Risking Failure to Succeed

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A little-known fact:

I was on the debate team in high school. I had to write a speech and memorize and present it as part of a team of students who traveled on Saturdays to other schools to compete.

Yes, I gave the speech from memory without looking at notes.

The students were ranked from 1 to 5–5 people the lowest–and the students with the most #1s took home the trophy.

I wasn’t an honors student at the time–I was in the regular classes. Yet I had gotten the ideas when I was a freshman in high school that public speaking was an important skill to have.

Readers, I routinely scored at a 4 or 5. That’s how I know that you can succeed at something even though you failed big time in the past.

As a junior in high school I got a job as a cashier in a supermarket using an old-fashioned cash register. I was fired five days later because I wasn’t any good at it. In college I had the chutzpah to apply for a job as a cashier in a supermarket again.

This time I succeeded.

I write about this because failure is often the cost of doing business in the real world. I write about this because it’s a reminder that for a lot of us success won’t come easy.

Giving up isn’t the answer. Seeing how we can do things differently or do different things so that we can succeed can be a better option.

The solution is to keep risking trying to do things.

Right now I’m writing fiction–my first novel. I have no idea whether it’s any good yet I want to perfect it so that I can start to publish fiction too.

I write about failure because often just starting out in recovery it isn’t going to be easy taking the risks to do the things you want to do.

Most of all, I wanted to be a cheerleader because I didn’t have a lot of cheerleaders when I was involved in the community mental health system.

There’s no shame in wanting to have a better life. There’s no shame in wanting to do better for yourself.

I cannot and will not be complicit in reinforcing that people with mental health conditions are helpless and that our future is hopeless.

So I dare readers: set a goal. Take a risk.

Believe in tomorrow because the future can be better.

Embracing Failure to Grow as a Person

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The quote on the upper right side of this blog I stole from a silver paperweight I bought in a museum gift shop. The paperweight has this Michaal Jordan quote on it.

That should tell you something right there about the validity of the quote when you know a champion athlete with great success in life is the person quoted.

“Don’t Be Afraid to Fail. Be Afraid Not to Try.”

At HealthCentral when I was the Health Guide there for close to nine years the editorial team wrote a news article that must have stole something I wrote elsewhere on that website.

The editorial team had the boldness to write in the news article that: “The only real failure is the failure to try.”

And they understood that for those of us with an MH challenge sometimes trying can be as simple as getting out of bed or taking a shower.

My take on this is that as long as we try our best there can be no shame in failing. Giving our goals our best shot counts more than whether we actually achieve what we set out to do. I bombed out big time in my first career in the gray flannel insurance field.

Failure is simply the cost of doing business in the real world.

Experiencing failure is necessary to grow as a person.

When you’ve lost your mind there is nothing else you could ever fear losing.

Thus people with MH challenges have nothing left to lose and everything to gain by risking achieving goals.

 

We need to fail to learn what not to do.

We need to fail to experience all that life has to offer.

We need to fail in order to succeed later.

Like Michael Jordan I too was always afraid not to try.

The alternative–not risking getting a job–was no option.

I didn’t want to be doomed to collecting SSI forever and living in a dangerous crack-drug-infested apartment complex on the edge of town the rest of my life.

In recovery as in life there are no guarantees.

Yet if we don’t take these kinds of speculative risks that involve the possibility of failure (the possibility of gain or no gain):

There’s only one guaranteed outcome:

No chance of potential success either.

My motivation for taking the risk to get a full-time job in 1990 was simple:

I sure didn’t like living in an apartment where my friend and I joked that we had cockroach races to see which bug got to the other side of the living room first : )

I’ll talk more in coming blog entries about taking healthy risks.

September 11, 2001 – 15th Anniversary

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Every year on September 11th I write a blog entry about the World Trade Center attacks.

A guy I love more than life itself was a first responder.

He was a New York City firefighter who rushed into those burning buildings to save people.

This guy and others who lived now have PTSD because of their involvement.

I’ve written in this blog recently about trauma.

In effect a person can have PTSD even if they haven’t served in a war.

Any traumatic event can bring on an ongoing hard time after it happens.

Each of us living on earth needs to “get with the program” as the expression goes.

Hate, violence, killing, racism, and any other kind of bigotry or senseless judging has to STOP.

I abandoned organized religion for good after September 11, 2001.

Being told that it’s OK to kill in the name of God–that it’s OK to hate and judge in the name of God–that’s it’s OK to view a woman’s role in life solely as a breeder–is NOT right.

I’m not attracted to women romantically. I’ve only ever had the hots for guys. Yet when the Supreme Court legalized marriage for every couple living in America regardless of sexual preference I only cheered this and was proud to be American.

I don’t have the inclination, temperament, or desire to sit around judging people.

I do align as a Christian though I’m no fan of organized religion.

God gave everyone living on earth this time around a divine purpose for being here.

Finding out your life’s purpose and going and doing that will make all the difference in having a healthy, happy, and prosperous recovery.

My purpose is not to judge anyone else. My purpose is not to tell people what they should do.

My goal is to use my experience living in recovery to help uplift and inspire others to dream of having a better life.

Today more than ever having a full and robust life is possible.

Won’t you join me in stomping out the hate and stigma?

Recovery and Pride

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I know plenty of security guards who have college degrees. I met a janitor who loved his work and had a big grin on his face when he told me he was a “custodial engineer.”

No kidding. Any honest job labored at with pride can give a person dignity.

You will not always like every aspect of your job every day. Yet finding a job where most of what you do is okay is possible if you ask me.

I’ve worked in offices and libraries and a law firm. I’ve been employed for over 25 years.

Starting in the fall I’d like to return to talking about employment.

First here I will take about each aspect of The Triangle of Mental Health: appropriate medication, quicker individualized treatment, and practical career counseling.

Trusting Our Intuition

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I watched a Suze Orman DVD a couple of years ago.

One guy she singled out had gone to school to get a degree so he could have a better career. He couldn’t find a job and might have incurred student loan debt.

He had been a waiter. Suze Orman berated him. She told him he could’ve had a perfectly fine life if he continued to wait tables.

After she was done trussing him up it looked like the guy was about to cry. His eyes were wet. She had publicly humiliated him.

Frankly, that’s not how I want an “expert” to treat me.

I’m confident we’ve all felt guilty and ashamed when we’ve tried to live by an expert’s rules and failed.

The kicker is: I went back to school when I was unemployed so that I could get a degree that would enable me to have a better career.

Suze Orman is against people doing what I did: going back to school instead of immediately looking for a replacement job.

Yes: I do think we need to trust our intuition more.

We need to pay attention to how our bodies feel and what our bodies are telling us.

Plenty of peers get college degrees. Not everyone uses their degree on the job they have. Yet educating yourself is not ever a waste of time or money if you ask me.

I’ll talk about this in future blog entries: why I think and will always think it’s no crime to want to do what you love and earn a livable wage or salary from it.

Telling a person that he should be content to wait tables when that is not what his soul calls out for him to do is a mistake.

Better: tell him that if he can’t find another job he can wait tables and do something else on the side that brings him more happiness.

Using our intuition to decide what’s the right thing to do makes sense.

Maybe the waiter convinced himself to purse the career-of-the-moment instead of listening to what the still voice inside him told him he was passionate about.

Maybe he could’ve done volunteer work in the new field to put on his resume when he did start to look for a new job.

Maybe he realized in the end that it wasn’t where his heart was after all.

In my blog I’ll talk about what I think is practical to do and what is possible to achieve.

My goal is to be a cheerleader not a naysayer.

You can decide for yourself if what I write makes sense.

I don’t think shaming people or making them feel guilty is pretty.

Getting Real Help

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I had a job as the Health Guide for HealthCentral’s schizophrenia website for nine years.

What I wrote for HealthCentral was in the vanguard of mental health reporting. What I wrote was always five years ahead of what other people and organizations were writing about recovery.

Years ago at HealthCentral I would write a series called Family Members Forum. In one of those news article I gave ideas as to how to help a loved one.

Point blank I wrote this: “Ask your loved one: “What do you need me to do right now to help you?”

In this way everyone in society needs to “get with the program” as the expression goes in how they interact with people living with and impacted by a mental illness.

I always wanted people to see me not my pain. Jodi Picoult is quoted: “People are more than the sum total of their disability.”

The producer Mark. R. Weber understands that maybe we can’t end homelessness and we can’t always give a homeless person money. Yet we can stop for a moment to talk to them to ask their name and show we care about them as a human being.

In this way too people need to start breaking bread with those of us who have some kind of mental health challenge. It’s a Catch-22 because a lot of us don’t go around telling people “Hi, I’m so-and-so and I was diagnosed with ______________.”

So a lot of times no one else knows what we’re going through unless we tell them.

What is the solution? Brene Brown wrote about this in her classic book Daring Greatly. We should tell only the people who have earned our trust.

I understand what it’s like to not trust mental health providers.

I had to quite seeing a doctor immediately because of his unprofessional behavior. This is revealed in a humorous scene in my memoir. I fled his office one night and didn’t ever return.

This lack of trust has extended to mental health service providers like state employment agencies for individuals with disabilities.

For at least five years now I’ve realized there was a need in the marketplace for my second book–a one-of-its-kind self-help book.

In September I will start to talk about this book and about a new business I hope to provide to peers linked to this pressing need that has historically gone unfilled.

I ask you: when has any other person asked you: “What would YOU like to do with your life and how can I help you do that?” Instead of telling us: “This is what you should do and there’s no other option only the one I deem appropriate.”

VESID in New York City would send people who were deaf to a printmaking program long after jobs in that field became obsolete. Peers were disillusioned with this state employment services agency for years.

There’s a better way. In this regard I want to start my own peer-owned business to fill this need that has gone unmet. Stay tuned in September for more news about this.

 

Thinking About Recovery

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Bari Tessler quotes Jack Kornfield in her book The Art of Money. A gem like this justifies buying her book. I installed in on my iPad.

This quote sums up a great way to think about recovery:

“The true task of spiritual life is not found in faraway places or unusual states of consciousness: it is here in the present. It asks of us a welcoming spirit to greet all that life presents to us with a wise, respectful, and kindly heart.”

Jack Kornfield

Thinking of recovery in this way is a way to take back our power over our circumstances. Our pain doesn’t have to last forever.

Our lives can be hard not because we have an illness–they can be hard simply because they’re not easy. This often has nothing to do with the illness.

I will go to my grave crediting my mother’s one quick action to get me the right help within 24 hours as the number-one reason I recovered. Today more than ever when a person gets the right help right away there can be an ed after the word recover.

Thinking about recovery as a process and a way of living our lives that we can honor precisely with a “wise, respectful, and kindly heart” is the way to go now if you ask me.

I’m skeptical when I see links in my Google Alerts for schizophrenia information when the tag line is “Rachel (or whoever it is) talks about what it’s like to have schizophrenia.”

That is totally misleading. The tag line should read: “Rachel talks about what it’s like FOR HER to have schizophrenia.”

It would be unhelpful and disingenuous for me to claim that my experience is the mirror of what everyone’s experience is like.

Instead I’m pulled to talk about my experiences as a springboard for showing readers that with their own kind of creativity and resourcefulness they can come up with their own path in their wellness journey.

That’s the contention that I make that is revolutionary: stating it thus: that recovery is a wellness journey. At least it has been for me and I think too that others can achieve their own version of well.

This is why I keep the blog: because for the last 12 years I’ve so strongly believed in my vision that people can recover and flourish and live life well and whole after they have a breakdown.

Your version of well is not going to be the same as mine and mine is not going to be the same as another person’s. That’s what’s beautiful about living here on earth: we’re like snowflakes – no two of us is totally alike.

We share things in common yes we do. Yet I’m always interested in the uniqueness of each person I meet or interact with. That is a precious gift: the gift of the spirit of a person that each of us was given when we were born.

I’ll end here by saying it’s high time to think about recovery as yes a spiritual practice as well as a lifestyle.

There’s no shame in living life in recovery.

The Art of Money

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Bari Tessler has published a book to buy: The Art of Money: a Life-Changing Guide to Financial Happiness.

As an author Tessler has a generous and compassionate voice. As a Financial Therapist Tessler has revolutionized how to approach dealing with money matters.

On her website she talks about calling an emergency fund a Peace of Mind fund instead. In her book she tells readers to rename expense categories in our budgets to reflect our values. For instance Mortgage becomes Home Sweet Home.

Tessler’s vision is brilliant. Her insight and information is right-on. I recommend buying this Tessler book and the Vitug book I reviewed too–You Only Live Once. These two books taken together could be the start of creating a solid foundation with our finances.

You can go on the Bari Tessler website to read more.

In the late summer and into and through the fall I’m going to talk here again about career and job strategies. By the fall I’ll have more news about my second recovery book.

Sources of Protein

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I found these sources of protein on a bodybuilding website:

Swiss cheese:

8 gm per 1 oz serving

Greek yogurt:

23 gm per 8 oz 0 fat plain

Sockeye salmon:

23 gm per 3 oz serving

Eggs:

6 gm – 1 large egg

Chicken breast:

24 gm – boneless skinless – per 3 oz

Turkey breast:

24 gm per 3 oz

Milk:

8 gm per 1 cup

Peanut butter:

8 gm per 2 tbsp

Quinoia:

8 gm per 1 cup

Tofu:

12 gm per 3 oz

Green peas:

7 gm per 1 cup

Tilapia:

21 gm per 3 oz

Light tuna canned:

22 gm per 3 oz

Shrimp:
11.6 gm per 3 oz

 

Sources of Fiber

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Fiber is thought to fill a person up thus regulating appetite.

I’ve Googled sources of fiber and amounts. Buy a 2-cup measuring cup and you can measure the amount of food you’re cooking or using.

Lentils:

15.6 gm per cup cooked

Black beans:

15 gm per cup cooked

Peas:

8.8 gm per cup cooked

Broccoli:

5.1 gm per cup boiled

Brussels sprouts:

4.1 gm per cup boiled

Pear:

5.5 gm per medium fruit raw

Raspberries:

8 gm per cup raw

Blackberries:

7.6 gm per cup raw

Avocados:

6.7 gm per half raw

Whole-wheat pasta:

6.3 gm per cup cooked

Taken from Greatist website.

The Greatist website appears to be legitimate. It evens features kettle bell exercises you can do and body weight exercises you can do.

I’ll be back next week with sources of protein.