“But who ever said the easiest path is the one you should choose?” – Ellen Hopkins, Rumble

Tags

bravery, change, Intensity, journey, Living, mental illness, social work, vulnerability, words

I can feel it lately, though I don’t know how to describe it other than a deep internal rumbling, almost like hunger but thicker and complicated by a stew of emotions.

It started during my first graduate school class, when my professor told us that silence condones, that our voices as social workers are one of the most powerful tools in our possession, that words are a vehicle towards change.

It continued as my eyes were opened to the unearned privilege I’ve carried my entire life with complete unawareness, unawareness born because of that very privilege.  It strengthened as I learned about our American system and how it is oppressive at it’s very core, how for the first 30 years of my life I have been quietly and passively walking on soil that is stained and stolen.

It grew louder, more ferocious, when the majority of the academic community which so loudly touted social justice values went mute surrounding mental illness issues. It writhed with loneliness and fear when I was told not to speak of my own struggles, not to share my personal story, not to be who I am.

And it’s there now, this rumbling, as I write these words.  I’ve cried over it, denied it, tried to throw it away.  I don’t want the heaviness of caring so much.

But I do.

So I’m releasing that rumbling, turning it into a thunder clap, a roar.  I don’t want to be a part of a world where so much is broken, so many differences are ostracized and demonized and oppressed.  I don’t know what it’s like to be black, to be homeless, to be Native American, and I hope to continue in my learning about allieship, about ways in which I can be a part of empowering those communities, raising those valuable voices above the din of privilege.

I do know what it’s like to have a mental illness.  And I’m finished walking the tightrope between silent safety and outright openness.  In a year and a half I am going to be a social worker who has attempted suicide, has scars from self-harm, has been in a psychiatric hospital multiple times.  And I’m going to be a damn good one.

And I’m allowing that rumble to guide me, that passion to drive me towards working for change.  I’ve always believed in the power of storytelling, that words matter.  Now my words will have rumbling behind them.

“These little earthquakes…here they go again.” -Tori Amos

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being ALIVE, bravery, DBT, emotions, Intensity, journey, mental illness, recovery, thesamedifferent

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the word recover.  We talk about recovery in terms of physical illness and injury; you can recover from cancer, a broken arm, a sunburn.  These all have fixed endpoints, clear indicators of when healing has occurred.

Then there is recovery in the sense that you regain something that you’ve lost, like recovering a document after your computer crashes.  This, too, is specific, tangible.

With mental illness, though, recovery seems murky, nebulous.  I keep hoping there is some plateau I will reach when everything will even out and things will feel firm and easy.  The more I search for that, however, the less I believe that it exists.

I’ve changed behaviors related to my illness, certainly, and I’ve not been in the hospital in months.  These are markers, I guess, of being in a different space.  But emotionally, I still feel the tremors of despair and sadness and anxiety.  Perhaps this is what recovering is? Responding to the big, painful feelings in a different way? Not being rid of them, but accepting that they will always be present, learning to allow room for them rather than running?

It’s not what I had initially hoped for.  When I made the choice, about a year ago, to shift my focus to living, I did it with the mindset that I might, someday, feel differently.  More and more, though, I believe that my life will always be a series of earthquakes, that seismic emotions will constantly brew under the surface.  I think I’ve just gotten better at functioning with them present-and am still constantly working at improving even more.

I’m not writing this to convey hopelessness, and it might be true for some people with mental illness that they reach a place which is entirely new, a state of “being recovered”.  But for me, this is a chronic part of my life, and though not who I am, very much connected to it.  And sometimes I wonder that, once you have almost died, once you have gone to such extremes, once you have felt dehumanized by a system and lost completely, if you ever totally come back.

It may just be where my head is at right now; exhausted, scared about the future, overwhelmed by a crush of different feelings.  I think there is a little sense of peace, though, in acknowledging that things might always be rocky for me.  In that imperfection there is space to stretch and grow, to make mistakes and learn from them, even if at times it’s painful and slow.

Recovered means I’m stagnant, a marble statue representing health and wholeness in a Psychiatric textbook.  Recovery means I get to keep living every day in my humanness, moving forwards and backwards as I try to figure out who I am, what I want, and how I can embrace my sensitivity and intensity.  It is living with the emotional earthquakes, not shutting down or self-destructing because of them-and maybe even, sometimes, causing the rest of the world to tremble too…for it’s the ground shifting beneath us that makes us stop to re-evaluate, try something new-pushes us to soar.