From Layoff to Launch: Alyssa Ostroff's Mental Health Journey

April 1st, 2025. An email. Five years as a Senior Graphic Designer at the CDC, and just like that, it was over.

Alyssa Ostroff thought it was an April Fools' joke. She stared at it waiting for the punchline. There wasn't one.

What followed wasn't just job loss grief. It was everything. The career, yes, but also the identity she had wrapped around it. The stability. The plan. Underneath all of that was something she had been outrunning for years: the realization, in her early thirties, that she had spent most of her life surviving rather than actually living.

The Layers Underneath

Alyssa grew up in a home with abuse and neglect. She wouldn't fully name or understand the impact until adulthood, when diagnoses of Complex PTSD, AUDHD, and Narcolepsy finally gave shape to what she had always felt but couldn't explain. For decades, the feeling had been that something was fundamentally wrong with her. Turns out, she had just never had the right language.

She's been no contact with her parents for 3 years now. The estrangement grief is its own complicated, layered thing. There's no clean ending to it, no resolution that makes it hurt less. It just becomes something you learn to carry differently.

One Month Later, She Built Something

One month after losing her job, on May 1st, 2025, Alyssa launched Self-Care Shirts.

She had started drawing again, not for clients or deadlines, but for herself. Phrases she needed to see somewhere. Affirmations that felt actually honest instead of aggressively cheerful. Dark humor that made the unbearable feel a little lighter. "Got Trauma?" wasn't a joke. It was an exhale.

Every design is hand-drawn in Procreate. Every single one is something she personally needed to hear. "Be Who You Needed When You Were Younger" came during her first year of estrangement. "Not Broken" was drawn the month she lost her career. The whole brand is a visual diary of her hardest moments, turned into something wearable.

Ten percent of every order goes to 988 and The Trevor Project. That was never optional.

What Self-Care Actually Looks Like

Real self-care, Alyssa will tell you, doesn't look like what Instagram sold you. It looked like going no contact with people who were actively harming her. Learning to say no without a paragraph of justification. Giving herself permission to rest without earning it first. And humor, leaning into the darkly funny side of trauma recovery, because sometimes laughing is the only thing left.

On hard days she puts on a shirt that says "It's Okay to Not Be Okay." Something about wearing the words on her own body helps her actually believe them.

One Year Old, Right on Time

Self-Care Shirts turned one year old on May 1st, 2025. The first day of Mental Health Awareness Month. She didn't plan that timing. It just landed that way.

What She Wants You to Know

Her advice isn't soft: name what you're carrying. You can't heal what you won't acknowledge. Find a therapist who specializes in your specific thing, not just any therapist, the right one. Let yourself grieve the people who were supposed to love you and didn't. Find the people who get it.

You are not broken. You are not too much. You are not behind. Healing doesn't follow a timeline, and some days will feel like going backwards. Those days are part of it too.