Tag: recovery

People Have the Power

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Individuals with SZ are seen as interchangeable with no identities of our own apart from the illness and its symptoms.

The reasoning goes: we’re not able to recover so why bother trying to help us do this if it’s impossible?

NO. That thinking doesn’t fly with me.

We should be trying to help people recover.

I don’t accept chronic disability as the fate of any human being.

My point exactly is that getting the right treatment right away can enable an individual to bloom–to do better–to be able to have a full and robust life.

I’m not a fan of the all talk and no action to create solutions MO of so-called normal people. They don’t have a vested interest in my life and health and in yours and other people’s who have MH issues.

I titled this blog entry “People Have the Power” because we have control over the dialogue. It’s also the title of my favorite Patti Smith song.

I’ve written before that I think no one we elect in government can ultimately ever do things to remedy societal ills.

So it’s up to each of us to take action to create the kind of life and health we want for ourselves.

It’s up to each of us to help each other.  Martin Luther King called this creative altruism.

I ask you:

Are you willing to remain silent?

Are you willing to accept chronic disability?

Are you willing to accept the status quo?

I’m NOT able to buy into the myth of helplessness and hopelessness.

There’s a better way: having the courage to speak the truth to power. Telling our stories.

Doing something to help those of us who WANT to recover have the OPPORTUNITY to recover.

Recovery for Everyone

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I’m an Author Advocate and Visionary.

I believe in my vision of “Recovery for Everyone.”

Recovery is not and cannot be a one-size-fits-all proposition.

Today I realized the dilemma I face in championing recovery for everyone:

Not everyone WANTS to recover. I found this out on Monday.

It seems hard to believe – yet I have met a person who doesn’t want to recover.

If you’re basing “recovery” on becoming a CEO like a friend of mine did you’re setting yourself up for an impossible standard.

The point of recovery is not to achieve status in the world with a traditionally accepted job or relationship or lifestyle.

Rather the goal if you ask me is: “To Thine Own Self Be True.”

Recovery is possible when you first like yourself and are willing to go down your own path to get to where you want to be.

If you ask me it’s a realistic not just noble goal to want to do a little better and be a little better every day.

I will always get flak. It’s because I’m a Visionary who dares think recovery is possible.

What I know to be true–that having your own version of a full and robust life in recovery is possible–is often not accepted in the mainstream. My critics don’t accept this view of what’s possible.

Wanting or expecting to become a CEO isn’t in the cards for every one of us.

Yet whatever our individual limitations are we can and should develop “work-arounds” to make our lives as happy and healthy as they can be.

I will go to my grave championing that getting the right treatment right away results in a better outcome.

Getting the right treatment right away has the potential to halt or totally stop disability in its trajectory.

Need I say more?

Yet regardless of the degree of disability that any of us face:

I say giving up hope is a mistake.

I’ll talk more about getting the right treatment right away in the next blog entry.

Recovery is an Open Door

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Tonight I’ve changed the wording in a couple of sentences in the book description for Left of the Dial on Amazon.com.

You live–you change your mind. I deleted the reference to achieving a “pre-illness dream.” I replaced it with wording that you can have your own version of a full and robust life.

Going on over two years since the memoir was published I’ve learned something profound, more realistic, and hopeful in terms of what is possible:

That when we get older we can discover that we have a new talent that we didn’t have before we got sick.

This is the real hope. The truth is that the illness can attenuate for a lot of us in our older years. So the point isn’t that to be considered successful we must–or can–achieve our pre-illness dreams.

The point is that I didn’t achieve my pre-illness dream of getting a Masters’ in Journalism.

This is the far more remarkable thing: that a person can have better life after they’ve had a breakdown than before. And this life isn’t always the one we wanted or expected to have.

Nothing succeeds like persistence. Recovery isn’t quick and it isn’t easy–it’s challenging and hard at times. Yet it can be a beautiful expression of the potential within each of us to do some kind of personally meaningful “work”–paid or not.

There’s an ending to the expression: “When one door closes, another door opens.” It’s this: “Yet we often look so longingly at the door that closed that we don’t see the one opening before us.”

It’s a mistake to regret what cannot be. It’s a gift to embrace what life has in store for us when we dare to walk through the open door.

No one else has stated in these exact words what I’ll be the first person to tell you now:

Recovery is an open door.

Reclaiming Ourselves in Recovery

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Keep on taking action in the direction of your dreams. A goal is a dream with a deadline according to a fortune cookie message I cracked open.

I’ll be 52 soon. I can tell you that the future can be better. There’s no crystal ball to peer into to predict what will happen of course. Yet it makes sense to have hope.

Each of us is capable of having our own version of a full and robust life.

As I get older I remember the city of my youth that has been long gone. You’re only young once. Yet it’s possible to have a youthful outlook your whole life.

I want to publish three other non-fiction books in addition to this second one I’m writing now. What I want to write in here in the blog now is about some of the topics of these other books that await wings.

Reclaiming ourselves in recovery is possible.

I will always maintain that I succeeded despite my time in the CMHS–Community Mental Health System–not because of it. Today we have more and better options and we can create our own options too.

The goal as I see it is to be happy and take joy in living. Sometimes  you need to have a Plan B when what you wanted to do isn’t working out. It takes guts to give up one thing and start to do something else.

Yet the older I get in my life I see the beauty in focusing on the elemental: having a core set of values that determine what you prioritize as being meaningful work you want to do now.

Get rid of the extraneous things and the negative people that weigh you down. Do only what suits you. My motto is: be bold. Be innovative.

To that end I have created another idea about goal-setting that I’m testing out now to see if I want to include it in a book.

In the coming blog entries I’m going to talk about some of the things I’ve written in the next three books.

 

15-Year Advocate Anniversary

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This year I’ve been a mental health advocate for 15 years.

In this time it feels like I’ve been preaching mostly to the choir.

I’ve been attacked when I claim that most people can recover.

This fall I’ll have been in recovery for 30 years. In the summer I’ll have been in remission–that is symptom-free–for 25 years.

I’ll be 52 in two weeks. I’ve taken some kind of pills for these 30 years. Today I take Geodon which has been a miracle drug. Before that I took Stelazine for the first 20 years. Neither drug caused weight gain.

I credit that fact that I recovered to my mother’s one courageous act to drive me to the hospital within 24 hours of my break. Luckily, I was admitted and given medication. Three weeks later when I was released the symptoms were gone.

In the time I’ve been an advocate since 2002 there has been some progress–thought most of us would think the progress has been limited.

Wherever I go when I give a talk it’s an honor and a privilege to connect with peers and family members who share common struggles.

I’ve been in the vanguard in terms of what I’ve written and spoken about recovery. No one else has quite yet reiterated what I’ve championed.

I credit having made fitness my number-one priority as having made all the difference in the last six years of my life.

On the cusp of 52 I believe fitness must rightly encompass body, mind, spirit, finances, relationships, and some kind of career–even if it’s just working on your recovery and not a paid job.

For years now I’ve hailed the work of the cheerful cashiers in Rite Aid. Unlike most people, I don’t care about status and I don’t think we should judge a person by whether they’ve achieved traditional markers of success.

Not everyone can and should aspire to become a J.D. or a famous writer. The peer support guideline tells us: “We expect a better tomorrow in a realistic way.”

I’ve learned in the last 15 years from some kinds of failure that expecting a better tomorrow in a realistic way is indeed the way to go.

Lynn Tesoro is quoted at the end of the Bobbi Brown book Living Beauty. I’ll end here with what she said. Tesoro doesn’t waste time focusing on what’s not achievable.

That wisdom if you ask me is the secret to success in recovery as well as life.

It’s far better to focus on what you can do and be and have.

Choosing Goals

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It’s clear to me that you and I won’t succeed if we succumb to thinking we have to do what other people tell us is the only right thing to do.

It’s 2017 and we have more and better options for living in recovery.

You’re only going to make yourself miserable and have ill health pretending to be someone you’re not just so you can please other people.

We should not be puppets–either of our government or of anyone else who attempts to pull the strings to get us to conform to a so-called norm.

We will only succeed if we are invested in the goals we set and have the starring role in deciding what we want to do with our lives.

When a person says another person has a ton of self-determination that really means that this individual had the courage to go after getting what they wanted without being deterred by whatever obstacle they faced.

Self-determination sounds like a fancy word however as I define it it’s simply the right of everyone living on earth to determine how they want to live their life and the direction they want to go in in their life.

No other person should be telling us what to do without soliciting our feedback on this course of action. Any treatment plan needs to be created with our input.

Choosing our goals should be up to us first of all. Yet really we shouldn’t set the bar so high that we can only fail. The dilemma is that historically for people diagnosed with mental health conditions the bar wasn’t set at all. We weren’t expected to be able to do much of anything.

2017 is here. It’s time to challenge this status quo. It’s time to speak out on the things that matter to us.

I say: engaging in goal-seeking behavior can make all the difference in a person’s recovery.

Choose your goals with care and attention. Choose goals that make sense to you.

Discarding Goals

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I firmly believe that everyone living on earth has the potential to do some kind of work.

For one person this might simply be doing volunteer work or working on their recovery. For another person yes this could be getting a JD.

We are not to frown on those of us who are less fortunate than we are in this regard.

In two months I’ll be 52 years old–and the older I get it’s become imperative to prioritize what I want to do. You too will turn 52 hopefully at some point if you haven’t gotten here now. Prioritizing goals at mid life is the way to go.

In keeping with setting priorities each of us should know that it’s okay to discard a goal or goals that don’t have the chance to be achieved.

At 52 life is getting shorter thus the requirement of choosing wisely what we focus on.

At 52 I’ve discarded a number of goals that used to burn brightly in my mind as things I really really wanted to do in my fifties.

You like I did will plan at 40 what you want to do in the future. Yet the view is different 12 years later at 52. Thus the beauty of discarding goals that weren’t meant to be.

This doesn’t mean you’ve failed just because you’ve quit wanting to do something. You can only fail at something you’ve actually done that didn’t turn out right. You can’t have failed if what you wanted to do you didn’t try to do to begin with.

Bingo–that’s the difference in succeeding at goal-setting–especially at mid life. When we give up focusing on one thing we can replace it with another thing.

Recovery is the gift of a lifetime that we give ourselves in which to heal and be whole and well and happy.

We cannot rush or cut corners when it comes to achieving our life goals. Better to have entertained a goal or two and not acted on it than to sit home throwing ourselves a pity party and not even trying to set a goal because we think we can’t.

Banish the word “can’t” from your vocabulary I tell you. Replace it with “I’m willing to try to see if I can do this.” That’s more like it even if not everything we try will always work out.

I want to continue to talk about setting goals. What I’ve written here is the short version. A book years ago was published that talked about the benefit of quitting.

The difference is: quit when it’s not to your advantage to continue. Persist when the goal is so life-changing that to not risk trying to achieve it would fill you with regret at “what might have been.”

The quote is: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”

The view from the cusp of 52 is grand.

Yes You Can

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I’ve changed the quote at the top right of this blog.

Years ago circa 1989 when I was shunted into the day program a woman I met told me: “Not a lot of people with a disability could do what you do.”

It’s true that I took offense at this because I thought it was possible to do these things.

As of today the proof that Yes You Can really is that we are “individuals” living with a mental health challenge. Not “consumers” or “schizophrenics” or any other label.

Each of us has the potential to do the things that give us joy and happiness. Each of us has the potential to heal and have optimal mental health. Each of us has the potential to flourish doing what we love.

Harboring jealousy at other people isn’t the way to live our lives.

Today in 2017 I can adamantly rebut that woman’s decades-ago comment with this:

You don’t have to become an Ivy League lawyer or a famous writer to get on with  a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life after you receive your diagnosis.

That’s the distinction I’ve always made in the various incarnations of my blog:

Often our internal roadblocks limit us more than external factors.

The goal I dare say is to be happy and healthy–that’s the true aim of living in recovery.

Each of us gets to define what happy and healthy looks like for us in our own lives.

Again it goes back to what I’ve written about self-stigma. If you’re trashing yourself or someone else because they’re a cashier in Rite Aid, that’s NOT right.

The woman who commented to me that way in the mists of time was an exceptional baker. She could cook like you wouldn’t believe.

So if you are a creative chef creating culinary wonders that’s your version of happy and healthy.

I thought about this woman’s comment today because I was talking with my literary agent who’s as visionary as I am in championing mental health.

Years ago when I first started blogging I had the audacity to claim that most people could recover and go on to have your own version of a full and robust life.

Frankly I’m tired of so-called experts claiming that no one can recover. I’m tired of getting attacked because I choose to focus on on the positive instead of dwelling on symptoms and lack and deficits.

The point is: if you can bake a souffle you’ve got that over me.

Any questions?

Self-Advocacy

Christina Bruni1 Comment

You shouldn’t ever apologize for your existence.

You shouldn’t feel that your diagnosis limits you forever.

I coached a guy who found out one of his top forty careers might be a race car technician.

I’m going to be excoriated for telling readers that we can’t always listen to what so-called experts advise us is the right thing to do.

They haven’t met us and aren’t living our lives. Only you and I know what’s the right thing to do on any given day.

You’re an equal partner with your treatment provider(s). You deserve and have the right to have input into the decisions being made about your life.

Today circa 2017 we have more options and better options for what we can do in recovery. If no option exists, you can create an option for yourself.

The Aveeno skincare advertisement gets it right: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Each of us can create a life of our own design.

It’s our right to be self-advocates. You aren’t any longer relegated to being a passive recipient of services.

That’s why I always detested using the word consumer to describe a person. You consume soft drinks. You don’t consume healthcare.

I’m going to end here with this:

You diagnosis doesn’t limit your choices forever.

Yes you can.

 

Continuing in Recovery

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The older you get in your life it’s possible to have a better recovery.

My point exactly is that engaging in goal-seeking behavior can make all the difference in the quality of your life.

God didn’t put me here on earth in this lifetime to judge anyone else. Yet it’s my philosophy that watching TV all day and isolating in your apartment can breed ill health.

The term “actively alone” I’ve coined to describe the benefit of doing positive healthy things–whether in your apartment cooking a meal or going to a coffeehouse to read a newspaper and drink a latte.

Sometimes all it takes is getting out of your house and your head to improve how you feel about yourself.

The further along you are in your recovery you can make new strides along the way. The goal is to not stop growing and improving. If you ask me staying in the same place mentally will lead to a stagnant life.

It’s January–which in my book is the perfect time to do early Spring Cleaning.

The first article I ever got published was in 1990 in the Women’s Forum of the Staten Island Advance newspaper. My article in appeared in January and was titled Time to Start Spring Cleaning.

Indeed–over and over through the years I’ve made the case in the blog for doing spring cleaning in January, in the actual spring,or at any time of the year.

Clearing the cobwebs out of your head as well as clearing items out of your closets is to me the perfect technique to segue into taking new risks.

Go at your own pace. Recovery is not a race nor is it a competition.

My friend and I count down the weeks to spring not the endless winter days. Right now there’s just over only nine weeks to spring.

Spring will be here in due season.