Feeling better today. I stayed home from work anyway just so I could be at home during my attempts to eat and rehydrate. In case my body decides to rebel like it did yesterday, I’ll already be at home.
I’m going to pick up today with what I wanted to write about on Tuesday. So, I’ll just dub today “Talk About it Thursday” instead of “Tuesday”.
I’ve decided to try and post something on Instagram and Facebook every day and see what that does for my reach. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of people on Facebook who are interacting with my posts that are people I don’t know. That’s good. It means my audience is widening. My message is getting out there. There are, however, still the people that I’m friends with on there. They have been super supportive of my recent posts.
On Monday, I believe it was, I saw a post on Threads that asked what our proudest accomplishment was. I responded that overcoming the worst of my mental illnesses and having good mental health and healing on the other side of them was mine. I turned my answer into a post on Instagram and Facebook.
I shared three pictures that are of me in the early 2000s. My best estimate is 2001/2002. Those were the years that my mental health was at its worst. My diagnoses were Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder Type 2. I was deep in the cycle of self-harm and it was just…bad.
These are the pictures:
In response to my post on Threads, someone asked how I recovered. I included my answer there to my post on Instagram/Facebook. And that was, medication, a brilliant psychiatrist, ECT treatments, quitting a toxic job, and therapy.
I shared that because I want my platform to be an inspiration for those either with mental health issues or people who have loved ones experiencing mental illness. My post on Monday was to share my experience in healing and to offer hope that it does get better. And that I am someone who at the very least, knows from experience what it’s like.
I got a very unexpected response to my post. One of my college roommates commented. I almost forgot that I was friends with her on Facebook. I met her in the fall of 2000 and she absolutely knew me during the time these pictures were taken. And she reminded me of that. Her message was very nice. She said she was proud of me. I told her thank you and that it was rough there for a while. Look at her reply to that.
She said, “Yes, it was.” That simple sentence really struck me. My memory of that time in my life is very limited. The trauma of how bad my mental health was has caused me to lose much of those two years. When I think back on that time, I zero in on my mother and Josh. In my mind, they were the two people who were there the most. But I didn’t live with them. I lived with this woman and another of our friends at the time. In our first year of school, we lived on separate floors of the same dorm. In the second year, we shared a suite in the new dorm that had been built. I spent more time with them than I probably did with Josh around then. I know how Josh and my mom were affected by me. It didn’t dawn on me until now that others were affected too. In fact, the second semester of that second year, she and our other friend moved out of the suite and to a different floor of the dorm. They didn’t say it, but I know it was because of me. “It was rough there for a while”.
It’s almost embarrassing for me now to have someone else acknowledge how they were affected by me back then. Mental illness feels very isolating at times. You are keenly aware that other people aren’t feeling the way you are. And because you’re so focused on how awful you feel, you can’t always consider the effect you have on others. Dr. Simpson, the brilliant psychiatrist I mentioned, when I first met him during my second hospital stay, I remember him telling me very pointedly, “Look what you’re doing to your mother.” She had been sitting there during our first meeting and apparently I was making her very upset. I just couldn’t see beyond myself back then.
Obviously there is a happy ending to this. More than 20 years later and I am not in a “rough” place anymore. The place I’m in is allowing me to share my experience because I’ve learned from it. It was just a little bit of a shot to the heart to have someone else acknowledge my experience from their perspective.
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