Top of My Class

I just picked up a newsletter from my high school that highlighted a few alumni from my class and the class above me. I am already privy to their successes partly from being connected on Facebook, yet it is hard still to not compare myself to their boastful lives; their self-started businesses, families, and titles of accomplishment. I find myself having to remind myself all of a sudden my worthiness in the stream of all I have faced in my life.

I don’t have a lot of credentials, I did not graduate college and I have not started a successful business or nonprofit, I don’t own a house nor am I a published author, though I am pursuing this. The school I went to was an artistic breeding grounds for free thinkers and the upper middle class white privileged. I am grateful to have received such a potent and lively high school education, and honestly I am very happy for all that my fellow alumni have achieved in their lives, having continued on the path of awareness, true education and success. I still have to remind myself that my success is anything but external, though internal success breathes out into my external on a humble and well-rounded level. I may have a few things to say for myself, that I have a blog, that I am attempting to publish a book, but most of all I would like to say that I have survived, for the last twenty years, with a devastating illness, one that changed my life path for the better.

I now live in a grass roots community surrounded by family and I am healthy. I work at the library and participate in community and pursuing my creativity. I am resilient and have learned so much from living with my illness about this resiliency as well as hope, survival, integrity and love. Self-love is not something one would put out there on a list of accomplishments in an alumni newsletter, but I think it should be listed as a major accomplishment. It is a working accomplishment as well, because we are constantly working towards inner awareness and a love that surrounds our nature with all-encompassing arms.

So yes, here I am in life, in what can appear to me as nothing insurmountable, but I am a success. Every day I breathe in the air and am giving and loving to my neighbor I am a success. Every book I read, every thought I write, whether it be in my own journal or blog, and every hug I give acquaints me with success. I still would love to write a piece for the Northwest School newsletter and say, “I Emily Metcalf has survived living with a severe diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder. I spend my every day reveling in the miracle of life.” I am worthy, I am special, and I am anything but a failure. I believe myself and those out there like me who have not succumbed to the fear and devastation of a serious illness are at the top of our class.