A Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers of the blogs.

I’m confident when I tell you that a person diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar or another mental illness can have things to be thankful for.

I recognize and understand that sometimes getting up and getting through the day is hard. That every time we do this we get no assist from others. We get labeled as crazy because we have a no-fault brain disorder.

The brain is a part of the body and these things are also physical illnesses that impact our lives. Why single these illnesses out as mental illnesses and not physical medical conditions like any other. The part of the body they happen to strike is the brain.

A guy I know told me once, “The brain is the most complex organ and it gives up its secrets reluctantly.”

Whether you eat turkey or not, however much you stuff yourself today or don’t, be grateful. Find things to be thankful for.

I’ll end here with my foolproof eating plan for Thanksgiving: skimp on the real food to save room for the dessert. I follow this rule at Christmas too when the platter du jour is prime rib. I don’t eat prime rib nor any other meat except chicken and turkey. So I load up on vegetables and always have the sweet potato.

Kindness helps at holiday time. We need to be kind to ourselves and others in this season when not everyone is jolly and the holiday blues could come on.

Think of one good thing you like about yourself to be grateful for.

Write a letter to or telephone the people who you’re thankful for.

I thank each and every reader for tuning in to this blog and posting comments when you’re able.

I discovered a Venus Williams quotation the other day:

“You have to believe in yourself when no one else does. That makes you a winner right there.”

What was I saying? A famous tennis star said the same thing I’ve been saying in here all along. I respect Venus Williams. She’s absolutely right.

The way to win is to not remain idle.

Sheryll Cashin in her book Place not Race also tells us the secret to winning. Buy her book because you won’t be disappointed. At the end, in a letter to her sons, she writes:

“You have to exert yourself. Everything worth doing is hard, difficult, complicated. You should welcome failure. Sometimes it is the only route to success…No one ever achieved great things in front of a TV. My goal, the goal I was taught to reach for, was an A in every class. It is the reaching, not the grade, that matters.”

That quote alone is worth the price of the book.

Reaching is what each of us can do. The striving is what counts not the result. We can be proud of our efforts even when we fail. Failure is the opportunity cost of success.

Winning involves trying. It involves making the effort that you’re able to make. It requires that we shut our ears to the hate, to the critics telling us that what we want to do can’t be done, or that we shouldn’t try to do what we want to do.

I’ll end here with another quotation from Steve Tatham:

“Confidence comes from making mistakes–the more mistakes you make, the more you know what not to do.”

The beauty of life is that a person can know victory and defeat and that’s OK. Sitting on the sidelines isn’t the way to live.

You’re not always going to win in the traditional sense of what constitutes winning.

That’s OK. Getting in the game is what matters.

That’s what my Left of the Dial ethic suggests: if other people won’t allow you on their playing field, you create a playing field of your own. Or if you want to, you try to compete in mainstream society.

Either way, victory is possible. You can do it if you try.

I find it curious that most people don’t value expressing that they’re grateful for what other people do for them.  If they did value a person’s kindness, wouldn’t they thank the person? This doesn’t seem to be how it is.

It’s not corny; it’s not kitsch–to keep a grateful journal.  A research study revealed that people who wrote down daily or weekly the things they were thankful for weren’t as depressed and their physical and mental health improved.

In my own life I reap the benefit of writing news articles at HealthCentral for other people to read and get inspired by.

We need to rethink exactly what the hell it is we’re supposed to be thankful for at Thanksgiving.  This once-a-year tradition hardly counts as the remedy to the ongoing lack of gratitude in American society.

I can’t talk about how it is in the UK or India or elsewhere in the world.  I only see with my own eyes in America that a significant number of people take and take and take without expressing thanks or without giving things to others in return.

If you’ve had a better experience, I’d love to hear about it.

Saying “please” and “thank you” opens doors.  A quotation gets it right: “Courtesy costs nothing but buys things that are priceless.”  I write about this habit in one of my books.

Thank you for reading my blogs.  Thank you for commenting on my blog entries when you’re able to.

Having the courage to change is in my estimation the single greatest predictor of success in recovery.

A person must adapt and not settle for the path of least resistance. Doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result could be a recipe for failure.

A person might get a payoff from engaging in unhealthy behavior. Or he or she might choose to live with symptoms rather than take the medication that can stop the symptoms completely. Either way, he or she might not be invested in creating positive changes, for numerous reasons alongside these.

I’m here to tell readers that the benefits of making positive changes outweigh the negative.

Consider that your medication causes you to fall asleep during the day. This could cause you to be in danger of losing your job if you boss doesn’t allow for this.

A simple switch in dose time could change things so that you’re awake all day, every day.

My story is that in 2007 I started taking Geodon and it was like a miracle drug. I started to wake up two hours earlier and go to bed earlier and sleep straight through the night for 7 or 8 hours. The old drug had stopped being effective.

As soon as I switched and started taking the Geodon at night instead of in the morning I was wide awake every day instead of falling asleep three days a week. I write about this in one of my books because it’s imperative that a person doesn’t give up hope in this regard. Discontinuing your medication isn’t the solution when a remedy like this could be possible.

Always talk with your pdoc about these things before making a change.

You might be surprised about what’s possible.

Having the courage to change is one of the all-time great skills in recovery.

I’d love to hear your comments on this.

I’ve read a book I’ll review this week in the reviews forum: Unstuff Your Life.

It’s about developing organizing systems that you can rely on to make order out of chaos.

I write about this because it’s critical not to live in a mess of papers, half-full coffee mugs staining the coffee table, abandoned junk mail on counter tops, and so on.

Two secrets to organizing exist: get rid of things you don’t use instead of storing them in closets or cabinets or drawers. And for every new thing you bring in one thing has to go out.

A lot of us get attached to our stuff because we equate what we own with who we are.

It’s healthier for those of us with challenges to understand that we are not our stuff. We don’t have to “keep up with the joneses” to prove our worth. Living on limited incomes could be the cure-all for spending-itis.

Better to have on display only a few items you cherish than to clutter your spaces with numerous tiny knick-knacks that make it hard to dust. That alone is a compelling reason to pare down.

All this comes to mind because it’s the fall and what better way to bring in the new in this harvest season than to clear out and make room for new things and people in our lives.

One thing in, one thing out. Get rid of what you don’t use.

Lastly: I recommend the Feng Shui book Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life and Buy Your Home Smarter with Feng Shui, two books that will help you find and create healthy living spaces. Buy Your Home Smarter will help you not make a mistake in renting an apartment or buying a house or apartment.

Elyn Saks, the J.D. law professor who has schizophrenia and wrote a memoir, is billed as a “celebrity.”

I find it curious that people revere a person who has ongoing major episodes simply because she kept going on numerous drug holidays that failed. She might have obtained degrees from Oxford and Yale yer her family did little else to support her as a younger person.

The reason I talk about this now, the reason I wrote about intrinsic motivators, is because I don’t think the goal is for everyone to become a superstar. I’m not impressed with other people’s on-paper remarkable achievements when they have to live with symptoms every day.

Getting the right treatment right away could enable a person to live symptom-free. I’m not a fan of having to live with symptoms. Most people with ongoing symptoms might not be able to do what Elyn Saks can do so this is another reason her story doesn’t impress me.

The focus on achieving external markers of success (husband and kids, picket fence life, Ivy League pedigree) didn’t appeal to me as a young woman and it doesn’t interest me now.

I want to write about this here because in keeping with the last blog entry I want to limn that traditional markers of success aren’t the only valid accomplishments that anyone should covet claiming, whether or not you have a mental illness.

Each of us can get to the top of our own staircase yet the room on the other side must have a view of the kind of life we’ve expressed is personally meaningful for us. For you, it could be an M.D. For another person, it could be having a career as a chef. Yet another person might want to work at Rite Aid part-time while he collects SSI.

Our family members, others in society, would be wise to champion us in our goals and dreams, as hard as this can be when we’re first starting out and might have reached a plateau. I quoted the professor two months ago in here who said a person who reaches a plateau can then go on to be successful.

Define what success looks like to YOU. Nevermind what others in society think it should look like for you. Nevermind what others in society can achieve.

I’ll end here by confessing I was just as guilty of being skeptical of a young woman who didn’t immediately set out to get a job after she graduated college. A year later she applied to library school and is going to be quite successful in a non-traditional career.

I was just like her when I graduated college: I was a free spirit who didn’t relish the thought of being chained to a desk in a cubicle.

Thus my contention that using only traditional markers of success to define a person’s potential is not right, especially for a person with a mental illness who had a harder stair to climb.

I’m not a special person either. I’m just a person who survived the hell of a mental health system ill-equipped to help a young person like I was in 1987.

I decided I wanted to act as a cheerleader today because back then I had no one on my side except my close-knit family and my private therapist and private doctor.

I fought to create a better life for myself. The stair was steep. And it’s why I cheer on everybody now, circa 2014: it’s too late in the history of psychiatry for providers to keep reinforcing to patients that they won’t be able to do the things they want to in life.

Each of us can do the things we want to in life.

It starts when we stop chasing what other people have and decide to work towards our own version of success.

I have no doubt that the young woman who decided to go to library school will be successful.
I have no doubt that people with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses can be successful.

Dare to Dream. Take the stairs, one step at a time. There is no elevator to success for anyone. That’s the point. It’s not about what’s on the other side. It IS about “the climb.”

(Cue the Miley Cyrus song lyrics.)