Being Me

The world is fast, it is aggressive. I live in this world but I attempt to combat the nature of society in my quiet life. I live on Lopez Island and as I am learning with my disability, I prosper in a low stress environment. Lately I have restructured or deconstructed my life in order to take care of my lover who suffers from spinal stenosis. He had a four level spinal decompression and lambioplasty lately and is recovering with a foot long scar on his neck and shoulders. He had been digressing majorly with the wearing down of his spinal chord and without surgery it was said he would be paralyzed in a year’s time. I am so grateful that he is in recovery and survived the surgery with resilience and strength.

Because of a need for me to care take him through recovery, I cleared my schedule. Lately I have been looking at the form that an addiction to accomplishment and my ego was taking in my life. I am not an incredibly high achiever, yet because of my disability, I have great sorrow and a void around not being able to go to college, have a family, or a career. I interpreted this as a need for me to appear as high functioning and normal as possible. I worked my way up to working two jobs and maintaining a life that was busy and full. Perfection led to my psychotic break or what I am learning to call a vision quest in 2016. Since then I have been looking hard at my life. I journal every day multiple pages, read tarot, pray and meditate and go to therapy in order to access deeper answers that lay in my soul. The spring of 2017 was not as difficult as the vision quest of 2016 which happened during the months of March and April, but I am reminded as the year anniversary to this life change occurs, of all that deconstructed without choice last year. My life was put on hold, I left my job, quit drinking, and went without seeing my friends for a couple of months. Quickly, however, my life filled again with activity, though at a paired down scale. I realized lately that I have more searching to do. I was offered a job that I had to turn down, but this was a blessing in disguise. I am motivated now to simplify further, to really accept myself in my sensitive state. I am continuing to write, and as I take on this opportunity I have once again of restructuring my life, I am careful how I am putting it back together. It is not purely about what I do day to day, but also an attitude and a commitment to inner reflection.

This new found way of life may also be a result of hormone changes and the possibility that I need different medication. I am seeing my psychiatrist again soon, but I am reminded and learning new that my gift, my differently abled-ness, is a full time job in itself. I am aware fully how my self outside of my illness needs attention as well, and if I don't address these inner issues, it will continue to make my life dealing with my disability that much harder. I am committed now to seeing a new therapist and lowering the stress in my life even further. I have found that I am able to quit drinking and that the need to smoke cigarettes has greatly diminished. I am on a quest, I am longing to channel some of the essence of the vision quest/ psychotic break of 2017, because in that I was so slowed down, I was open, I was sensitive to both my emotions and my visions. I am learning that I have the ability to relax, to channel my inner nature and nurture it. It brings gifts.

I was reminded watching Oprah and Ellen Degeneres in an interview for her 20th reunion of coming out on television, that the most important thing I could do for my health is just be who I am. Find my inner truth and stick to it. If I act from a place of authenticity, of knowing who I am, from my uniqueness, from simply being me, I will learn that my faults are not faults, they are just colors of my individuality. Having a mental illness makes me different from others, though we all have a self to be true to. If I follow this path of honoring myself, good things will happen, I will be blessed. This is God’s truth. He made me a certain way, and I need to stop fighting my nature. As I learn to do this, relax into my natural being, I feel the healing begin to take place. I am grateful to be discovering these truths and moving onward with grace, sensitivity, and a gentle stillness in life.