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The Myth of Being a Superstar

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Surf on over to my Left of the Dial blog to read an entry about the absolutely gorgeous Nike video with Colin Kaepernick. You can view the short film on YouTube.

The video is uplifting and inspiring. In one way I feel like I have a connection to Serena Williams and the others featured in the film. Like the lyrics to the Lorde song “Royals” each of us came from nothing spectacular and rose up to become winners.

When you have a diagnosis of schizophrenia or another mental health issue you’re told that you succeeded “despite having” schizophrenia.

Your achievements have most likely come via your own efforts. Yet minimizing your role in your success discounts how hard you worked.

In keeping with the Nike claim to be “The Greatest Ever” each of us needs to base our identity on who we are as a person not on what our illness is.

What if who you are is a biker, baker, or book lover?

Being defined by your symptoms locks you into what I call an identity straitjacket.

Using your illness as the barometer of your abilities is a mistake.

It’s quite the opposite: people can and do recover every day.

It can seem like it’s out of the ordinary to succeed when you have a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Yet telling people they have succeeded or thinking people succeed despite having schizophrenia reinforces the myth that this is a rare occurrence.

I’m trying to publish an Op-Ed piece soon timed to October–Disability Employment Awareness Month.

I’ll give the link here if (I hope when) the Op-Ed piece is published online.

I’m confident when I tell you that being The Greatest You is all that counts.

8 Tips for Caregivers

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Though I had a breakdown when I was 22 years old my parents didn’t ever have to act as my caregivers.

By the time I was 25 I lived in my own studio and had a full-time job.

I’m 53 and act as my mother’s caregiver now. It’s as if I’ve become a mother to her after all the years she cared for me.

Acting as a caregiver you have to care for yourself at the same time.

Here are 8 Tips for Caregivers:

Eat healthful food.

In New York City you can order from FreshDirect to deliver food to your doorstep.

Kettlebell Kitchen offers nutritionist-created meal packages delivered to your door or to your gym in New York City.

PeaPod is available in other areas.

Have on hand in your family member’s kitchen a complement of take-out menus. Be able to order a pizza or Chinese food to be delivered in a pinch.

Have a laundry service pick up and deliver your laundry.

The items will be neatly folded yet often wrinkled. I simply live with the wrinkles because I don’t send out good shirts.

In New York City the tropical summer air itself can smooth out your clothes’ wrinkles by the time you reach your destination.

I’ve place wrinkled tee shirts in my closet in August. The shirts are wrinkle-free by the time I take them out to use courtesy of the internal humidity.

Hire a House Cleaner.

It’s worth it to free up your time and preserve your sanity.

I ordinarily dislike cleaning chores on a regular day so have a woman clean as often as possible.

Set up a home gym.

All you need is a kettlebell, a set of weights, and a foam roller.

You can type in the names of exercises on YouTube to watch videos on the kinds of moves you’ll be able to do at home.

Turn on music and pump up the volume as you break a sweat.

No need for a costly gym membership if you’d really rather not pay a monthly fee.

In a coming blog entry I’ll talk about how I use my living room as a gym.

Hire a Home Health Aide to come in once or twice a week.

For the things you can’t do or provide on your own hire trained help to come to your family member’s house or apartment.

They can cook, possibly clean, and do other things for your loved one once or twice a week or more often if needed.

Contribute money to a peace of mind or emergency fund.

This way if you have to take unpaid leave from your job you’ll have the cash to cover it.

In New York State workers are given 40 hours of paid time off each year to care for a sick family member.

Keep your cell phone powered up at all times.

For your own safety and the safety of your loved one.

Carry a spare cell phone charger with you in case the battery runs low.

Talk to a friend or a therapist for added support.

In New York City you can dial (888) NYC-WELL to talk with a peer or social worker who can give you information about mental health resources.

 

No Judgments At This Blog

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This is what I think about something that happened in response to Kate Spade’s death.

NAMI New York State violated one of its own peer support guidelines: “We judge no one else’s pain as any less than our own.”

In an electronic newsletter NAMI New York State dared write:

“The heartbreak that many of Ms. Spade and Mr. Bourdain’s legions of admirers are experiencing is a fraction of the emotions felt when losing a friend or a loved one.”

The audacity! NAMI New York State feels its members are more deserving than others to feel grief about a loss. NAMI New York State dares assume that other people’s pain is less than yours or mine.

This stance will only alienate people who might have sought help.

I for one have been devastated by Kate Spade’s death at her own hands. As a person with ambition who is driven to excel I acutely understand that the fashion designer might have struggled even though she was at the top of her game.

After the death-from-illness of my mentor I have been thinking often about this dichotomy exactly: Why do some people when faced with hardship keep moving along and think things can get better? While others think things are hopeless and see no way out of their pain?

Is it partly a question of being given hope when you’re at the end of your rope? Is it mostly a question of feeling rapport with your treatment providers who can give you this hope? What is the solution to despair?

In New York City The Rita Project offers hope and healing for survivors of suicide attempts via art therapy endeavors. It seems they don’t have a website (or at least I haven’t found it via the cursory Google search hits).

I offer a disclaimer header in the menu bar at the top of the blogs. What I’m really trying to do here is to offer a haven in prose where people can be uplifted and inspired.

When people are hurting the last thing they need is to have a mental health organization discount the pain they’re in.

For the record, I was distraught when a guy I had known took his own life.

I’ve thought of a way to honor friends and loved ones who have committed suicide. I want to run this by an attorney to see about the viability of doing this. It might not be possible.

Yet hey–if you’re experiencing a hardship you deserve compassion.

Kate Spade – An American Tragedy

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I’m going to cut-and-paste here in this blog the entry I posted just five minutes ago in the Left of the Dial forum.

Today Kate Spade–the designer of iconic handbags–took her own life.

She had everything going for her in terms of external success.

It’s a tragedy that inside at her core she wasn’t doing very well.

A year or two ago in this Flourish blog I wrote about the phenomenon of “smiling depression.”

Women are suffering all alone because no one takes them seriously.

“How could you be depressed when you have a great life?”

“Just pray and go to church and you’ll be fine.”

“Get married and have babies and raise a family.”

That last sentence contains actual words a young woman was told years ago.

The other two sentences are oft-repeated ill advice that women are given too.

I remember vividly when I was going on a job interview in the 1990s.

I rode the elevator up to the office with another woman. She held a Kate Spade tote against her shoulder. I coveted that Kate Spade pocketbook.

It wasn’t until this spring that I dared splurge to buy myself a Kate Spade pocketbook.

I bought it at a reduced yet not cheap cost at an off-price discount retailer in New York City.

Kate and her husband sold their company years ago. Yet American women have coveted the Kate Spade handbags since their first creation.

Disability is no joke.

Mental health issues strike everyone from all walks of life.

It’s a tragedy that Kate Spade and hundreds possibly thousands of nameless faceless individuals feel the only way out of their pain is to end their life.

What if Kate Spade could’ve gotten treatment? What if she had bipolar or another mental health issue that wasn’t diagnosed?

A part of Kate Spade lives on in the pocketbook I bought this spring.

Yet that’s no consolation for the fact that another human being’s life ended in tragedy not recovery.

God bless you Kate Spade. God bless everyone living with a mental health issue who suffers. You are not alone.

The Suicide Prevention Helpline can be reached at (800) 273-TALK (8255).

You can use the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

Please. The pain you are in can be healed. People care about you. Help is available.

There is a way out of the pain that will enable you to live a better life.

There’s no shame. What you feel is real and true. What you feel can be healed

Say Yes to Compassion

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The older I get I’m getting bolder.

I’ve learned that dwelling on what’s not right in the world–the hate and violence people have towards each other–is simply only a foolproof way to make yourself ill.

The person who is filled with hate only serves to make themselves ill. The object of their hate most likely could care less if the hater becomes ill.

Wait just a minute: there’s a better way to live and act and be: kind compassionate with joy and love in your heart.

Harboring hate well into your older years isn’t healthy.

Interact with loving people and you’ll see a difference in your own health.

This blog and my other blog are stigma-free zones.

It’s coming up on summer.

Summer is my favorite time of year for enjoying optimal health.

Meet me in the next blog entry for some quick and simple recipes to cook.

They’re healthful and easy to prepare.

Ciao.

Sacred Contracts

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My mentor stayed clean for decades. I think he was motivated to live drug-free because he wanted more than anything to help people.

If you ask me figuring out your Sacred Contract–essentially your life purpose–can give you the motivation to stay healthy and care for yourself.

Caroline Myss believes our sacred contracts are life assignments given to us to carry out in this lifetime.

A client of hers is quoted in the book Sacred Contracts. Liza had dreamed she was in a small rowboat going in circles. She could see an ocean liner in the distance and wanted to be on that ship not stuck where she was. Liza had been paralyzed in an accident and had to makeover her career and her life.

To quote Liza: “The key is to learn to row the boat you were given.”

I recommend you buy these two Myss books. Any kind of self-improvement project that is healthy shouldn’t be frowned on. We should only be competing against how we were yesterday–not against what other people can do today.

I say: “No thank you” to critics who compare peers to people who don’t have MH issues. The size of another person’s ocean liner shouldn’t concern us.

In a coming blog entry I’m going to talk about The Myth of Competitive Employment.

Having a Plan B (And Plan C)

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Your life can change after you get a mental health diagnosis. I’m here to say that though your life is different it can be better.

Having a Plan B when your Plan A doesn’t work out  is critical. You should also have a Plan C and D. Heck, you can have two plans going on at once.

In my twenties I had the dream of rising up to be a corporate Executive. That didn’t happen. So I went back to school to get a library degree. Now my goal of publishing the second book is taking longer.

No one has ever talked about how to proceed after a setback when you have a mental health thing. I’ll tell you here: you have to figure out if it’s the goal itself that is not right–or if the method for achieving the goal is wrong.

A nifty way for figuring out the life path you should go down might be met with skeptical response. Yet I firmly recommend studying the life work of Caroline Myss. She created a philosophy of Archetypes and Sacred Contracts.

Like what happened when I was in my twenties a lot of us pine to be someone we’re not. No–I wasn’t cut out to be an Executive–I didn’t have that archetypal pattern.

My theory is that when a person understands how their archetypal patterns interact they are better able to figure out what the right goals are to have if they want to succeed in life.

I’m going to talk about archetypes and sacred contracts in a coming blog entry.

Casting your Chart of Origin and analyzing how your archetypes express themselves through you might just be as helpful as taking any career quiz.

The Shortest Guide to Mindfulness You’ll Ever Need

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Years ago my shrink told me I should practice mindfulness.

No kidding–it’s not a trite concept and it’s not pop-psychology babble.

It works–mindfulness is a valid healing practice. How do I know this?

Having had a severe cold for one week was no joy. As I started to be on the mend I was able to do things. This inspired me to have a weekly mindfulness practice and to make mindfulness a daily habit too.

You don’t have to read a 300-page book on this topic.

Just read this one sentence: Mindfulness at its heart is simply paying attention to what you’re doing and not doing things on autopilot.

That’s all it is.

Thinking about mindfulness can conjure up meditation or another behavior that seems hard to implement successfully.

The truth is–there is no right or wrong way to do or to practice anything–just the way that works for you.

In terms of mindfulness, it can help to focus on the 5 W’s: the who, what, where, when, and why of what’s happening in your life at this particular moment.

Thich Nhat Hanh a famous monk author uses the classic example of washing dishes with awareness of what you’re doing.

Feel the plate and sponge in your hand. See and listen to the water.

Really experience what you’re doing instead of doing it mindlessly.

To this end I’ve started a mindfulness practice.

I was motivated to do this by the simple act of washing my makeup brushes when I had gotten over the severe cold.

Simply washing makeup brushes with care and attention can spark joy.

The truth is, if what you’re doing doesn’t spark joy and you don’t have to do it–I say stop doing it.

Stop doing busywork and start doing the things that are important to you and align with your values.

I’ve come to see the beauty and benefit of practicing mindfulness.

For women, I recommend hand washing bras and washing makeup brushes 1x/per week.

When I decided to practice  mindfulness it was like I was hit on the head with a piano falling from the roof of a building in a TV cartoon.

It occurred to me that mindfulness begets mendfulness. That to mind what we do can be the first step to mend what’s not working.

I for one don’t want to live my life on autopilot anymore.

Finding Your 5 Commitments

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Years ago I read a book that Leo Babauta of ZenHabits wrote.

In it he urged readers to make a list of their 5 commitments.

Limiting the focus of your life to 5 things was appealing.

What saved me?

Art and Music and Fashion and Writing and Exercise.

These 5 things were and always will be integral for  enabling me to recover as fully as I have.

What are your Top 5 commitments?

Find what gives you joy and go do that.

I wouldn’t be so quick to be pessimistic and give up.

I wouldn’t be so quick to throw yourself a pity party.

I wouldn’t be so quick to be jealous or envious of another person or to compare yourself to them.

I think EVERYONE living on earth has good traits and God-given gifts.

None of us is any better than anyone else.

We each of us need to believe in ourselves first of all–to take pride in who we are not what we are able to do.

Not being able to hold a job doesn’t preclude a person from being able to do other things.

It goes back to the concept of woodshedding when you’re in a plateau and in a valley not on a peak.

I wrote about woodshedding in one of the first blog entries I posted here over three years ago. This is a term taken from the jazz world where musicians would go into a woodshed or other private space to practice their instrument until they could perfectly play the piece or had greatly improved.

That’s what the early years of recovery are often like: we could require solo time to rest and reflect so that we can heal.

I would say that hibernating in your apartment for years and years isn’t healthy. Yet going off to be by yourself when you need to rest and recuperate might help.

Practicing woodshedding when it could help you to do so is one tactic for making productive use of a plateau when you’re in a valley not on a peak.

Focusing on limiting yourself to 5 Commitments might also help you.

In the coming blog entry I will talk about another technique that I find useful in recovery.

Here’s a link to the ZenHabits blog.

New Law Seals Up to 2 Convictions in NY

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A new law in New York seals up to 2 convictions for non-violent and non-sex offender crimes

According to the Wall Street Journal article:

“The law will let New Yorkers apply to seal up to two convictions, including one felony, for crimes other than sex offenses and violent felonies, starting 10 years after their sentencing date or release from prison. ”

MacMillan, ThomasAuthor Information. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]06 Oct 2017: n/a.