However, my emotional state verges on tears and I'm trained not to burden others. I feel like a dam about to burst in an explosion of tears and that my tears of grief will find no comforting arms. This is what it is like for me as a middle-aged single woman with a psychiatric disability. Yes, I'm an individual diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Often euphemistically called mood swings it is more accurately a medical condition more akin to a system of pulleys shifting its load of deep, sensitive emotions.
Today I feel overwhelmed by grief and unable to muster the energy required to do what needs to be done. Torn asunder, I am. I feel the ache of an opening heart, unsure whether I can heal another round of depression. It has been a very difficult and challenging year health-wise in every major domain; physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. I'm in mourning. That's what is happening within me and I wonder if it will ever end.
I already know the answer. It will pass and then randomly it will return in spite of the medication. There are predictable triggers and then there are the unexpected ones. Why? What happened? How do you reach individuals who are unable or too stubborn to ask for help? Depression has it's own voice. The trick is to be able to separate and/or distinguish the voice of the disease from the real me or the real you. You do not need to believe this is true for it to be so.
Part of the resolution calls for authentic kindness and compassion. While some individuals delude themselves into believing they hold these values to be true and there are "the Others" who live and share these values with friends and strangers and families.
What do you do when a friend is sick or hospitalized or sent to rehab? You visit, bring food, send flowers or chocolates (always appreciated), buy them a new nightie or bathrobe. You email or Facebook them. You take them out for walks, go out for lunch or to the movies. You distract them by bringing them back into the community from which they've been separated. Slowly, gently without an personal agenda.
Naturally, as a sensitive, I have a distinct point of view culled from a myriad of experiences advocating, battling, and negotiating through an overburdened, impoverished psychiatric and social services system. It is now faced with a flood of new patients returning from war to a dysfunctional health-care system with it's own prejudices, an increasing number of disenfranchised, unemployed and the displaced, amid a Depression (not recession) since the Great Depression. Is an explosion or implosion possible?
The ever growing number of American-born families added to the poverty class is a major national mental health crisis as both health-care and social services funding are cut. The new wave of immigrants are better able to cope than the native-born of the United States. What is it really is like "Out Here" as an educated, middle-class, "high-functioning" individual who was initially unprepared to live alone with a disabling condition, in poverty, as a marginalized citizen, interacting with immigrants during the worse economic crisis? Who cares any way?
In the health-care, legal, media and social services systems the prejudice against the mentally-ill is pervasive. Changes in attitudes takes generations. So I'm drawn to the underdog because I am an underdog myself. It has always been this way for me. I, also, believe the pen or in this era, word processing software, is mightier than the sword. I write myself out of dilemmas. I am one of the Others. I give a damn.
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