Merry Christmas! I have been successfully weaned of medication for a couple years.
Posted Dec 26 2010 12:00am
Merry Christmas!
If you have read my blog in the past or have just stumbled upon it, I want you to know that recovery IS possible. I am totally weaned off of drugs. My goal five years ago was to write an autobiography about how I was written off as disabled, almost a “throw-away.” Many, especially the professionals, thought I should be on meds for the rest of my life.
I am a successful person now. Success is in the eye of the beholder, but I am willing to bet no one in the town I now live, would ever guess that I have a mental illness or that at one time I was basically a drooling fool. Drooling because of the meds!
As I said, I thought I would write an autobiography, but I am still to scared to do it. I feel 90 percent recovered. I head up a small non-profit agency and I am an artist. At this time I don’t make enough money. I am scared that if I went public with my story, I might need future employment. Will employers not really want me?
I will give you an example. I have been very, very busy so I wrote a generic email and blind carbon copied it to several of my friends. In the email I said that I was too busy to put up my Christmas decorations and that we didn’t have electricity for the part of the house that we wanted to put the decorations. Well, a friend who knew me from my depression and bipolar mania days wrote back to say she was so sorry that I was feeling blue.
Blue! I was busy, busy, busy. I’m wasn’t sad, blue or depressed.
Now this person was/is a very good friend who stuck with me through the worse. But I suspect she will always see me as mentally ill. We never see each other any more. We met in the days before Internet and we live thousands of miles apart. I guess I haven’t told her about my long journey off the meds. She saw me at my worse. To be fair, she doesn’t know about the new me.
But the fact that I my busyness was misconstrued for the blues as why I had no decorations was revealing to how people view you once you have been labeled as mentally ill.
Merry Christmas!
If you have read my blog in the past or have just stumbled upon it, I want you to know that recovery IS possible. I am totally weaned off of drugs. My goal five years ago was to write an autobiography about how I was written off as disabled, almost a “throw-away.” Many, especially the professionals, thought I should be on meds for the rest of my life.
I am a successful person now. Success is in the eye of the beholder, but I am willing to bet no one in the town I now live, would ever guess that I have a mental illness or that at one time I was basically a drooling fool. Drooling because of the meds!
As I said, I thought I would write an autobiography, but I am still to scared to do it. I feel 90 percent recovered. I head up a small non-profit agency and I am an artist. At this time I don’t make enough money. I am scared that if I went public with my story, I might need future employment. Will employers not really want me?
I will give you an example. I have been very, very busy so I wrote a generic email and blind carbon copied it to several of my friends. In the email I said that I was too busy to put up my Christmas decorations and that we didn’t have electricity for the part of the house that we wanted to put the decorations. Well, a friend who knew me from my depression and bipolar mania days wrote back to say she was so sorry that I was feeling blue.
Blue! I was busy, busy, busy. I’m wasn’t sad, blue or depressed.
Now this person was/is a very good friend who stuck with me through the worse. But I suspect she will always see me as mentally ill. We never see each other any more. We met in the days before Internet and we live thousands of miles apart. I guess I haven’t told her about my long journey off the meds. She saw me at my worse. To be fair, she doesn’t know about the new me.
But the fact that I my busyness was misconstrued for the blues as why I had no decorations was revealing to how people view you once you have been labeled as mentally ill.