Posted by Christ_empowered on May 10, 2014, at 0:52:51
When you're not sick enough to be in a mental hospital, your psych history is widely known throughout your small southern town, and your people take care of you....
...you just might piss people off. At 20, I was hospitalized, ECT'd, and destroyed. Now, I'm 29, bright eyed, surprisingly well-preserved, and healthy.
For a while there, people projected all their issues onto me. I was, in fact, scapegoated. It wasn't cool to talk bad about most gay people, but me? I was a f*g, apparently. So on and so forth...
So, I'm back, this time with an attorney (long story...did I tell you I now have a misdemeanor?), and things are slowly improving.
Problem is, being mentally ill/issues with shrinks/struggle defined so much of me for so long, I don't know how to develop a whole new self, one not defined by survival mode.
Ugh. Back to the title...
...people expect the mentally ill to be vegetable or brain damaged lunatics. I used to be a strange mixture of both...now I'm relatively normal.
My one friend--she's a high achiever, into CBT and Ikea, and...wow...not like me--she tells me I can do better. I don't doubt it, but I also kind of think she's turning into the modern equivalent of a "Stepford Wife", with all her original thoughts and feelings wiped away by CBT and carefully selected pharmaceuticals.
Did I tell you I'm taking classes online? And not in psychology/sociology? Thank GOD for that! I have to take my first ever Accounting class! Crazy!
I'll get a real job someday, I think..hope..pray...
...in the meantime, I guess being "schizophrenic" (even though the dx is bipolar) is, like, my job. LOL.
poster:Christ_empowered
thread:1065435
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20140502/msgs/1065435.html