Humans of Finch, Vol 1. Meet Steph
Welcome to the first edition of Humans of Finch!
In this series, folks will be sharing their stories about all walks of life. We hope this will be a place where we all can see there are others like us out there, where we can remember we are not alone, where we can build our empathy for each other, and where we can find some strength, joy, and inspiration.
Interested in sharing your story for a future edition? Learn more here.
For our first edition, meet Steph, and learn how one of our founders tackled her own mental health journey.
What was one of the major struggles you’ve experienced during your mental health journey?
“I was 28 when my life should’ve been in the best state it ever was. I was in a happy relationship of 12 years. I worked at one of the best startups with a meaningful mission and amazing people. My dad had reconciled with me after disowning me for several years. I finally got a corgi, my dream dog I had obsessed over. But internally I somehow felt like I was at the bottom.
There wasn’t a single obvious trigger point, but my mental spiral started with anxiety. Work had always been a big part of my identity from my childhood when I had to work at my parent’s local family business at age 8 or needed to financially support myself through college. Work gave me purpose and I used to enjoy the workaholic lifestyle to grow myself and increase my impact. At some point, however, I found myself no longer being motivated by work like before and I felt lost. My day-to-day became increasingly energy draining, but I was too hesitant to make a change to the lifestyle I thought I enjoyed. I ended up burning myself out to dread each day.
This anxiety started to spiral into other aspects of my life, and I fell into many bad habits. I stopped exercising and lived on the couch. I started to excessively snack and eat. My dread for the future made me stay up very late at night because I was too scared to wake up to face the next day. My sleep cycle was a particularly bad spiral that made me increasingly hate the future.
I had forgotten how to like myself.
I developed an increasingly negative perception despite normally being optimistic. I used to be happy that my father reconciled with me, but somehow I lost the appreciation for that milestone. I used to be happy that I could support my parents who were financially struggling, but it transformed into a burden. I used to be happily engaged to my husband, but I became weighed down by the regret of never experiencing the other side of my bisexuality. Everything positive became a negative, and I couldn’t enjoy the things I used to enjoy anymore. This spiral made me hate myself.
After a year of living one day at a time to try to not experience breakdowns, I was surprised by how much depression weight I gained and I was exhausted by how long I had been struggling for. At this point I broke down from feeling too tired to continue hating myself.”
What were a few things you found helpful for healing?
“Fortunately I was able to overcome the depression after receiving a lot of support from friends and family to improve my habits, spend time to reflect on myself, and set stronger boundaries around work.
After I was ready to make progress to dig myself out of my depression, I decided to take time off from work to spend time with loved ones and reset all my habits with sleep, exercise, and nutrition. This was a good first step that I wished I took much sooner as I was able to recognize concrete steps to help unravel a lot of my depression. It took a much longer time to get my habits and boundaries into a consistently healthier state, but the first step to change felt overwhelmingly welcoming.
Journaling also played a critical role in my recovery. Eventually I left my previous job to start Finch with Nino, and while building the early versions of Finch, we learned how powerful expressive writing could be for mental health. Even if we couldn’t retain any users with Finch at the time, I was mentally benefiting from using our product to reflect on the ups and downs of my days. I realized that I typically discounted the good moments in the day unless I spent deliberate effort to recall positive experiences. I could also notice I wasn’t spending enough time on things that were important to me like family, so reflecting gave me opportunities to re-evaluate and make adjustments to live by my values.
It took almost 2 years of lifestyle changes and exploring different habits to improve my mental health. But I also realize that many people can struggle for a much longer period of time. I hope that my shared story here and my time toward building Finch can help others navigate their mental health journeys more easily.”
We hope you enjoyed the first edition of Humans of Finch! If you are interested in sharing your story for a future edition, please share your information here. If you have feedback for us, or if you’re a journalist or writer who would like to interview folks in the community and write these profiles, please reach out to us at humans-of-finch@befinch.com.
