Bodies

Let’s just be real with each other, we all have bad days.

When talking about my mental illness with people, I’m often asked about the stigma I have experienced and my answer often surprises them. I have never experienced stigma from friends, family, or employers. Of course, there is always one idiot in the crowd who says something stupid, but overall, stigma for me, hasn’t come from the layperson. The biggest form of stigma, as the Time to Change study reported, was from mental health professionals.

You hear the phrase "change is hard." And it is. As humans, we are creatures of habit. We like what we know. I mean, I've been wearing the same pair of sole-less sandals for years, and we might have a presidential election with the names Bush and Clinton on the ballot. But come on, who can blame us. The same? The same is easy.

Wouldn't it be great if we could go back in time and talk to our younger selves? What would you say (besides ridiculing those questionable hairstyles and dodgy dates!)? Fortunately, we live and learn — painfully at times — and realize these experiences only define who we are.

No medication seemed to really work, so I started to believe I was responsible for my own sickness. While I professed the notion in public that mental illness is akin to physical illness and therefore no more or less anyone’s “fault” for having to cope with it, when I was alone I hurled all the blame in my own direction.

There was nothing easy about recovery, but it helped that living the trainwreck lifestyle had stripped me of everything. Within sixteen months, I was unemployed with no job prospects, barely scraping through my last semester at school. I was drinking every day. Sex with classmates had led to casual encounters which bottomed out at trading sex for cash, something I spent a whole lot of time justifying.

1. We don’t know “normal”. Normal is a relative term, yes. But our normal is not on the relativity scale. Normal for us can include instability, fear, and abuse. Normal might be a parent passed out in their own vomit

The overinflated American work ethic is slowly killing us. It’s constantly pushing us to do more — put in longer hours, check business emails on personal time, take calls from our bosses when we’re chilling in Cancun.