Meet Malia Braiedy

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Malia Braiedy a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Malia, so happy to have you on the platform and I think our readers are in for a treat because you’ve got such an interesting story and so much insight and wisdom. So, let’s start with a topic that is relevant to everyone, regardless of industry etc. What do you do for self-care and how has it impacted you?

Throughout these last few years, especially, I’ve made an intentional effort to include more self-care in my everyday life, and the impacts have been incredible. I used to think of self-care as selfish and would limit it to my worst days only, and I’m grateful to have realized how necessary it is and how diverse it can be. On my better days, some of my favorite self-care activities include geocaching, mixing mini-sets, writing, and spending time with my loved ones (especially my cats (: ). On my lesser days, my self-care is more prioritized around taking care of my basic needs- food, water, sleep, cleanliness, movement, and even more time with my cats. I’ve also found that some of my self-care activities mirror things that I enjoyed as a child (singing, having my hair played with, coloring, etc), and that some days, taking care of myself looks like tending to myself how my mother would if I were sick. Focusing on my self-care looks a little different every day, but it’s consistently about listening to my body and trying to treat myself with a little more compassion, creating joy and comfort within and exclusively for myself.

Truly, the impacts have been amazing, and my therapist was right when she said it would get easier as I kept doing it. Tuning in to how I feel, I’ve been able to create a catalog of different activities that I can do to spark my joy, many of which involve being in nature, and I’ve gotten to know myself a hell of a lot better than I used to. The impact has been noticeable to those around me, too, as my self-esteem has finally gotten to a respectable-yet-humble amount and I’m able to walk into a room confident and self-assured, something I wasn’t able to do for a long time. I’m so grateful for the change in perspective, as the more aware we are of our wounds and what we can do to heal them, the more we tend to ourselves, the better we all are to one another.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

Whether I’m behind a mic or having conversations in community, a majority of my inspiration comes from my journey with mental health and passion for de-stigmatization. I’d consider myself a Jacqueline of many trades, due to both personal interests and the economy. Alongside my roles as a Bartender and PCA, in the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to expand my love for music into a career as a Professional DJ, helping to curate the perfect playlists for my clients’ most treasured days. I’ve also had the opportunity to get back into my theatrical roots through hosting weekly trivia at Macaluso’s Roadhouse (Thursdays) and Shore 96 (Sundays), and I’ve been able to begin to tie in my passion for biological research and education on my podcast, minneyapolis, which is currently exclusively on Spotify and in the works.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

While I attribute a lot of my growth to the community I’ve curated around me, there are three qualities of my own that I feel were the most influential in my mental health journey:

1. Communication – Opening up about how you feel and what’s going on in your brain can be really scary, but it’s so important to find the courage to try to do so anyway. In struggling with intrusive thoughts and various triggers, it felt overwhelming to let my loved ones into my thought processes. It took a lot of practice and patience, but it’s gotten a lot easier, and it’s helped my opportunities for growth and relationships so much. Learning how you communicate best is important too, as is communicating these styles to those you care about so you can understand each other better!
2. Resilience – No matter how tough things get in life, you have to keep going. I’d say for a while, I did so begrudgingly and for the sake of my loved ones, but in the last few years, especially, I’ve found there’s a lot of joy that can be created in resilience. The conditions of being human feel exhausting a lot of the time, so I think it’s just as important to celebrate the small victories as much as the large milestones. In the words of the great Hannah Montana, “Life is what you make it”, and in my opinion, it’s really cool that the human brain and body can bounce back even stronger from so many different things, whether it’s back to someone’s normal or into someone even more wonderful.
3. Empathy – Truly, you never really know what someone else is going through, so I feel it’s important to lead conversations with kindness and understanding, and to be open to alternate perspectives and experiences. In my own journey, there were times when my OCD spirals were all-consuming, and the empathy shown to me by the people in my life gave me the space to heal gently and grow into a better version of myself. One of my more challenging objectives in the last few years of therapy has been learning how to have empathy for my younger self and realizing how much of life is just doing your best and trying to be better, and creating that understanding within myself has healed parts of me I didn’t even realize needed healing.

Just like any skill, developing these takes practice, but practice makes progress! As long as you’re trying your best to be the best version of yourself, for both your and those around you, then you’re doing amazing. Try not to be so hard on yourself; the world is hard enough.

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?

The biggest obstacle I’m currently facing is one that I’ve been facing for as long as I can remember- my own brain. While I’ve lived with obsessive-compulsive disorder since childhood, I didn’t get diagnosed or start treatment for it until 2023, and I feel like a large contribution to that is the stigmas and general misunderstandings that surround such a complex disorder. For a long time, I wrote myself off as irreversibly crazy, but when I finally started to try to understand my diagnosis (and the neurophysiology generally involved with mental health), I found it a lot easier to show empathy towards myself and finally meet myself where I was at. Especially on the days I long for an external off-switch for my brain, I try to meet myself with kindness and understanding, balancing whatever task is at hand with ample self-care, therapy, and community. A lot of my healing has involved communicating what’s going on in my brain as well, which has been just as freeing as it is daunting, and has been worth summoning the courage ~95% of the time. So far, overcoming OCD is intense and something I’m sure I’ll be in the process of for a while longer, but it’s doable, and I am determined.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sites.google.com/view/malia-braiedy
• Instagram: @maliamixesmn , @maliabraiedy
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malia-braiedy/
• Other: TikTok & Twitch: @braiedz4dayz

Image Credits

Image Credit: Malachi Gibson (Only for image 4 of me DJing for a Miracle Arts event)