My Journey into Darkness

Infusion of light and dark creates mystery. It can also create healing. This last Monday I had the experience of meeting my new psychiatrist. Ann, my Meds Consul Nurse whom I have seen for the last eight years living on Lopez, retired recently and has sold her house on Orcas Island and moved away. This began a short series of events, luckily, that led me to a woman in Anacortes, as we are very scarce of such experts in San Juan County. I know this because when the busy summer is gone, I hope to continue pursuing starting a mental health support group on Lopez that will link potential consumers to the help that they need. As a result, we need to make a thorough inventory of what is available in this county. Thus far results have proved that very minimal services, if any, exist for my fellow travelers, my people, in San Juan County.

Back to the recent journey to Anacortes to meet Gina, a turns out brilliant pharmacologist and psychiatrist, I had no Idea what sort of can of worms I was opening in myself. Turns out telling your entire mental health history starting at age 14 and spanning 22 years, can leave you a bit, well there are many words, bewildered, intense, gutted, completely revealed, raw, angry, and in the end, hopeful. This proved to me the extent that we must dance with and embrace the darker side of ourselves to open the door to healing. I am grateful to be in the hands of such a skilled scientist, but she is far from touchy feely. Ann was also a mindfully oriented therapist, and though not a doctor, was able to hold me in the soft light of validation. I loved our visits, and she was also a very skilled medication nurse, and got me on the right medication (a very challenging pursuit in most cases) as well as guided me to the balanced place that I live today.

I have not forgotten completely what I have been through mentally and emotionally over these last 22 years, and yet it is easy to try to do so while encompassing a balanced and stable life for the most part that consists of “fitting in” with many humans on this planet that do not suffer from mental illness. I have found that while pursuing connection these last couple of months with people who are near to my cause, that they are helping me. I need to be seen in all of my flaws. Exposing my parts so completely to a stranger at this recent appointment, proved how much darkness still remains inside of me. That my past consists of pockets of secrets, neatly tucked away in my psyche and self, to function in a way so that most people in my community, not being told, don’t even know I suffer from a serious mental disability. I felt mad at Gina at first, for having me thoroughly dispose of my darkest secrets for a clinical report she could study, then discarding me to my day with a frank and unemotional goodbye. But I see now that I do trust her scientific mind and expertise as well as her professionalism, and I know I am in good hands.

So here is to journeying on. Many of you out there today may also suffer from depression, some form of bipolar disorder, a sex or alcohol addiction or even schizophrenia, and I have to say that the darkness that resides in you, the abuse in your past, the pain that you have been through, IS the key. I may not have wanted to give a thorough inventory of every flaw I have emotionally, mentally and physically, but it felt honest. I know that in this darkness, though there is much anger, is where I must pass through to achieve being a companion with the light.