Tag: recovery

Demanding Excellence

Christina BruniLeave a comment

I’m sending this blog entry through one day early because I will be going to sell copies of Left of the Dial soon.

This is where I differ: my stance is that we should demand excellence: from ourselves, from our treatment providers, and from others in society in how they treat us.

Each of us has the choice: the free will to decide what we want to do and how we want to live.

I make the case though for striving to bring your A Game to the challenges you face.

We don’t have to do well everything we do. Yet doing well what’s important and what we value doing well can boost our confidence.

It’s not always easy to feel good when we’ve made a mistake or not performed well. Yet learning from a mistake and giving ourselves a pat on the back for trying is what will give us the confidence to try again.

My contention is: for too long people with disabilities were discouraged from setting goals and achieving them like other people in society do routinely. Other people take for granted going to school to get a degree and having a job and living in their own homes.

Now is the time for individuals living with chronic conditions to act like we’re hot shit. Demanding excellence signals to other people that we won’t accept being kicked to the gutter while others enter the banquet hall and feast at the table.

It’s a choice. I realize a lot of people are perfectly content to have an ordinary average life.

I’m simply giving out another possible option: setting our sights higher for what we can do and how we expect others to treat us.

I’m all for demanding excellence.

Risking Change

Christina Bruni3 Comments

I talked in the Left of the Dial blog–or was it here–about having a sustainable life.

Eating everything in sight–the see food–diet wasn’t sustainable for me. Buttoning up my individuality by working in office jobs at insurance firms wasn’t sustainable.

It takes courage to admit failure and take off in a new direction. A person can live in denial only so long before the lid pops off and we’re forced to confront things.

Denial is a coping mechanism we use when the truth is too painful to deal with. Yet make no mistake: we’re aware of the truth about what’s going on. We just keep stuffing it down. Then one day the lid pops off.

I met Lori Schiller at a book talk she gave at the Learning Annex circa 1994 when her schizophrenia memoir The Quiet Room was first published. Lori was the first person who told the audience that we can’t keep stuffing things down.

Stuffing things down causes ill health. I’m convinced it can cause illness.

I’m merely taking what Lori said and running with it because it’s so true.

We need to have the courage to risk doing something new. We need to have the courage to back up and take another route when the road we’re on is a dead end.

In the end and at the end of the day living true to ourselves is the only via option for having a full and robust life.

I might be the oddball in this regard because I choose to see the humor in life. I know that working at a buttoned-up job turned out to be a mistake. It’s better to figure this out later than not ever.

IMHO a job shouldn’t make you ill. And if you have schizophrenia, you shouldn’t be shunted into a job with narrowly defined duties and no chance of breaking out of that blind responsibility.

That’s precisely why I prefer working in a creative field: I like the customers and treat them with dignity. The library is a third place in the community that opens its doors to everyone.

Once a guy came up and I asked: “How can I help you?” “I need a psychiatrist,” he deadpanned. “Do you want a natural treatment or medication?” I followed along.

“I’ll have what  you’re having,” he continued the joke. And he was joking because in no way did he come to me for help finding a shrink. After this quirky banter he did tell me what he was there for.

A numbers cruncher I’m not. And I still can’t do long division. I got a 66 in my trigonometry Regents so I barely squeaked by. How you could rightly ask could someone like me think working in business was the ticket out for her? Wearing suits and having a steel demeanor. With no opportunity to joke around or banter with customers.

It took me seven years to figure out that the road I was on was a dead-end.

The moral of this story is that risking change is better than continuing to be in denial that you’ve gone down the wrong path. It’s better to risk change later in life than not to risk change at all.

With nutrition, with fitness, with a career: it’s better later than not ever to make positive changes.

Gnocchi Recipe

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Readers: I failed. At the gnocchi recipe. It was a total disaster.

I burned the inside bottom of the saucepan and had to throw out the saucepan.

It was a recipe I found in the Audrey at Home cookbook written by Luca Dotti–Audrey Hepburn’s younger son.

This experiment convinced me to not want to try to make the gnocchi again. Not at all. The food I’ve cooked from recipes comes out great. Not so with the gnocchi. It was a total disaster.

Wind-up:

I’m tearing through a KMart stocking up on items to the tune of $55. I bought a turquoise baking dish along with the replacement saucepan and other sundries.

You can get household items at KMart on the cheap. Though I didn’t relish having to spend the big bucks to buy another saucepan.

This gnocchi failure seems like the perfect metaphor for recovery and for life:

If at first you don’t succeed, consider Plan B. Figure out your next move when continuing down the same path isn’t an option.

A person is often forced to reinvent themselves when Plan A doesn’t go as planned.

This requires having a sense of humor. Laughter can be the best medicine as an adjunct to SZ medication. I want to tell amusing stories more so than to focus on the hell.

Now not all of our foiled efforts are as laughably raucous as a gnocchi recipe.

Yet IMHO the lesson here is that sometimes a mistake is just a mistake. The option we choose at the time (like going into a gray flannel career when you’re a creative madwoman) seems like the right one.

It’s only in retrospect that we realize: “What was I thinking?” It starts out innocuous. It seems like a good idea. Like wanting to try out a gnocchi recipe. Then you’re full-tilt into a mistake.

Recognizing the need to change direction in our lives is necessary.

That’s the moral of the gnocchi story.

I’ll talk about this in the coming blog entries: taking risks and risking change.

Life IS Fair

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I realized yesterday that life IS fair. It’s fair because regardless of what happens to us we have control over how we respond.

It might seem odd that I say this yet it just might be true. My hope is that when people read my memoir they see that I fought to have a better life. This was my response when I was shunted into a second long-term day program.

I will always be averse to having a young person languish in a day program for longer than nine months. I recommend obtaining goal-setting services at an Intensive Psychiatric Rehabilitation Treatment (IPRT) program instead.

The wind-up is that a person can be successful later in life. Where you start is not where you have to remain.

I know a guy who collected a disability check all his life. At 55 he said: “This is it. I want to get a job helping people.” He got a job as a peer advocate and years later was able to retire.

It’s not ever over.

I’ll keep this blog entry short and repeat:

Where you start is not where you have to remain.

Added Attraction – Extra Blog Entry

Christina BruniLeave a comment

I wanted to publish an extra blog entry today after having read an Atlantic magazine news article on Twitter. It quoted research that 70 to 80 percent of individuals living with schizophrenia want to work and think they’re capable of working.

The Atlantic article said it’s their doctors who tell their patients they can’t work. I have in these various incarnations of my blog for the last nine years railed against the mental health staff who have a dim view of what patients diagnosed with schizophrenia can do in their lives.

I have always championed that in my own life I recovered BECAUSE I found the jobs I love and that I’m good at. I wasn’t able to do these jobs because I had recovered. I will always claim that it is the other way around: I recovered only after I found the careers I loved.

In New York City: Baltic Street AEH, Inc. provides advocacy employment and housing for individuals with mental illnesses. Baltic Street has an employment agency with two locations in Brooklyn. The staff there help people get and keep jobs they like and would be good at too.

The day is here. Today is the day when not only it’s possible to recover it’s possible to have a full and robust life equal to people in society who don’t have mental illnesses.

If you are a mental health staff person I urge you to take the long view and consider that your clients can indeed work at some kind of job. It might not always be a JD or MD. It might be a job in Rite Aid. It could be as the CEO of a corporation like my friend was able to do.

I urge readers to consider doing what I do. My first thought is NOT “This is impossible” or “I won’t be able to do this.” My automatic thought is “How can I make this happen?”

If you have a goal of any kind–to get a job, to live in your own apartment, whatever–I’ll be the first to tell you that you have right inside yourself what you need to succeed.

And if you want to get a job you can go to your local neighborhood library and ask if at a branch in their system a librarian helps people create resumes. Resume help is available at libraries in Brooklyn, NY.

Turn over every stone. Be creative. If a solution isn’t immediately available, see what you can do differently using your own strengths and your external support system.

Remember: I’m confident when I tell readers that I recovered BECAUSE I found the jobs I love.

If you want to work, you deserve to try. I will devote more blog entries here to this topic in the future.