Category: recovery

Gnocchi Recipe

Christina BruniLeave a comment

Readers: I failed. At the gnocchi recipe. It was a total disaster.

I burned the inside bottom of the saucepan and had to throw out the saucepan.

It was a recipe I found in the Audrey at Home cookbook written by Luca Dotti–Audrey Hepburn’s younger son.

This experiment convinced me to not want to try to make the gnocchi again. Not at all. The food I’ve cooked from recipes comes out great. Not so with the gnocchi. It was a total disaster.

Wind-up:

I’m tearing through a KMart stocking up on items to the tune of $55. I bought a turquoise baking dish along with the replacement saucepan and other sundries.

You can get household items at KMart on the cheap. Though I didn’t relish having to spend the big bucks to buy another saucepan.

This gnocchi failure seems like the perfect metaphor for recovery and for life:

If at first you don’t succeed, consider Plan B. Figure out your next move when continuing down the same path isn’t an option.

A person is often forced to reinvent themselves when Plan A doesn’t go as planned.

This requires having a sense of humor. Laughter can be the best medicine as an adjunct to SZ medication. I want to tell amusing stories more so than to focus on the hell.

Now not all of our foiled efforts are as laughably raucous as a gnocchi recipe.

Yet IMHO the lesson here is that sometimes a mistake is just a mistake. The option we choose at the time (like going into a gray flannel career when you’re a creative madwoman) seems like the right one.

It’s only in retrospect that we realize: “What was I thinking?” It starts out innocuous. It seems like a good idea. Like wanting to try out a gnocchi recipe. Then you’re full-tilt into a mistake.

Recognizing the need to change direction in our lives is necessary.

That’s the moral of the gnocchi story.

I’ll talk about this in the coming blog entries: taking risks and risking change.

Life IS Fair

Christina BruniLeave a comment

I realized yesterday that life IS fair. It’s fair because regardless of what happens to us we have control over how we respond.

It might seem odd that I say this yet it just might be true. My hope is that when people read my memoir they see that I fought to have a better life. This was my response when I was shunted into a second long-term day program.

I will always be averse to having a young person languish in a day program for longer than nine months. I recommend obtaining goal-setting services at an Intensive Psychiatric Rehabilitation Treatment (IPRT) program instead.

The wind-up is that a person can be successful later in life. Where you start is not where you have to remain.

I know a guy who collected a disability check all his life. At 55 he said: “This is it. I want to get a job helping people.” He got a job as a peer advocate and years later was able to retire.

It’s not ever over.

I’ll keep this blog entry short and repeat:

Where you start is not where you have to remain.

Added Attraction – Extra Blog Entry

Christina BruniLeave a comment

I wanted to publish an extra blog entry today after having read an Atlantic magazine news article on Twitter. It quoted research that 70 to 80 percent of individuals living with schizophrenia want to work and think they’re capable of working.

The Atlantic article said it’s their doctors who tell their patients they can’t work. I have in these various incarnations of my blog for the last nine years railed against the mental health staff who have a dim view of what patients diagnosed with schizophrenia can do in their lives.

I have always championed that in my own life I recovered BECAUSE I found the jobs I love and that I’m good at. I wasn’t able to do these jobs because I had recovered. I will always claim that it is the other way around: I recovered only after I found the careers I loved.

In New York City: Baltic Street AEH, Inc. provides advocacy employment and housing for individuals with mental illnesses. Baltic Street has an employment agency with two locations in Brooklyn. The staff there help people get and keep jobs they like and would be good at too.

The day is here. Today is the day when not only it’s possible to recover it’s possible to have a full and robust life equal to people in society who don’t have mental illnesses.

If you are a mental health staff person I urge you to take the long view and consider that your clients can indeed work at some kind of job. It might not always be a JD or MD. It might be a job in Rite Aid. It could be as the CEO of a corporation like my friend was able to do.

I urge readers to consider doing what I do. My first thought is NOT “This is impossible” or “I won’t be able to do this.” My automatic thought is “How can I make this happen?”

If you have a goal of any kind–to get a job, to live in your own apartment, whatever–I’ll be the first to tell you that you have right inside yourself what you need to succeed.

And if you want to get a job you can go to your local neighborhood library and ask if at a branch in their system a librarian helps people create resumes. Resume help is available at libraries in Brooklyn, NY.

Turn over every stone. Be creative. If a solution isn’t immediately available, see what you can do differently using your own strengths and your external support system.

Remember: I’m confident when I tell readers that I recovered BECAUSE I found the jobs I love.

If you want to work, you deserve to try. I will devote more blog entries here to this topic in the future.