THIS IS ME TRYING

Hi person-on-the-Internet, whoever you may be (or I guess hi artificial intelligence, please don’t hurt me).

I'm Rya. It's nice to meet you.

Welcome to my mind, digitalized.

So, what do you know about me so far?

Here are some things I can tell you: I love bookstores in new cities and vintage shopping. I love making incredibly niche Spotify playlists for every life experience. I love using the Nike Run Club app and making silly videos with my friends and the movie The Social Network. There's more, of course, but you'll have to keep reading.

Maybe you’re a friend, or a friend of a friend, or someone who has accidentally stumbled into this corner of the Internet (which would mean my free digital marketing certificates are working, thank God).

Maybe you heard of me from This Is Your Sign LA.

While I am writing this, it’s June 2023. I am 21 years old and I have owned my mental-health-focused loungewear/lifestyle/label/brand/concept et cetera et cetera, This Is Your Sign LA, for almost three years.

I have been focusing all my energy and attention lately on relaunching the brand for our third birthday (I love to say "our" as if I am not the sole employee, because it makes me feel less alone). I'm down to the wire here. It scares me a little to put myself and the brand back out there, if I am honest. I hate feeling vulnerable in any way. It scares me to stand before the world with something I care about and asking "Hey, will you care about this too?"

Almost as if the my fears had been heard, last night, when I was going through photos from our recent photoshoot, I got a text from a friend.

I held down the message and stared at it for so long. My mind raced as I tried to unpack the complexity and the weight of what that text meant to me.

I used to sometimes receive messages of this sort in my business DMs, using the word “saved” in reference to something the little business I started at eighteen was capable of doing for people.

The whole message of one of my best selling products, "Tell Them You Love Them" is the fact that words are powerful.

The concept of "saved" feels so overwhelming and powerful.

I feel undeserving of it. I always have.

Ever since I started This Is Your Sign, I always get the question, "What inspired you to start this business?". I find my answer changing all the time, because the heaviness of why I would choose to build a business with suicide prevention as a platform is not something I consider to be light conversation.

Here's the thing that maybe some people have guessed but I rarely talk about - the reason I care so much about mental health is because it's an issue I have struggled with almost all my life.

What happened before I started my business that led me to create it is a story for another time. But I can tell you what happened after.

I fell into a very dark place around the same time my brand started taking off. When I launched my business at eighteen, I naively thought I had overcome the truly dark parts of mental illness. Moving away from home to Los Angeles at nineteen right after COVID was really hard on me. I isolated myself from everyone who could hold me accountable or take care of me.

I was starting to receive everything I had ever dreamed about, and yet suddenly, I couldn’t get out of bed. I reversed into old, "bad" brain habits and stopped taking care of my mind and soul. I wasn't proud of myself. I felt alone and undeserving of my successes and even more alone in my failures.

I felt like I truly was a failure, and I lived in that. I was almost comfortable in my shame and sadness. I slowly stopped posting, stopped caring.

Why would anyone want to hear about mental health from someone letting their own mental illness consume them?

I really thought I was "better" when I began this journey with This Is Your Sign. The truth that everyone will tell you: healing isn’t linear. It’s true.

It is so hard to resolve oneself to the fact that pain, as well as joy, comes in waves, and, as one of my therapists put it one time, you have to teach yourself not to let the depths of your emotions fully overtake you.

Only a short while after I had the best selling day of This Is Your Sign ever, I found myself gasping for breath between sobs on the 405 freeway at two in the morning, desperately calling my best friend over and over in hopes he would pick up and remind me why I should stay, because it felt like my mind was screaming at me to drive my car into the median and to give up on everything and everyone.

How can I save other people if I can’t even trust myself to save myself?

My brain was sick and I was fighting to survive.

A few weeks ago, I was relaying this story to a friend and she said, “Sometimes there’s beauty in hitting rock bottom, because you will find you have nowhere else to go but up”.

At the end of my night on the freeway, I drove myself home. I tucked myself into bed. I woke up the next day, and I tried. I tried again, to live and live well.

Here’s the thing - the littlest things in your life are bravery. Even though I didn’t realize it or give myself the credit, I saved myself every day. The fact that I am still here is courageous. The fact you are still here is courageous.

Our lives are a f*cking miracle, whether or not you are aware of it in your bones every second or not. Not only that, but our lives are short, regardless of how you live them.

The whole purpose of my brand was to show little signs that people could be inspired by.

“Tell them you love them, life is too short not to”.

Life is too short not to.

Slowly but surely, I have begun to straighten my back and sit up taller. It has't been a linear journey by any means. But now I feel that I am finally at the point where I am brave enough to write again, brave enough to try and be proud of myself, to trust in my voice and to be there for others.

I guess what I have realized is that I used to never want people to know who was behind my brand, because I didn’t think I deserved to have the power to save others. I didn’t think that I was strong enough. And at some point, I just stopped trying. But now I want to try again.

Vulnerability is bravery, no matter the form. Even if it's in a blog post that maybe no one will read, but I want to try.

I now know I don’t have to reach a magical, nonexistent point where I am finally strong enough or healed enough. I just have to try and show up and that is enough and maybe sharing that in itself will help someone.

So, let me re-introduce myself.

My name is Rya Partible. I run This Is Your Sign LA and have for three years now. I have battled with depression and anxiety and suicidal thoughts for almost as long as I can remember. I was diagnosed with bipolar in 2022 and then re-diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. I felt so overwhelmed by the pills and the diagnoses that I stopped taking them because I didn’t know if any of that was correct. I have a semicolon tattoo on the inside of my left wrist.

I am happy to be here. I am happy you are here.

I don’t know what "mental illness" I am or what to label the darkness that has tried to creep in my mind all my life. To be honest, sometimes it feels selfish to me. I love my life and my friends and my family, but I have just always felt sad and too quickly hopeless and I don't completely know why. I do know it’s hard for me to get out of bed some days. Some days, I have meltdowns so seemingly catastrophic to me that it feels like the world is ending and life is hopeless and I still don't know how to stop them.

Sometimes I feel like I am not strong enough to save myself, but I always have.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember life is short but it is beautiful and worth getting out of bed for. It’s hard to love other people and feel loved and the most hard to love myself but I want to try.

So that’s what this is.

This is me trying.

(Thank you, Taylor Swift)

I am not perfect and I am not the poster child for perfect mental health and not the perfect spokesperson for suicide prevention but I have lived through every one of my battles and I want you to, as well.

I still don't think I have the power to save, but I think we all, as humans, have the power to love each other and inspire each other and help heal each other. I want to step into that power and really own it, for maybe the first time.

If my life thus far is a "sign" of anything, it’s living proof of all the things I have learned along the way that stuck with me enough to emblazon on pieces of clothing to share with the world.

Tell them you love them, life is too short not to.

Tell it to yourself, too.

I hope the words and ""signs" that resonate with my broken heart resonate with yours as well, and I hope they begin to heal it as they have mine.

Thank you for listening.