Being a person with some type of mental health malaise has become my identity and how I am seen by those around me. (Actually since I've been having an episode for the past six months, I've been reminded that it's been my not-so-secret identity all my life.) That being said, I've never labeled myself as a person with a depression illness or acknowledged that I have an illness. I've said I have mood swings, the blues, a chronic personality Bitch disorder, that I'm depressed today, etc.
Most of the people around me make me feel like I have some control over my depression. Heck, even I think I should be able to control it..... I'm not being paranoid about this. I know it's true! M has let it be known from early on just as much. I don't think he's changed his mind at all over the years, but now he deals with me differently. When I'm in one of my moods, he says as much and excuses me until I snap out of it. I think my mom is the only one that gets me because I'm pretty sure she deals with the same issues.
I have people tell me you're the unhappiest person I know. Can't you try to be happy? Why are you this way? What do you have to be unhappy about? You complain about everything and everyone. blah, blah, blah
I've felt a little better about life lately. I get most down when I feel like I'm alone, that I'm horrible person because of the way I feel or the things I do, and that I should be able to control my depression.
I'm not happy about acknowledging my depression as an illness and an incurable one at that. I think you can manage it and take steps to try to head episodes off at the pass, but I'm learning that you're never really cured. I would love it if it was a switch I could turn off.
My goal has always been to learn ways to deal with the way I feel, to learn how to cope, and to put myself in the best position so as to not to become ruled by it. To learn that I will always have to be mindful of that which I suffer so that I can avoid getting into situations that destabilize the tenuous balance I've been able to achieve.
This is one of the hardest parts because it takes a lot of work and requires certain recognitions. It will require me to say No to myself and others, also. I don't have to be defined by my illness, but I need to be very mindful of it with everything I do.
From the beliefnet.com article:
I suppose it's an exercise in saying the Serenity Prayer: trying to identify the things I can't change, the things I can, and asking God for a little assistance in telling them apart. In her book, "The Wisdom to Know the Difference," Eileen Flanagan writes about how we can better live the Serenity Prayer ... or navigate more gracefully through the thorny territory between our diagnoses and our opportunities. Much of it, she says, comes from accepting ourselves: with our cotton mouths and extra pounds, with our hypersensitivity to noise and stimulation, with our low threshold for stress. She writes:
Accepting life's flat tires seems to be easier for people who have accepted themselves. If you know who you are, what you are capable of, and what you are called to do, you are much less likely to waste your time and energy sweating the small stuff or even the big stuff you cannot change. You are less likely to project your uncomfortable feelings onto other people, instead of facing your feelings and learning what they have to teach you. You are less likely to waste time trying to change other people and more likely to influence them with a positive example.
I'd like to think she's right ... that the more we accept ourselves with our limitations, the more freedom we feel in living as individuals, not merely as bipolars, diabetics, or cancer victims, and the better we can distinguish the things that we can't change from the things that we can.
This may or may not have made a difference in what happened six months ago with TQC. I'll never really be able to test it because I can't go back.
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