The psych-evals had to be wrong. I did not have a split mind. The person I knew myself to be could not be schizophrenic. The monsters I’d been seeing for years were real.
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I can’t really begin to describe how it feels to “go manic” other than it feels like your brain is being taken over and that you have this heightened sense of paranoia. For me, that meant that the government was watching me, studying my every move.
Of course, the first thing that comes into play is the stigma. The number of times I’ve heard someone say, “I’m so OCD!” the pop culture meme for explaining away control issues. At this point I’m aware of how social stigma functions, so I won’t be letting it get me down. Still, it’s out there in spades, pushing the self-stigma triggers ever more so, prompting mindful response over knee-jerk reaction. Dealing with another diagnosis is challenging enough without letting stigma derail my quality of life.
The staff on our wing had their work cut out for them, with twenty-four patients to attend to. Community therapy concentrated on setting and achieving goals. Occupational therapy focused on creatively integrating right- and left-brained processes. Twenty-four individual viewpoints on life; twenty-four souls needing to communicate, each in their own unique way. A microcosm of the very world we longed to be a part of, treating one another with respect when someone went off the rails, supporting one another when life’s lessons got too hard to shoulder alone.
When I choose to agree with the shame I feel, I am the one giving power to stigma. I am the only one who has the power to break this internal stigma because I get to choose what I believe about myself. So for me breaking stigma requires intentionally breaking out of the mindset my childhood gave me. It requires me to talk back to my mental tapes that tell me I am not enough.
When I see pictures of me growing up, I always look straight in my eyes. There I see determination to protect my family and to survive.
I am proud of that girl who fiercely grasped on to the sliver of hope she had and refused to let go.
I dream of the day where instead of feeling defensive, I let down my guard and allow myself to feel beautiful in my own skin. Most days I can manage to accept the skin am in. I don’t feel ugly, but I also do not feel beautiful. Like many people…
I want anybody who’s struggling to know that I’m okay now even though i never thought i would be.
I knew my confession was motivated by the hope that I could change the trajectory of my life. I wanted to find a way out of depression more than I wanted to keep hiding my compulsive self-injury. I wanted an end to secrets, an end to shame. I wanted my classmates to look me in the eye and accept me for who I was, not for girl who I pretended to be.
Change is often an agonizingly slow process, but from this side I can say it truly is worth it. While I continued to struggle with self-harm for three more years eventually I developed a support system that helped me to achieve my goal of sobriety—11 years now.
To this day I live with reoccurring episodes of depression, but even that has changed. I am quicker to recognize the downward spiral, quicker to seek the help I need. I have learned to say on the good days and on the bad, “I am lucky to be alive. “
