Creation of ETERNAL pt.2

   Welcome back, this week I'm going to be discussing the other side of the ETERNAL. I'll be giving background on how mental health has affected my life, and how I'm dealing with it. 

   I've experienced death and on going sickness from when I was like 11 or 12. Not personally, but from the people closest to me. Over time you become numb to a lot of things in life. The traumatic experiences don't seem real, and you think you should be feeling a lot worse. You don't feel the overwhelming joy of the positives in life either. I didn't experience the true feelings of my dad passing until like 8 years after it happened. That's the first time in my life I think I experienced depression. It wasn't long but I would just wake up not knowing if I was going to have a good or bad day. A bad day was letting my emotions get the best of me where couldn't even go to the gym. My dad always worried about others, and never let anyone worry about him. I'm exactly the same way, I thought I was dealing with my thoughts and feelings but I really wasn't. 

   I don't like bringing up my past, if you ask I have no problem talking about it because I feel like I'm here to help people who are struggling like myself. I know a lot of people who will read this didn't even know my dad had passed. That's fine I don't need anyone to feel bad for me but it's the reason I am the way I am. I tend to be closer to people who have gone through something that was a traumatic experience, because you look at life different and understand the stuff a lot of people focus on really doesn't matter. 

   Moving forward to just recently, being at home during quarantine has really opened up my eyes. Mental health has been a huge issue that was put on hold before with our daily lives. The biggest thing for me was after a few weeks of being home I experienced in one hour my dog go from being perfectly healthy, to dying in my arms. I wouldn't want my worst enemy to experience that feeling. Dealing with that while being stuck at home, left me with no outlet to deal with my emotions. Later on in the summer I developed this pain in my stomach, that would go from a pain level ranging from 8 to 3. I didn't understand what was causing it and would just go day to day dealing with it. At this time the idea of ETERNAL was just beginning, I was doing a lot of research on the do's and don'ts of starting a clothing company.

   A few months later with this pain in my stomach still relatively mild, I began to experience heart palpitations. This is when you just randomly take deep breaths, like your heart skips a beat. I thought it was just from too much caffeine. The more I was researching this feeling, the more I realized all of these symptoms were due to my anxiety. I went to the doctor for the feeling in my heart, and when I began taking the medication my stomach pain instantly went away. After a few weeks of my head being clearer, I started thinking to when all of these feelings began to develop. I couldn't determine any specific time because I was just dealing with everything in my head alone. It was just piling up and I just believed one day I would get over it, and that isn't the case. 

   If you have any questions or comments i'd love to hear from you all. Within the next week i'll be a new colorway! I'll be posting only on the Eternal.19xx Instagram page so be sure to follow!

Thanks, Jonathon

Jeff Gordon is the Goat.