I recommend weeding the contents of your closet in the winter.

The Salvation Army is the charity I send all my good-condition clothes to when I no longer wear them. Remember: only give to charity clothes that aren’t stained or in tatters and are in good condition for others to wear. The item should bring a smile to the face of a person when he or she is the recipient.

Get a tax receipt for you donations that lists every item you’ve donated. If you itemize things on your tax return, you can deduct the value of the donations.

After originally resisting, I went out and bought matching huggable hangers for the shirts hanging in my closet. I still use wooden hangers for blazers and wooden skirt and pant hangers for those items. Yet the flocked velvet thin hangers are visually neater. This could put you in a positive frame of mind when you view the contents of your closet.

The way to cut down the clutter is to not bring it into your house to begin with. Only buy items on sale that you would pay full-price for. You can get coupon codes for a lot of online clothing retailers to reduce the cost of buying the items.

I recommend reading the Life in Color book to figure out your ColorType and StyleType so that you’re able to choose and use clothes that flatter you and reinforce the image you want to project.

I have a 3-tiered shoe rack on the bottom left of my closet and four see-through storage bins on the bottom right of the closet. The bins store scarves of all kinds: each bin holds winter or spring or fall scarves. You can get these bins from The Container Store online.

A solution is to install a second rod above the lower rod to hang off-season clothes. This doubles your storage space in the closet.

You do not need a ton of clothes to be well-dressed and stylish. You only need to buy the clothes that fit your StyleType and are in colors that you look good in.

I will end here by telling readers that as hard as it can be: sometimes you just have to let go of those items you don’t wear anymore. If you can’t fit into them, donate them to charity and buy a couple new items in your current size that fit and flatter your body and suit your personality.

And too: an item of clothing might be past its prime. You might have gotten seasons of wear out of it only to no longer wear that item because it no longer suits you.

Arrange the items in your closet left to right from light to dark and hang like items together: skirts, pants, dresses, shirts and so on.

Organization upfront makes choosing and using your clothes easier each morning.

It’s National Clean Out Your Closet week.

I’ve always equated a neat apartment with a clear mind. Messy crib: crabbed thoughts. It might not be entirely true. Yet I’m convinced people diagnosed with mental illnesses need a clear path in our rooms to be able to enjoy our homes.

A home should be happy and healthy to live in.

I’ll share some feng shui tips that can clear your mind:

Only store clothes in bins under the bed. Storing papers and books and other things under the bed disrupts your thoughts.

As you search for an apartment, nix any building that is near electrical wires or a power station or on the side of a highway or on the dead end of a street or in the middle of the street where the street intersects another street.

Nix an apartment where you can see the door to the bathroom directly from the front door entrance of the house or apartment. And bathrooms at the front of the house or apartment are money-wasters. Put the lid of the toilet down not just the seat because in feng shui your money will go down the drain if the lid is left up. See about keeping the bathroom door closed too.

The flow of chi-pronounced chee-should be positive and flow beautifully not be stagnant or cut off. Sha chi or furniture or doorway configurations and doors that create sharp arrows against each other aren’t healthful.

The Chinese place woo foo dogs at the entrances of their homes to promote good fortune.

I will return on Thursday with closet storage techniques.

I firmly believe God doesn’t make junk and he doesn’t make mistakes.

Having faith in YOURSELF as well as in a higher power is the goal when you’re going through a hard time.

I didn’t ever ask: “Why me?” I thought: “OK so this happened. What am I supposed to do now?”

Find your purpose and go do that. Seek to be your own version of well. Embrace the struggle and remember that today is what it is and tomorrow can be different.

The most beautiful thing is for all of us to be alive in the world. To live in synch with our personalities and as Oprah Winfrey wrote in her magazine: “to use your personality to do your soul’s work.”

Life can get better. It can truly get better as you get older.

You don’t have to go to church by the way if that doesn’t suit you. You can go out and be in nature. You can volunteer at a soup kitchen.

Having faith can be as original as you are.

I turned away from organized religion after the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11. I chose to have a Christian life in word and deed. Not by warming a chair in a pew and pretending I agreed with the Catholic church’s views on women and LGBT members.

If going to church is your thing, more power to you.

Having faith can make the difference between achieving goals and remaining on the sidelines in your own life.

The Zen quote tells us:

Leap, and the net will appear.

I’m tired of alleged “international experts” talking smack about people living with schizophrenia.

As early as 2007 when I first started to be employed at HealthCentral (nine years ago): I wanted to cheer people on and offer positive solutions for the challenges of living with this illness.

What good comes of a person talking smack about himself or others with schizophrenia?

I want to be given hope that I can live a happy life even with ongoing challenges. I want to read about people and hear from people who show us a better way: that we can transmute our pain by doing some good in the world to help ourselves and others.

I always sought to turn my pain into a thing of beauty for other people. To show that there’s a light on the road ahead. To extend a lantern of hope along the sometimes-dark road.

My point is: every human being needs light and love and laughter. Not to constantly be reminded of how hard life is. I make the case for attending a comedy club. Or watching a marathon of the old Looney Tunes Warner Brothers cartoons.

Life can be hard living with schizophrenia. Yet it can also bring us joy when we actively look for the silver lining. A silver lining does exist: we get to choose how we want to live our lives.

I wrote in my memoir that being diagnosed with schizophrenia gave me the opportunity to find out what was important to me and to discard the rest. That’s something beautiful: limiting the extraneous: what’s not necessary for us to do we should discard.

We don’t have to chase after another person’s dreams for what we should do. We can follow our own path. That was the whole ethic of left of the dial: that I chose a different path, later in life, after the narrowly-defined path I was on failed me.

Remember: a lot of times you didn’t fail; the job or lifestyle or activity failed you because it was at odds with what you needed to do to be truly happy.

Hope Heals. The road of recovery is a journey not a destination. The older I get, the less impressed I am with coveting achievements. We should each of us like ourselves for who we are not what we’ve accomplished.

I think I’ve written this somewhere before.

Light love and laughter can be as potent as any medication we take. Laughter truly is the best medicine in addition to our SZ meds.

Hope does heal.

It’s coming up on four weeks until spring.

I’m busted: just as guilty of frittering away the day when I’m holed up inside when the wind chill is too cold outside to go out of the apartment.

I’ve written that I value being in tune with the natural world: to be in synch with the seasons. Fall is the harvest to enjoy the bounty of our labor. Winter is the season to hibernate and to clear out the old and make new plans. Spring is the rebirth of ourselves to have the energy to carry out our goals. Summer is sweet and the living can be easier in that season.

This is how our lives evolve: season-by-season. Yes: I do value respecting the forces of nature. I value living near greenery or within an easy commute to a park. The goal in New York City a couple of years ago was to plant a million trees.

If you’re going to hibernate, I make the case for doing it in style. Lie in bed for hours in elegant pajamas. Listen to the radio. Read a fashion magazine.

Yet sometimes the lure of doing nothing must be heeded. Part of living life-even for those of us who are not in recovery-is to recover from the daily grind. To rest and recharge our batteries on the days when we’re not active outside.

A typical winter’s day, Chez Chris:

7 a.m. – wake up automatically without alarm clock and listen to the radio when the alarm does come on.

morning – work on a writing project.

afternoon – fritter away my tax refund by shopping on the Internet.

late afternoon – install CDs on my computer from iTunes.

night – listen to radio.

next day: lather rinse repeat all of the above.

It doesn’t help when Presidents’ Day is an official holiday and baby it’s cold outside so you stay indoors shopping all over again on the Internet.

Do not try this at home: I don’t recommend a person goes into debt using their credit card.

I do recommend hibernating in the winter. The siren’s song of lying in bed all day can’t be resisted.

Five days later your packages will arrive in the mail.

What’s not to like?

A poster on a wall beckons: Don’t Give Up The Fight.

I will go to my grave fighting for the right of every person who experiences mental or emotional distress to get the right help right away to halt disability.

I’ve been employed as the Health Guide at HealthCentral’s schizophrenia website for nine years now. Easily five years ago I wrote at HealthCentral that sometimes getting out of bed warrants a recovery Nobel Prize.

It’s hard. I won’t discount how hard it is. Yet I prefer to focus on the positive because hope heals.

It’s possible I’m doing something right because this blog kicked off only seven months ago in the summer and a ton of readers are tuning in. I give a “mille grazie”-a thousand thank you’s-to every reader and to my loyal followers for tuning in.

It is part of my biology-my chemical nature-that I’m an eternal optimist. I was born with a fighting spirit to not give up. My mother had seven miscarriages before I was born. So I must have been determined to be born: to give my mother the baby she always wanted.

I tell you now and I will tell you always: don’t give up the fight to have a better life.
I understand that people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses often have to fight to be taken seriously. We have to fight to be given crumbs from the table when everyone else feasts at the banquet.

This is no joke. I do not take this lightly even though I have an irrepressible sense of humor.

Certainly it’s hard living with schizophrenia or another mental illness.
Yet the solution is not for the mainstream media to parrot the hell we’re in ad nauseam without offering ideas for solutions and techniques to make our lives easier.

At HealthCentral, I write news articles that focus on schizophrenia recovery strategies.

I’m going to end this blog entry with a request that readers post comments about future blog topics they might like me to write about. In the earlier incarnation of my blog a reader wanted me to write about negative symptoms and I obliged.

In the next blog entry I will talk about the beauty of hibernating in the winter.

You don’t realize when you’re 22 that one day you’ll be 50 and your loved ones will be in your life for a limited time.

I’m going to write at HealthCentral in the coming months about bereavement for individuals with mental illnesses. About how parents need to develop a succession plan for their son or daughter who has schizophrenia or another MI.

Nowhere have I seen this issue addressed by anyone anywhere in any medium. Not even by so-called mental health organizations.

It seems so unfair that anyone can develop a life-ending disease. You’re not ever prepared for this. Nor are you prepared for any ordinary loss of your family members.

I like to think that by the time a person is 50 they should’ve done 3 things on their “bucket list.” I was kind of odd in that I typed up a list of “30 by 50”: 30 things I had achieved by the time I was 50. I could count and itemize 30 things. This seems unusual yet there you go.

Yet right now as I confront that the years are gone I think it’s foolish to measure your self-worth by the things you’ve achieved in life. As driven as I am, I don’t think accomplishments count.

I think the measure of a man (and of a woman) is his or her character: how they treated others with dignity, were they kind and compassionate, did they hold the door open for the person behind them.

I’m not impressed with someone’s status in society even if they’re a JD or an MD. Martin Luther King famously told us we should only judge someone by “the content of his character.”

Age brings wisdom. You learn how to pace yourself, to rest when you need to rest, to value what’s truly important and stop focusing on things that don’t matter.

This involves acting with grace and forgiveness towards yourself and others.

If you’re already 50, you’re too old to focus on the negative because doing so will only age your faster.

I’m facing things right now that all of us face on the cusp of 50. It can help to “let go, let life” or “let go, let God” tell you what to do.

Most things aren’t a big deal in the scheme of life.

Yet confronting the loss of your family members isn’t something that people diagnosed with mental illnesses should have to suffer alone.

I’m going to write about bereavement at HealthCentral in the coming months.