MARCH 29th, 2016
By JOHN LILIES
We have recently shared with you, our readers and followers, that Lana and I are huge supporters of mental health initiatives. Throughout our lives, various forms of mental illness have touched us both with friends and family, and we have each experienced our own struggles along the way.
While developing Carbon Lilies, we decided that we want our work to include our support for mental health awareness, research, and initiatives. If you have read a handful of our articles, you know that while we do cover a lot of the paranerdal experience, we have many different topics to share with you. We know that a great many people have dealt with or are currently navigating issues related to mental health and mental illness, either privately or publicly, personally or via friends, family and co-workers.
Carbon Lilies is about our trips through time – museums, haunts, galleries and life. Life stories are important to us; so important that we want to share different life accounts among the various articles we post. Last year, we began interviewing different people so that we could share some of these tales with all of you. Thus far, we have focused mostly on topics related to the paranormal but within those interviews, we have also tried to present the person. We want to bring you more interviews with more people sharing their life experiences: plans, fears, memories, failures, celebrations, and successes.
We have, so far, brought to you interviews with Andrea Bailey of Unearthing Shadows, Patrick Keller of The Big Séance Podcast, Chris Medina of Platinum Predictions, and today we are introducing you to Sally Goncalves of Outta.
Sally has been an incredibly close friend of mine since 2001. We have gone through a lot together and supported each other during some of the darkest times. Sally’s life experience has successfully brought her to realize a huge dream of owning and operating an apparel and accessory line, called Outta. The focus of Outta is to spread the important message “get outta your head and into your heart”.
So with that lengthy introduction complete, get into your comfy clothes, grab yourself a drink, settle into your favourite cozy spot, and join us for part one of our interview with Sally Goncalves.
[John] Thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. Even before you started this initiative, I had actually been thinking that I would like to interview you because of everything that you’ve gone through; it builds a beautiful person and so it was important to me already. [Outta] made it even more of an opportunity, because while you’re building this brand new adventure of your own, we get to let people know about you and your stories. I think that you have so many important aspects going on with this.
[Sally] Okay, so no pressure.
[John] No pressure! I’m going to just start at the beginning… Who are you?
[Sally] Okay. Oh. [Sally had a lot of nervous laughter here] I don’t know. I guess I’m still trying to figure it out. [Laughing] Who am I? Um… Oh gosh where do you begin?
[John’s note: Sally laughed a fair bit while she was trying to sort out who she is, on the spot. As she started to tell her story, she quickly calmed, centred herself and settled into a story that told me so much more than I had ever known about her life. It’s amazing what you learn about the people closest to you, when you ask a different question…]
[Sally] I was born in Canada to two Portuguese immigrants and they were very poorly educated. My mom is illiterate; she never went to school. My dad, he went to school in Portugal but he was very limited in his education. So, my mom stayed at home. I have three older brothers and my dad worked a lot to provide for us; and my mom has mental illness. [Deep, thoughtful sigh…] I don’t know really what she has. I know, growing up, she had bouts of depression. I remember her being in bed for what seemed like days – that’s from a child’s perspective. I remember going to visit her in the Psych Ward of the hospital, when I was a kid. I don’t know why she was there but I remember going to visit her in there. She doesn’t get depressed anymore but she talks to herself, she’s very emotional – she can’t control her emotions. She has calmed down, for sure, since I was a kid but growing up in that environment, it affected me. My dad self-medicated – he was an alcoholic.
Looking back, I felt like I was susceptible myself. I was afraid of everything and I was probably depressed too, but I didn’t really know until my late teens, early twenties that something was off. So, I kind of grew up in a really tense, unpredictable, scary home. My brothers, who are much older than me – there are 22 years of difference between me and my oldest brother – thankfully for them, they were kind of my escape. They would save me from a lot of those times when my mom was having some sort of episode. My parents fought on a daily basis – I mean physically fighting. The cops would come to our house and that was kind of a daily thing for me. Looking back, I wonder how I didn’t get taken away from them.
As I became a young adult, I didn’t really handle stress very well. I would become depressed – where I couldn’t function. I would be like my mom, laying in bed hopeless, kind of dreading life. That came and went, until a few years ago. So, I’ve had to find a way to navigate through depression.
I wouldn’t say that I’m a depressed, anxious person – I don’t like to use those terms. I’ve also found that with mental illness, we attach our identity to it too much. People say ‘I am depressed’ and I’d rather we say ‘I have depression’. You don’t really say that with anything else.
[John] Why do you find that different?
[Sally] Because you’re not your depression, you’re not your cancer, you’re not your diabetes, you’re not your broken leg, you’re not your cold. You say you have a cold, or ‘I have cancer’, and I don’t know how it happened with mental illness but people are identified with that issue. I think that’s a big problem. That needs to shift. The perspective on how we even word it and how we describe it, I think it would make a huge difference because it is a mental issue. It affects you physically, it affects you emotionally and it affects you mentally. That [wording] plays on the intensity of it; it’s doesn’t help. It doesn’t help the situation, so whenever I’m having anxiety I say ‘I’m feeling anxious’, you know; it’s a sensation, I’m feeling it, it’s not me. It’s there and eventually it’s going to pass just like when you have a cold. When you have a cold, you don’t know when it’s going to pass; it could be two days, it could be two weeks, you don’t know, but you know eventually it’s going pass. You don’t worry about it. You don’t feel good, you’re not yourself but you know that eventually you’re not going to have that cold anymore. So, I think that we need to start looking at certain mental health issues – I’m not saying all, because there is a big spectrum – but certainly ones that are more situational or stress-related, so we don’t make it worse. I’ve kind of taught myself to look at it that way and I find it really helps me.
[John] That’s such a great perspective.
[Sally] It’s not easy. I’m not saying ‘oh well I do this and it goes away’. It doesn’t go away. It’s still there but I don’t make it worse than it already is.
So yeah, I think that if we just change that – that little, tiny shift of looking at it and labeling it differently – I think that makes a big difference. That’s just from my own personal experience from what I’ve noticed when I was in those dark places. I really identified with it and it’s hard not to because you do feel like you’ve been taken over. It does feel like it’s swallowed you up and you do feel like you’re never going to feel like yourself again, when you’re in it. You do, eventually [feel like yourself again]. I mean it’s different for everybody, it’s a different time for everybody but that’s where the hope comes in.
[John] Do you feel like that [experience growing up] has shaped the decisions you’ve made about your life, in terms of what to do with your life?
[Sally] Absolutely. I feel that the times where I did become really depressed were the times that I was supposed to make a major decision and I didn’t know how, without letting somebody down. I just didn’t have the confidence, I didn’t have the self-esteem; and I didn’t know that at the time but now looking back, I think it’s interesting that when I became depressed it was always with this major decision. I just didn’t have the coping skills to handle the change, because I was really afraid when I was a kid. I was afraid to do anything. So that definitely shaped me because as a young adult, I had these opportunities to do great things like travel and move out with girlfriends, and I didn’t do it because I was afraid. My mom always said things like ‘No, you can’t do that. This is going to happen to you’ or ‘What if this happens to you?’ and it was just so fear-based and I really was affected by that.
The good thing is that I am not like that with my kids. I am completely opposite to that, where I tell them ‘You guys have got to go’ [laughing], ‘You’ve got to go see the world’; and give them the confidence to know that they can, and I know this sounds cheesy, but they can do whatever it is they want to do if they work hard enough. Just try to build that confidence in them so when they get to that point in their lives, they’ll be confident in their decisions; and whatever may come, they’ll be able to handle it - and if they don’t handle it, that’s okay. They’ll know how to handle the not handling it, where they’re not consumed by anxiety or stress or uncertainty.
[John] Are you open with them when you’re experiencing a bout of anxiety or depression, or whatever it is that you’re going through at the time? Are you letting them know what it is that’s going on or do you hide it? Or, is that something that you struggle with?
[Sally] No. With Outta, they know that it’s supporting mental health [initiatives]. I’ve told my kids that mommy, in the past, has had depression and I’ve explained to them what depression is. My daughter, who is 10, knew about it because they’ve talked about it at school. One of the teachers actually opened up about his own experience with it and how he had to go on medication. So she actually knew what it was. When they were really young, that was the last time that I was depressed and in bed, and it was a whole summer when I was really ill. I don’t think they remember that because they were quite young. So I tell them when I’m anxious and we talk about it. I’ve taught them how to talk to their anxiety and be with it. I’m trying to teach them techniques that I feel work for me and I don’t really make it a big deal. I tell them it will go away, that it always goes away. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it will go away if you don’t feed it.
So, yes I’m open with it. I’m a pretty emotional and intense person anyway, so in our household we don’t really hide our emotions; we let them be and we talk about it and move on. I don’t really think it’s helpful for anyone [to not talk about it] and we are trying to bring awareness, so the whole point is to talk about what’s going on. My son is nine and he’s a boy, so he doesn’t really care [right now] but my daughter listens and I think she understands.
[John] And your husband?
[Sally] [My husband] is very solid in his emotions, where he doesn’t take them very seriously. Actually, when I met him I was depressed and he stuck around. I’ll be the first to say that I am not easy to live with at all; I am up and down, up and down and it takes a man like him to be married to me because he’s very grounded. He doesn’t take anything too seriously and he’s very calming to be around and very supportive. He’s great.
[John] You have a background in hair styling; did that lend itself at all to starting this new venture?
[Sally] I think so. When I first started doing hair dressing, I was very passionate about it. I was very young – I started when I was 18. I was very ambitious and I wanted to have my own hair salon at that time. I wanted to own my own ‘thing’. I didn’t want to work for somebody forever. I wanted to open my own salon and I had it all designed in my head and I knew what it was going to look like. That was a decision that I wasn’t confident enough to make. So, I didn’t go that route and I ended up working at a really nice, wonderful salon for about 13 years. Something inside me though, was always telling me there was more; that there was something else I was supposed to do. Then I had kids and decided to focus on being home with my kids. But I always had this entrepreneurial urge, so I think that doing this now has stemmed from that.
It’s funny that when you’re in it, you don’t really see the connections – it’s only when you look back. I’ve been thinking that I remember feeling the way I’m feeling now about my company, when I was young and pumped and I was set on owning my own salon. My passion isn’t in hair styling anymore so I have no desire to open up a salon but I do have a desire to run a business, so I do think that has definitely played a part in it.
[John] So, what is Outta?
[Sally] Outta is, right now, a small apparel and accessory line. Meaning, we only have tank tops and hair ties. We have two items, but that is eventually going to grow. I didn’t want to just start with only a couple of things, but then I never would have started. If I had to have all of these things lined up I would have never got it going. So I decided to just start and see where it goes. We are introducing t-shirts very soon, because people are asking for them. Lots of people want to wear t-shirts.
It’s not really about the apparel though, funny enough. It’s about the message. It’s really about my personal mantra that I have adopted into my life. The message is to ‘get outta your head’. That came to me through an amazing therapist of mine; I call her Doctor V. I remember, the last time that I had depression, my best friend recommended that I go to see her. I sat with her for two hours and I was just sobbing and sobbing because I didn’t want to be depressed. I wanted somebody to tell me I wasn’t depressed, that I was just having a hard time. Even though deep down I knew I was, I wanted somebody to tell me that I wasn’t.
After my rant and my sobbing ended, I looked at her and I said, ‘I’m depressed, aren’t I?’ This desperate question, and she looked at me and said, ‘yes’. She said, ‘you are depressed but that’s because you’re in here [Sally pointed to her head]. You’re in your head. We’re going to get you out of your head and we’re going to get you in here [Sally motioned towards her chest], into your heart.’ That was the last thing she said to me and I went home and I was thinking ‘what? Yes! That’s exactly what it is!’ It was just so simple and that’s exactly what she did. She took me from my head to my heart. Her therapy was not your traditional, cognitive therapy; it was much deeper than that. It was learning to connect to that place inside of me that I had never connected with, because I had been so distracted and I had been living in my head forever – since I was a kid. So I really owe the phrase to her because she said that to me and it’s something that has stuck with me ever since. So I know when I’m getting really anxious or overthinking and just going to that place of thinking I can’t handle things, I tell myself to stop and that I’m in my head – to go take some deep breaths, do yoga, do whatever I need to do to get out of that place. I don’t want to live in there any more.
So I thought that if I feel like this, I’m sure a lot of people feel like this. It’s such a simple but powerful message and so I wanted to tell people about it. I thought a fun way of telling people about it would be on clothing. I know for me, while I was going through therapy I also started doing yoga and I became really serious about a yoga routine and a meditation routine. That played a huge part in my healing and I still do it today. I feel like that’s my medicine. So that’s why with Outta, we promote yoga, meditation, activity and movement – that type of self-care. I know it’s different for everyone but for me, that’s something that I do that I find super helpful and I know when I don’t do it, I see a big difference. So at Outta, we promote self-care and support mental health at the same time because it goes hand-in-hand.
So that’s how Outta came to be. It was just an idea, wondering how I could get this message out and I thought I could put it on something. I thought tank tops were good because you can do activity in them or you can [wear them for something else]; and hair ties because I have the background from being a hairdresser and I just thought it would be something fun. So that’s what we’ve started with and I hope that it will grow and expand. But I’m just starting out, so we’ll see.
[John] You’ve talked about self-care and on your website you call it self-care apparel…
[Sally] Self-care awareness apparel.
[John] How would you define what that is? To me, that was even a new term.
[Sally] So self-care awareness apparel is basically bringing awareness to the importance of self-care; with anybody, whether you have mental health issues or not. It’s important for everyone, but because we’re supporting mental health, the importance of self-care in recovery or healing and maintaining your well-being is really important, especially in our culture. So that’s why we named it self-care awareness apparel (a friend helped me name it – I won’t take all the credit for it). Because the awareness is really important – you need the awareness first, to say ‘hey, there’s something up and I need to do something about it’; and we’re advocating for self-care.
So that’s why we wanted to donate proceeds to mental health initiatives. Anything to do with mental health, we’re open to; programs, initiatives, charities, organizations – all of it. There’s a lot of great stuff going on so I didn’t want to lock into one specific charity; I wanted to be open to [different things]. There are lots of schools bringing [in] mindfulness programs. Students are even starting mental health initiatives, so I would be more than happy to help out if a bunch of students were starting something in a school and they don’t have the funds for it. I’d love to be a part of that. It’s a lot of reaching out and getting the word out and networking; that’s a lot of what I’m doing right now. It’s hard, it’s very hard - a lot of work, a lot of time. I have to remind myself that we just launched last month [February 2016], I’m barely a month old. I can barely send an email and now I’m on all these social media platforms and I’m trying to figure it all out. I need someone to help me, so I have my family helping me. It’s gonna take time, for sure, but I’m positive that something will come out of it.
[John] Things already are coming from it.
[Sally] Yeah, things already are coming out of it. I think if we reach the right people, then it will create some sort of change somewhere.
END PART 1
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading Part One of our interview with Sally. This has been a wonderful experience and we are really looking forward to sharing Part Two very soon, so stay tuned!
If you would like to have a look at Outta or contact Sally, please visit:
