mental health, and how we think about emotional pain and a life worth living.

Now, please don’t misconstrue this as me having ANY idea what I am doing. I don’t. I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. That is why this project exists and is all about unabashed curiosity — about asking these questions over and over again:

What does it actually mean to live well?

And how can I actually do so?

Since I spent a decade navigating a psychosis-inducing psychiatric misdiagnosis and still live with severe PTSD, my focus is particularly linked to mental health and liberated by celebrating the duality of joy and pain and the fact that emotions have no morality whatsoever.

In simple terms, I am just trying to return to the places I was happiest as a child — spaces where:

• Less is more and a chrysalis is all the content you need for an afternoon

• The little things are the big things and the way my dog waggled her head and tail really is some of the worlds greatest medicine

• True beauty is finding, reclaiming, and being our full selves in safety, and how that usually involves seven outfit changes and wearing party shoes to bed

• We are together — living, breathing, laughing, crying, fully ourselves — with our people.

But as easy as it is to write such truths, living them proves far harder and that is the invitation that is healing out loud.

So if you are a seeker of your one true self, that belly laugh and full body giggle and a fort made of sheets where you can cry, love and be truly safe as you are seen — this project is for you.

And no matter what, whether you join me or not, I so hope that you find what you are yourself are looking for.

Now, before diving into what the newsletter includes and giving you a little tour because I am a colorful soul and share a whole array of things here, I want to be very upfront:

I write about mental illness like it’s normal because it is normal. One in five humans live with it, myself included, and I fervently believe that there is no shame in mental illness. There is only shame in stigmatizing it.

Each Thursday morning, I send out my free Friday newsletter — Healing Out Loud.

The Free Weekly Newsletter includes:

1. Personal updates about my misadventures in healing. Ohhh the misadventures.

2. An assortment of stories, poetry and art — from both this community and my own reading adventures.

3. A prompt to further your own healing and self-reclamation practice

4. Dog pictures — always always pictures of my two dogs — Waffle and Tugboat.

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In addition to the free weekly newsletter, I also share:

• Chapters from my inaugural memoir — Maura and Me. The book explores my experiences with psychosis and disabling mental illness through the lens of best friendship. Each chapter is an essay that stands on its own but if you are interested in reading more from the series, head to Maura + Me.

• Essays about the healing power of dogs. If you are a dog person like me and that written work interests you specifically, head to Dogs are Medicine.

• A compilation of poems. I lovingly call my poems, ‘lines.’ If you are interested in reading them, head to Lines.

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Healing Out Loud is an entirely reader-supported publication. Being a paid subscriber makes my mental health advocacy and community building work possible. If you are able, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today.

A subscription costs $6 a month ($1.50 a week) or $60 a year ($1.15 a week).

Paid Subscriber Benefits Include:

• Healing Out Loud Together — This is an hour-long storytelling hour devoted to healing out loud. It is a monthly community gathering where we read aloud our stories and poems. These gatherings offer solidarity and support and our time together is nothing short of magical.

• The Patient is In — a monthly long-form piece or podcast episode that explores my lived experience with serious mental illness, a question from the community or a topic of note with an expert in that subject.

• My deepest gratitude.

Please know: if you cannot afford a subscription and would like access, simply email hi@katespeer.com with the words “subscribe” in the subject line and I will add you no questions asked. I am not here to add more barriers to an already broken system.

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Now, why read a newsletter by me?

Well, because I have lived quite an unexpected life.

And I have not only lived through it, I have grown through it too.

In 2013, after 21 psychiatric hospitalizations, a suicide attempt, and eight years of psychosis, mood lability, and self-harm, my doctors told me that I would only survive in a long-term, psychiatric, critical care facility. My care team made plans to send me there and instead of agreeing with them as I usually did, I told them no. Hell no. And I set out to do some of the hardest work I have ever done — intensive exposure response prevention therapy.

It’s been ten years since my care team told me I would only survive in a locked residential unit and today, I can proudly say:

I proved those doctors spectacularly wrong.

But now that I’ve landed myself here — to a place where I am well(ish) most of the time — I still find myself longing for more.

And that is where this project comes in — the adventure of really unpacking what it means to be well and how we can build a life that honors that revised understanding.

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Now - why subscribe?

All human beings are on their own healing adventure. And, it is my fervent belief that when we are brave enough to reclaim ourselves, we give permission to all we encounter to do the same.

I also believe that self reclamation and healing are a practice and we can all benefit from all the help, ideas and inspiration we can gett. On top of that, the more we practice kind curiosity, holding space and radical acceptance, the better the world and we will be for it.

So, if you want to learn more about yourself, the human condition and how we all have been conditioned within a community of like-minded humans — we’d love to have you!

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Whether you join me or not, I wish you nothing but the best. And I do not mean that in a sarcastic way at all. I truly wish you nothing but the best and a life where you find exactly what you are looking for.

Wishing you a day.

Kindly,

Kate Speer