Out of the blue one night last week I remembered the words to the Langston Hughes poem, “Mother to Son.”

She told him: “life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” Those words popped into my head over 30 years since I read the poem in high school.

Lnagston Hughes, in my estimation, is one of the greats, not just of the Harlem Renaissance, but of all time. I’ve memorized his poem “Harlem–A Dream Deferred” and can recite it at the drop of a hat.

I wanted to write about this because it seems relevant to recovery. Life isn’t a crystal stair for anyone. Envy serves no purpose. I want to inspire people to dare to dream of having a better life–to go to school or to work, to live in their own apartment or to own a house, to do what anyone without a mental illness does.

If you reach for these things, others might be jealous of you, yet carry on. The stair might be long and hard to walk up to get to where you want to go, yet keep on moving. Another great, Martin Luther King, is quoted: “Faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole staircase.”

Taking the first step is what counts. Even when others try to cut you down.

And if you’re looking at someone else and think he or she has it easy, think again. Are you a mind reader? How do you or I or anyone know what’s going on in another person’s head and life?

Jealousy serves no purpose. Focusing on what other people have or can do doesn’t help you succeed. Strive to do the things you can do instead of harshing on yourself for what you can’t do.

Maximizing our assets instead of trying to correct weaknesses is the only way to live.

Instead of keeping ourselves stuck in a negative thought loop of envious thoughts, we can pick the brains of successful people to see how they did it. Truly accomplished people will harbor no secrets; they want others to follow along in their footsteps. They do this because they realized the secret to making yourself look good is to make the people around you look good.

I say: send the haters packing. Acknowledge that their insecurities come from a place of pain, and have compassion for them. Reach for the stars and settle for the moon. It’s just as easy to dream big as it is to settle for less.

Be grateful for the tacks and threadbare steps. Every effort to climb the stairs counts.

You can get to the top.

I’m fond of the Nike slogan–Just Do It. I have it on a sunny yellow tee shirt with fuchsia and turquoise letters.

Just Do Your Own Thing is more like it. This is easier to do when you remember wellness is not the total absence of illness. I value having a life where I can live as a whole and well person.

This isn’t impossible. It’s possible when we recognize that our health isn’t an “always” well or “never” ill affair. And that allowing ourselves to live in fear of other people’s judgments is no way to live and the quickest way to make ourselves ill.

Ironic, yet true.

We can look to others for inspiration yet selectively choose the media we use to get information about ourselves and other people. We don’t have to feel inferior to the rail-thin waifs like Kate Moss advertising designer clothes. We can instead seek out individuals and images that reinforce a positive message.

For the record, I rarely wear high heels. I’m not rail-thin either. I believe that those of us facing mental health challenges need to take back the media. Thus my goal of publishing Left of the Dial in December and of publishing soon after the two self-help books.

Remember: wellness is not the total absence of illness. Achieving wellness involves accepting that the world is bigger than you and your pain. That by going out and doing what you love every day or as often as possible the pain subsides.

That by helping others, you help yourself.

Just Do What You Love?

Yes. Yes. And Yes.

I recommend setting goals to achieve for the intrinsic rewards not external approval from other people.

The ability to walk in “go-big-or-go-home” stilettos that cripple your feet just to prove you’re hot.

The getting on a hedonic treadmill to acquire more and more things that clutter your apartment.

The faking it over and over to prove you’re normal to people who are going to judge you for being “crazy.”

The holding of other people accountable for determining how you feel about yourself.

The living with endless insecurities instead of lowering the VU meter on your thoughts so that you can live life in balance: left of the dial.

It goes on and on when a person continually seeks other people’s approval.

I say: do what’s right for you. Live YOUR life in YOUR style.

In my book Flourish I talk in detail about acting true to yourself to combat the stigma.

The Ziggy Marley song “True to Myself” is an anthem. I attended a Ziggy Marley concert where I first heard that song and had to buy the CD it was on.

It can be hard when other people in society don’t give you recognition. Like when Ralph Ellison wrote in his classic book that he was an invisible man because no one saw him.

There’s a solution: seek intrinsic rewards like a job well done or the high of a good workout.

Each of us can hold ourselves in high esteem when others do not.

It takes courage to live with a mental illness. It takes confidence to do your own thing when society abandons you.

I’ll end here by telling readers that doing your own thing IS the way to combat stigma.

I’ll return on Thursday with more ideas about this.

The Oprah magazine seems to be getting better.

In his recent column, Dr. Phil addresses the topic I started here last Thursday: having the courage to discover and do “your own thing,” not what you think you should do to escape the hell you’re in.

I will quote the best part of his column: “Escape-based choices are almost always disastrous, because they solve only half the problem. Target-based decisions at least have a shot of being successful, so keep that in mind every time you have a significant choice to make.”

“Don’t be pushed away from what you don’t want; let yourself be pulled toward what you do want.”

Dr. Phil understands that when we find ourselves in a hellish dilemma, we’re “ready to run headlong for anyone, anything or anyplace…without regard for whether it’s better, healthier or even what we want.”

He calls this “ready, fire aim.” It’s the topic of his column in the Oprah magazine out now on newsstands.

In it, by the way, he’s critical of most women’s urge to settle for the wrong guy because they’re afraid of what others will think of them if they’re single.

“Ready, fire, aim” is no way to live.

Each of us deserves better than to cycle through one dead-end scenario after another on the way to finding our true happiness.

I want to talk about the upside of hell: how a situation that is not ideal can turn out to help us move toward our true calling.

I spent 7 years chained to desks in cubicles in offices in buildings. I had two-hour commutes each way for a total of twenty hours spent traveling to and from work. That’s no way to live.

I had hitched myself to the first job that came along to spring myself from the hell of a dysfunctional mental health system. True: I went out of the frying pan into the fire.

It’s 2014: too late in the history of the recovery movement for individuals to be told what they should accept, what is possible for them, or what they should want. Providers aren’t the ones who are supposed to tell us that we have to accept a one-size-fits-all lifestyle.

Only us: we’re the ones who can take control over the direction of our lives. The tools to get there are ours to create and to use. Do you want to only “defy mental illness” and live your life in reaction against the diagnosis? Or do you want to “win at the game of life” and take your rightful place on the playing field by “moving toward” a great life instead of away from hell?

All is not lost though. There can be an upside of the hell, if that is possible. A silver lining exists; you just have to turn the cloud inside-out or upside-down to reveal your own opportunities to move toward wellness instead of escape from illness.

The detours we take can have an upside, even if it’s often in retrospect that we realize the road taken moved us farther away from what excites and energizes us.

We need to find the hidden positive elements; the silver lining in our experiences from our dark days. Often: had we not been in hell, we’d become complacent, and not strive to better ourselves.

The upside of my time spent in offices was that I learned social protocol and interacted with people from different walks of life. My first boss told me to tell callers on the phone “one moment please” instead of “hold on.” That is one of the things I always remembered from that time.

I’ll talk on Thursday about words of encouragement along these lines that I read in the Oprah magazine.

I’m going to share a secret I figured out recently that would’ve made things better early on in my recovery and in my life.

I was reading this on the Internet and it makes perfect sense.

So often, when we lose a job or are dissatisfied with our job, we think the only thing to do is find a new job in the same field. In the 1990s, I was laid off from one job after another: 3 jobs in a row failed to work out.

Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I’m guilty of being crackers in this regard too: it wasn’t until I had spent 7 doomed years in the gray flannel insurance field that I realized something had to go.

The chance meeting with a therapist set me on the new course of going to library school so I could get a job I’d like and would be good at.

The wind-up of this story and the takeaway is that you owe it to yourself to take the time upfront to research the kinds of jobs you’d be good at and would like to do. Do this to spare yourself the misery of going down the wrong path.

If you experience burn out or this chosen field turns out not to be worth its salt down the road: you can always have a second or third career.

I’ll talk in next Monday’s blog entry about how even challenging times in our lives can turn out to have benefits.

I want to recommend the Virtual Consulting services of Organization by Design at http://www.dressingwell.com.

Circa 2005 I bought the Mary Lou Andre book Ready-to-Wear about choosing and using your wardrobe.

For an initial $300, you can hire the services of an image consultant to talk with you via telephone. You e-mail her as an attachment up to 10 photos of yourself wearing outfits. She analyzes how you can improve and talks to you in a half-hour telephone consultation. Then she e-mails you hyperlinks to products you can buy online.

Going on, you can enlist the consultant for $75/per half-hour telephone talk.

I’m telling readers about this in here because it’s the perfect solution for anyone that wants to create a professional wardrobe for going on job interviews, or to assemble clothes you can wear on dates, or to discover the items that fit and flatter your body and your style, for whatever occasion you’d like help with.

I’ve used this service at least 3 times since I had the original first-time consultation.

It’s well worth the money. The way I see it: some people spend money on cigarettes or street drugs or alcohol. Instead of doing that (hardly advisable) you can splurge on the Virtual Consulting service.

The consultant can also tell you your body shape and your face shape to advise on the most flattering eyeglasses or hem lengths for jackets and pants and skirts.

If you love fashion, you might just get hooked on this service.

No kidding: it’s well worth trying out. The Virtual Consulting option is also available for men.

There you go.