When my brain totally melted down a few years ago, I spent a lot of time on a well-known online forum. The community was tolerable and at times incredibly helpful. There was a definite social pecking order, though. I suppose that's true of any online community. At a time when I had been heading upward and then spiraled downward, I was no longer healthy enough to delude myself and ignore the truth that there were several hostile people there. They just would not tolerate anyone else having serious troubles--I suppose they resent that the attention that goes with that is going to someone else.
I recently went back and visited the forum. The same people are having the same discussions about the same exact issues and dramas they were three years ago and two years ago and one year ago.
This means something to me, mostly because I am no longer having those discussions. Maybe I have a good doctor. Maybe therapy worked. Maybe I was never afraid to keep looking for a way to not be able to relate to those discussions.
I'm not saying that I am in any way better than those people on the forum. No. I do, however, think that there is a big difference between talking about one's illness and talking to get insight about one's illness. As I scrolled through those conversations, it seemed to me that going over the same old ground is not meant to be insightful for them. It's more of a way to avoid getting on with life in spite of an illness.
That may sound judgmental, but that's not my intention. Looking back on the forum was a revelation for me showing just how far I've come and continue to progress.
The truth is, I haven't been feeling all that great myself lately, but I can see that I have coping skills and I know how to call on them. That's a good thing when you feel a little unraveled. It's encouraging.
I detest my illness. Treating it with medication may be a challenge, but getting me to accept that I would have to live with it if I were to choose to live at all was a much, much greater challenge. I am sure that this moment of personal insight exists somewhere on the famous continuum outlined by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Progress, I guess.
2 comments:
Having a way to cope with distress is essential. Nothing else progressive can happen without that. I guess those people at the old forum have not found anything that is not destructive or stagnant. I don't know if it was medication or therapy that helped you most, but it seems to me that the kind of coping you are talking about comes from something inside the person. I don't think therapy or medication can 'create' that, I think they might only help the person to see that it exists and then assist the person when they are finding ways to use it and develop it further.
I think I know what you are talking about when you notice a level of stability but yet you do not feel very good. I have the same thing going on here. I really DON'T feel good, but I can write the checks to pay the bills on time, collect the mail and the phone messages, make sure people have doctor and dental check-ups, make sure the trash goes out and cars get serviced, etc. I couldn't keep up with all of those things a year ago. I was a wreck. I can take care of them pretty well now, but I still feel like shit.
Yes, Lynn, I think you get it. There was a time when not only couldn't I function, I just didn't have much interest in it. I think I needed to "be" where I was and understand how that felt before I could adapt and function differently, adapt and function differently than that.
There is something to be said for wanting to get better, although that isn't necessarily how it might be articulated in one's head at the time. You and I share this in common, this wanting to understand, to know even when the information is frightening, and to do this to get back to a reasonable level of functioning--even if it is functioning in a different way.
My illness rolls over me like big breaking waves at high tide, but all along, what I've really wanted, was to know how to ride those waves instead of getting pulled so far under I can't come back up. Again. As it turns out, treading water may be exhausting, but it might actually be better than drowning.
You know what I mean.
Every time I think I'm better, I realize that I thought that before but wasn't as well as I am when I have this thought. Takes too damn long, though.
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