Mental Illness Awareness Week

I've been so busy that I hardly had time to pause. Hence the lack of posts. I haven't been this busy in 10 years. I guess it's another stepping stone up from the complete dysfunction I used to have only a couple years ago. So it's another time for mental health issues awareness. I'll relate what I've been going through on the subject.

This should be an obvious fact for both sufferers and their loved ones that having a mental illness will affect how productive you can be. And yet, it can be so hard to keep in mind. For severe depression you're really not going to get much done at all. For anxiety, stress, personality disorders it will be that sometimes you can't function in certain situations or on certain days. If you have bipolar and are in a manic phase, you'll get a whole ton of stuff done in the blink of an eye sometimes. For ADHD your productivity levels will fluctuate a lot. All this to say, if someone has a mental illness don't compare them with the same measuring stick that you would use for the average person. What am I trying to say? First let me make sure that I don't sound like I am saying that all people with mental illnesses are deficient. Like I said, some can be more productive than the average person and all kinds of varying degrees of productivity are seen in different people. But it sure does throw a wrench into your life plans especially since a lot of mental illnesses come out during early adulthood.

My life plan was to graduate with a fine arts degree and become a full-time working artist. That meant that I would freelance a lot and I knew that. But that takes quite the amount of productive self-discipline which became one of the many things that mental illness stole from me. In fact, I barely was able to graduate since I became very suicidal in my last year of university and instead of being a working artist, I fell into a hellish abyss of dysfunction. I was completely unproductive for quite a few years. You know what made it worse? Expecting the same from myself as I always did, even before I got sick. It drove me crazy to think about how I was not achieving my goals and how I was wasting time while everyone else my age were getting careers started etc...

For a long time I couldn't let go of my original life plan and it didn't help that my dad thought the same thing. We both put extra pressure on me that made my illnesses worse. I saw myself as a failure and hated myself more. But through therapy I began to see that using the same measuring stick I used before is unrealistic. I lowered my expectations with difficulty but it really helped me achieve more than I would have if I didn't. If I was able to get out of bed that day and go grocery shopping, that was a great achievement. If I did the cooking for my dad and brother that day, I learned to be proud of that. If I was able to put off taking drugs until after therapy I was impressed with myself. This sounds kinda sad but it actually gave me a new starting point that I could work with for future growth. With less pressure on me to achieve, I was freer to work on myself and eventually go back to school with a new life plan. And now I'm on track, older than almost everyone in my classes but on track with a plan that has taken me step by step back into functionality and productivity. I'm even better at school now than ever in my life and I know God will keep guiding me into a grace-giving career as a psychologist. It's funny, in my dysfunction, I found my function.