#I went untreated for 20 years because it made my school's numbers look better

[chronicangel]

I mean, obviously yes, people with ADHD are just kind of abandoned by the system completely, but I feel like this post is somewhat obviously about the way that "smart" kids with ADHD and high-achieving kids with ADHD are not only neglected by the system but exploited by it.

I was a good student in all the traditional senses. I got good grades, I loved school, I did not have any significant behavioral issues. All of this was directly because of the fact that I had ADHD, which went undiagnosed until I was 20. I got good grades and loved school and was well-behaved because I found learning stimulating, and I needed mental stimulation so I didn't explode.

I was actually just going down an hour-long spiral yesterday about how if anyone had ever just told me that hyperactivity could be mental I would have realized that I had ADHD before I was 20 entire years old. Nobody ever bothered to tell me that it wasn't normal to frame every moment of your life around the need for intellectual stimulation so your thoughts didn't start racing and spiraling out of control. No one ever told me that experiencing writing as a form of meditation because it's one of the few times you're allowed to just sit in your whirlwind of thoughts for a few hours and pick out the good parts without trying to force yourself to Pay Attention to the Right Things was not, in fact, how everybody else was experiencing it. No one ever told me that plotting 10 scenes ahead in your pretend play (or, as I got older, roleplay) and then getting excited when the other person didn't follow your plotline because it meant you got to plot 10 more scenes ahead with new ideas was not why everybody else was doing that.

Every moment of my life I have had a constant, uncontrollable internal monologue, and it never stops, and it never shuts off, and it just goes and goes and goes. And the only thing I can do to make it bearable is find the things that are intellectually interesting, so my thoughts can all get channeled into One Thing, and they aren't bouncing all over the place and completely overwhelming me until I can't function at all anymore.

And no one ever told me, or asked me, or said or did anything. Because I got good grades.

[fullmoondagger]

Thinking about my HS science teacher bc of that ADHD post Its still honestly so wild to me how fucking unwilling to understand me she was...

I have some trauma around math. It's hard to distressing to me to interact with numbers because of teachers and my father being unable to explain to me and getting mad & screaming for the latter and leaving me to rot for the others, so now my reaction to seeing numbers is simply blanked out I will not do math on my own, seeing it makes me anxious and upset. Also might have slight discalculia that must have played into me being bad at math in the first place. Whatever.

Taking this into consideration I chose studies that did not have maths taught as a subject, with a lower level in everything else to go easy on myself, didnt turn out as I had planned but thats not the subject of the post.

Science teacher! I kinda like science, I was a little excited to have another teacher for the last year or so but like I was not doing well because again, math, and I don't do homework because I spent all my free time trying to recover from my days and I have better shit to do anyways which (rightfully) annoyed her but like. One day at the end of class she was like ohhh how are you doing so bad you have so much potential which instantly triggered my bite bite kill destroy instinct so I calmly explained to her that I could barely get two consecutive hours of sleep at night, that school was eating me alive and I barely had my head out of the water, that I had undiagnosed untreated ADHD and it was hard for me to do anything and that I was bad at math to begin with! I went serious and honest because sometimes you gotta, yknow. She brushed it off and went but youre so smart you can be good at this ! I KNOW you can do it! To which I replied this was simply crippling me more with anxiety and the certainty I will not archieve it because I was already doing my best and therefore disappoint her. Which I didnt care to please her at all for starters I dont want to be here.

Still I tried! I tried to read up my lessons and prepare for the next test, and I was pretty confident I had done a better job ! And I DID. I got a 13/20 instead of my usual 3-7/20 (for those with diff grading systems 0/20 is bad and 20/20 is good)

Needless to say I was happy ! I practically doubled my average results . Handing me my paper she said in front of EVERYONE in the class that "You could have done better and frankly with a test like this it looks like you're making fun of me". 💀💀💀 I got so pissed as you can imagine! Imagine saying that to a student after you have been exlicitly told about their situation.

At the end of the class I came to her desk and told her she had been really hurtful because I actually tried and studied for that test and I actually did impossibly better than usual, AS SHE WOULD KNOW, and that it was just rude to say that in front of everyone. She went on again about my potential and I told her to stop making up a fake image of myself in her mind because that's not the truth and I will never be it but again she didnt give a shit.

She went personal with me at the teacher council (I was attending bc I was elected for it to take notes for my classmates n bring up issues) and went on again about my potential so I got mad at her after that night I simply stopped going to science class altogether. Fuck that bitch lol. You wanna see me fail I'll show you fail.

Moral of the story evil teachers wont give a shit about you. Fuck em. Preserve yourself before anything else & also maybe dont listen to my advice school years were immensely damaging for me and I will have no positive or intelligent thoughts about it ever. Idk what the point of this post was but I think seeing shit abt wasted potential made me go rabid

[ittybittydragonfox]

Mental Illness is Not Psychic Power

That’s a doozy of a title, ain’t it? But it’s true, and it reflects the lies I was told by my earth-and-spirit-loving pagan and witch communities growing up. For those that don’t know, I’m a lifelong witch of 25 years from a generational family that’s been practicing witchcraft for 200 years. My parents are also pagans. My father is a legal, ordained High Priest.

And despite all that spiritual education, I still grew up hearing these two phrases: “Mental illness doesn’t exist. All you need is to connect with nature and your spirituality.” “You’re not mentally ill, you’re psychic!”

Sounds a lot like “You’re a wizard, Harry!” And just like Harry Potter is a pile of fiction, so are these statements. Let’s talk about it.

I don’t talk about my personal demons too much, but I suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). These two things combined have resulted in two very real symptoms that the pagan and witch communities like to attribute to psychic awareness: hallucinations (”Visions”) and erratic, unpredictable, sometimes strange behavior that is complete uncharacteristic of me (”Channeling”). Those that live with me (my partner and, in the past and near future, roommates) have gotten to see me do some truly odd things in an attempt to hide my illness, but the things I do when I can’t hide it anymore are even more strange. I’ve hidden in sheds in my pajamas in -20 F weather because I thought my hallucinations couldn’t follow me there. I’ve spoken in a heavy accent from a country I’ve never been to. I don’t answer to my name. I ask people I’ve known for years, in homes I’ve lived in for months “who are you and where am I?”

Growing up, I showed a lot of these odd symptoms. I do have psychic abilities, and so, when I started hallucinating at the age of 14, my parents wanted to believe my Sight/Clairvoyance was just showing me “new things”. But the fact was, my PTSD had been so bad, and untreated for so long, that I was seeing things that truly weren’t there. These are not spirits. They are my fears incarnated into visuals and sounds. The more terrified I became, the more my pagan parents, our churches, and covens would tell me that “everything is alright. These are just spirits. You know how to banish spirits. We’ll help banish them. You’re just getting more powerful. You’re just becoming more aware.” And no matter what I did, no matter how powerful the High Priest/ess in my church, no matter how in-tune the witch in my circle was, they could neither sense these spirits, nor banish them. They assumed that because my psychic senses are overdeveloped anyway, I was seeing something invisible even to most powerful psychics. The truth was, I was just a frightened child being followed around by a grinning, white monster created by my own mind specifically to scare me. And the constant sound of doors being slammed or dogs growling that only I could hear was keeping me awake every night and ruining my straight-A performance in school.

I’ve had DID since childhood, and my parents were used to my erratic, uncharacteristic behavior. They shrugged off my not answering to my name, and my friends seemed to just accept that I called myself by 20 different names. The truth was, I was dissociating, and an alter had taken my place. And no, I couldn’t control it. I still struggle with control. DID is not something I get a choice in. It’s not fun and it makes my life extremely difficult. I don’t enjoy waking up after 3 days to find that my friends have been trying to call me, I didn’t attend my doctor’s appointments, and I may have done any number of things, none of which I can remember. And that’s if I get lucky and wake up at home. My pagan and witch communities believed I was channeling, because I am a spirit worker, and they believed I was one of the best at it, save for the fact that I couldn’t control it. They believed when they spoke to me as my child alter, that they were speaking to the Young God, or a child spirit, through me. But they weren’t, and they refused to believe otherwise. They never questioned that they were talking to God or a fairy or what have you.

This comes from a misguided belief that mental illness isn’t real. Or that it can be treated with some herbs and yoga. Because of this, I spent 10 years struggling with my mental illness untreated. Everywhere I went, people looked at me as something to Be. “A powerful psychic who sees into a whole other world.” They viewed me as dramatic or gatekeep-y when I said I wouldn’t want others to have this “power” or that I wouldn’t teach them to see. But the fact is, I was incapable of teaching anyone anything about these skills. Because I didn’t have them. I had a mental illness, and my brain was rebelling against me.

This absolute denial that mental illness exists leads to people attributing illness with power. It’s not healthy, and it leads to a really harmful culture where people with mental illness can’t see that they need help, and they don’t get the help they need. Often times we end up with people with illnesses leading groups, sometimes working with the “visions” (hallucinations) they’re having. Or worse, we end up with this toxic idea that taking the medicine someone might need is hindering their awareness, which is some ableist bullshit I still fight with all the time in psychic circles.

I’m not saying that clairsenses don’t exist. I have them, and I believe in them, but there must also be a balance of discernment in the pagan and witch communities. We have to learn to accept the science: The brain is an organ, and it can malfunction just like any other organ can. Mental illness is an illness, and it often needs the help of doctors and therapists to treat it. Loving ourselves and building a better community means it’s time to examine this ableist bias, and do what’s right, so that we stop passing these gross ideas down to the next generation of magic-inclined folx.

My psychic community meant well, but in their effort to erase illness, they made me sicker and used that sickness as a reason to both uplift me and spite me. They gave me undue praise and anger for a thing I can no more control than someone else can control their diabetes. And worst of all, they blinded my family into not getting me help before these illnesses very nearly took my life. My parents almost lost their son to the depression that comes with PTSD. And it took them almost losing my sister too for them to understand that while we may have psychic abilities, we are also sick, and we need help. My parents have since become an active part of my and my sisters’ recoveries. They support us, where once they had been afraid of us losing something if we took these steps, and do their bests to uplift us. We’re both better. Neither of us want to die anymore. I’m on anti-psychotics and an anti-depressant now. I still have hallucinations but they are manageable. I’m in talk therapy, and I’ve learned how to decipher what’s the difference between me seeing a spirit, and me hallucinating. I still do spirit work, but I understand that my alters are not spirits possessing me. They are fragments of my mind, and I am reflected in them. I’m learning to come to terms with that and trying to go through integration. It’s a long road. I still see spirits. My medicine did not take that from me. I still talk to deities. My medicine didn’t take that away either. But my medicine does help me approach them without fear, and with certainty that they are real, and not a figment of my ill mind. And because of that, I can have a meaningful, fulfilling relationship with spirits and deities, built on trust and love instead of the innate fear of “not knowing”.

So for anyone out there who needs to hear it, because it’s important: You are not a failure in your faith or spirituality because you realized you are ill and sought help. Taking care of your mind does not make it, or you, weaker. Let’s change the narrative, and learn as a community that seeking help is how we grow stronger.

Jake

[joyful-voyager]

Today’s Melancholia

It’s a rainy, chilly day in SE Wisconsin, and I’m sitting by a window just ... thinking things.

The first half of 2018 has seen some really high highs and low lows in my life. I said good-bye to my mother in late March, and she passed away on April 9. We all knew when she went back to the hospital in early February that the end was near. We managed to get down there to visit twice before she finally succumbed to a long and terrible illness. Now my dad has moved into an assisted living facility where he feels much safer (he falls a lot) and my brother and his family have purchased the house we all grew up in. They’ve gutted every room and have sold or donated all the toys and books and memorabilia I associate with my childhood. We each rescued a few meaningful items, but for the most part it’s all gone now. They keep sending us all pictures of the many changes they’re making to the house. It all needed to be done — the place is 150+ years old and was in desperate need of work — but it’s kind of sad that the next time I go home, I won’t recognize the place anymore.

My daughter made the tough decision to give up her art school scholarship and try a liberal arts school instead. It was a big adjustment, but she made the Dean’s List. She’s also decided to move to Denmark with her boyfriend and has since applied to and been accepted to university there. We found out she’d been accepted just a day after the Dean’s List came out, so we had a big celebration with Thai food. It’ll be the last one for a while. We’ll be saying good-bye to her at the beginning of August, or perhaps the beginning of July, if we can get her student resident status straightened out a little more quickly. Today we sent her off on a ten-day road trip with this same family. I don’t expect to hear from her much. His family has adopted her as one of their own, and she has found a happiness with them that we couldn’t help her find with us.

The house is too quiet now, and the cat is distraught. My husband and I aren’t ready to be empty-nesters together, not yet. We don’t really know each other or even like other very much anymore. I’m not sure how these next 10 days are going to go, much less the next 20 years. He’s finally seeing a therapist about some deep-seated issues that have gone untreated for far too long. Now that we’re no longer focused on the kiddo, he’s got no excuse. I needed his help to raise her, but I’m not willing to put up with his crap anymore. He knows that if he’s not going to get help and really work on his problems, I’m not going to stick around. I love him, but I deserve better than the behavior he’s been exhibiting recently. If I’m being honest, I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life than deal with his behavior for a few more decades. And that’s really all I can say about that, except that without our daughter here and given the contentious place we are in with each other, my Wisconsin home doesn’t feel like home anymore, either.

I feel very ... adrift. Unmoored. I’ll always be a parent, but I don’t much feel like anybody needs me as a Mom anymore. I’m not my Mom’s daughter anymore, either, because she’s gone. I’m not sure I want to be my husband’s wife anymore. I’m going nowhere in my career — I’ve been rejected for multiple jobs since the beginning of 2018 — and I just don’t have a lot to look forward to, day to day. 

I suppose this should be an exciting time for me. I’ll have more time on my hands than I ever have, and maybe I can discover who I was before I was a wife and Mom. It’s the only positive spin I can see on any of this right now. I’ll have time to write, maybe, and run, and read, and make food that I like to eat rather than the limited number of foods my daughter the foodie will consent to eat. But I don’t have a lot of friends (or any, really) or hobbies anymore, so it all looks very empty to me right now.

And I miss my kiddo. Oh, how I miss my kiddo.

[wincestshippingtrash2]

Cie’s Year-End Wrap-Up 2018

Image copyright Conger Design

I love the above image. Back in the late 1990s, I went to school for one semester for graphic design but dropped out. I didn't know it at the time, but I had untreated type 2 bipolar disorder, OCD, and borderline personality disorder, three exciting co-morbid conditions which happen to feed each other in ways that are just, shall we say, really special. I wouldn't be properly diagnosed until 2004.

When I think of how many years were wasted mired in shame and stigma because I had no idea in this Universe what was going on with me, I thought I was just an attention-seeking fuckup, it makes me very angry. Granted, some of the tools available to me now simply didn't exist when I was younger. E-commerce was in its infancy in the 1990s. There were no smartphones. 

Hell, even GPS was still in its infancy. (I still have my TomTom Go.) The job I have today could not have existed in the 1990s. Back when dinosaurs and Ronald Reagan roamed the Earth in 1984, I delivered pizzas. Even the TomTom Go was as yet unheard of. How the hell my dyslexic ass didn't get lost more often, I'll never know. When I think of trying to do my job without Waze, it gives me that feeling of waking up with a start after a terrible dream and praising whatever powers there might be that the dream isn't real.

So, I didn't initially come here to talk to you about type 2 bipolar disorder, but now that I've thought about it, I want to talk about it. This is how people tend to think of bipolar disorder, and it's a reasonably accurate depiction of type 1 bipolar disorder.

Image Source

The post that the image comes from is worth reading.

The late Patty Duke had type 1 bipolar disorder. She is a personal heroine of mine. Her book, Call Me Anna, helped me understand better the things that I had gone through and to help me forgive myself for some of the truly awful decisions I made while hypomanic. 

Being diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder helped me understand why I had seen some features of bipolar disorder in myself but was convinced that I didn't have it because I'd never experienced a full mania. I tended to go from crushingly depressed to positive and overly functional. I never flew off to Vegas and got married to a guy I barely knew or anything of that nature, although I did convince myself several times that the Universe wanted me to be with guys who raised red flags like nobody's business and who, unsurprisingly, turned out to be horrible and abusive.

When I was hypomanic, I would take on second jobs and be the world's greatest employee that everyone loved until everything came crashing down and everyone ended up thinking I was the world's biggest flake and fuckup. I would be mired in depression which felt like being at the bottom of a dark pit that there was no way out of. 

When I would finally, miraculously, find myself pulled out of that pit, I would admonish myself that from now on I would be positive and productive and would never go back THERE again. When I inevitably went back there again, I would shame and berate myself for being a worthless fuckup.

Click to enlarge. 

This is a fairly standard bipolar disorder screening questionnaire. It tends to miss people with type 2 bipolar disorder.

Was there ever a period of time when I wasn't myself? No. I was always myself, although I often didn't like it very much. 

The late Peter Steele of Type O Negative, who had type 1 bipolar disorder, describes reflecting on occasions following a manic episode where he felt that there was something he could have learned from the time in question if only he could remember it. I never experienced anything like that.

I've never presented as talking extremely fast or seeming particularly hyper. I've never slept well anyway, so the "sleeping less than usual" criteria didn't send up any red flags. The late Julia Lennon described having periods where she wouldn't sleep for a week at a time, and doctors didn't know what was wrong with her. She was institutionalized on several occasions.

I did get involved in ill-advised relationships with abusive guys, but I never flew off to Vegas to do so. I took on multiple jobs and then crashed, often losing all of my jobs. When I was good, I was very very good, and when I was bad I was nonfunctional. 

I speak openly about my mental health struggles because I would be very happy if no-one else ever had to fight the way I've had to fight. I've been told that I should keep my psych problems hidden because people would avoid me if they knew I was one of THEM. I was told I would never find a job if people knew I'd been to a therapist. 

I was also told that I was "just being dramatic," that I needed to "stop seeking attention," that I was "just being lazy," and that I brought all my problems on myself with my "negative thinking." I can tell you that none of these criticisms did a damn thing to help me improve my life or to do anything except hide my problems and hate myself because I was never able to develop any decent coping skills for dealing with them until I was in my middle years. At this point, I'm still cleaning up the messes made by attempting to hide my problems, such as a storage unit full of stuff and a mountain of debt.

We've come a long way when it comes to mental illness in Western society, but we haven't come far enough. There is still a tendency to see people with mental issues as less intelligent or less capable or as loose cannons just waiting to explode and harm others. The truth is, people who live with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than to perpetrate violence.

There is a tendency to see jobs such as mine as "lesser" and to believe that the working poor, unemployed, and homeless "deserve" to not have basic amenities or a living wage. This needs to end. Everybody deserves the basic amenities, whether or not they are capable of working a "normal" job or at all.

I heard the term "lazy" so many times that I ended up with a terrible complex about taking breaks or doing things that are purely enjoyable and will never turn a profit. I once read a statement from a counselor which said that the term "lazy" should be replaced with "demotivated," because asking a person why they are so lazy shuts down the conversation and thus any chance of helping the person, whereas asking them why they are feeling demotivated leaves the conversation open and may help create a plan for helping them.

Exploitative shows like "Hoarders" should not exist. Like, at all. Capitalizing on people's illness for entertainment is twisted and barbaric. Hoarding is a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is the symptom of malfunction in a certain area of the brain. It is not "laziness." Dealing with hoarding tendencies is exhausting, time-consuming, and life-destroying. People with hoarding tendencies need help from a compassionate professional, not a bunch of lookie-loos seeking schadenfreude at another's expense.

My son is helping me deal with the lifetime of hoarding without help contained in my storage units and the closets and spare rooms of the mobile home that I hope to have in a condition where I can think about selling it by the end of next year. With his help, the storage unit, which is about the size of a one-car garage, is 1/3 of the way clear at this point, and we are hoping to have it entirely clear by June of 2019. 

My late father attempted to "help with cleaning," but his help really only traumatized me and made me feel more ashamed, which didn't lead to me keeping up with the process. My son is understanding when I tell him that I can't deal with a certain item at the moment and we'll need to put it aside. We move on to the next thing. He also suggests creating scrapbooks and art from my vast collection of images from magazines, unlike my father, who told me that "anything that lands on the floor needs to be thrown in the garbage."

My father had piles of papers and magazines all over his house. He had OCD with hoarding tendencies too, but he came from an era when one locked their mental health issues in an attic and never spoke of them. This helped nothing, which is why I have come out of the attic and am speaking openly about my struggles.

For years I refused to make New Year's resolutions because I had learned to equate them with "new you in 52" crap, which really benefits no-one but the billion-dollar diet industry. I refuse to have or promote weight loss as a "health goal." 

I spent 33 years in yo-yo dieting hell trying to hate myself thin. There is no way I'm going to endorse that behavior. I'm going batshit at this point with all the blogs in my sidebar promoting "get paid to lose weight" garbage. You'll never see me promoting these things because dieting inevitably fails for everyone but statistical unicorns.

Diets don't work. Health at Every Size works. If you want to start exercising, increase the amount you're exercising, or eat fewer processed foods, great, but do it for overall health, not for weight loss.

We'll all be a "new you in 52" anyway. We'll have new experiences behind us, and many of our cells will have been replaced by new ones. Don't buy into the "new you in 52" crap. It only leads to frustration. Instead, pursue things that will lead to a more authentic you. 

Your authentic you has nothing to do with a number on the scale or even the amount of money in your bank account. It is the you who is true to themselves, which has nothing to do with looks or status at all.

Best wishes in the coming year,

Cie

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[netherworldwritersguild]

Cie's Year-End Wrap-Up 2018

Image copyright Conger Design

I love the above image. Back in the late 1990s, I went to school for one semester for graphic design but dropped out. I didn't know it at the time, but I had untreated type 2 bipolar disorder, OCD, and borderline personality disorder, three exciting co-morbid conditions which happen to feed each other in ways that are just, shall we say, really special. I wouldn't be properly diagnosed until 2004.

When I think of how many years were wasted mired in shame and stigma because I had no idea in this Universe what was going on with me, I thought I was just an attention-seeking fuckup, it makes me very angry. Granted, some of the tools available to me now simply didn't exist when I was younger. E-commerce was in its infancy in the 1990s. There were no smartphones. 

Hell, even GPS was still in its infancy. (I still have my TomTom Go.) The job I have today could not have existed in the 1990s. Back when dinosaurs and Ronald Reagan roamed the Earth in 1984, I delivered pizzas. Even the TomTom Go was as yet unheard of. How the hell my dyslexic ass didn't get lost more often, I'll never know. When I think of trying to do my job without Waze, it gives me that feeling of waking up with a start after a terrible dream and praising whatever powers there might be that the dream isn't real.

So, I didn't initially come here to talk to you about type 2 bipolar disorder, but now that I've thought about it, I want to talk about it. This is how people tend to think of bipolar disorder, and it's a reasonably accurate depiction of type 1 bipolar disorder.

Image Source

The post that the image comes from is worth reading.

The late Patty Duke had type 1 bipolar disorder. She is a personal heroine of mine. Her book, Call Me Anna, helped me understand better the things that I had gone through and to help me forgive myself for some of the truly awful decisions I made while hypomanic. 

Being diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder helped me understand why I had seen some features of bipolar disorder in myself but was convinced that I didn't have it because I'd never experienced a full mania. I tended to go from crushingly depressed to positive and overly functional. I never flew off to Vegas and got married to a guy I barely knew or anything of that nature, although I did convince myself several times that the Universe wanted me to be with guys who raised red flags like nobody's business and who, unsurprisingly, turned out to be horrible and abusive.

When I was hypomanic, I would take on second jobs and be the world's greatest employee that everyone loved until everything came crashing down and everyone ended up thinking I was the world's biggest flake and fuckup. I would be mired in depression which felt like being at the bottom of a dark pit that there was no way out of. 

When I would finally, miraculously, find myself pulled out of that pit, I would admonish myself that from now on I would be positive and productive and would never go back THERE again. When I inevitably went back there again, I would shame and berate myself for being a worthless fuckup.

Click to enlarge. 

This is a fairly standard bipolar disorder screening questionnaire. It tends to miss people with type 2 bipolar disorder.

Was there ever a period of time when I wasn't myself? No. I was always myself, although I often didn't like it very much. 

The late Peter Steele of Type O Negative, who had type 1 bipolar disorder, describes reflecting on occasions following a manic episode where he felt that there was something he could have learned from the time in question if only he could remember it. I never experienced anything like that.

I've never presented as talking extremely fast or seeming particularly hyper. I've never slept well anyway, so the "sleeping less than usual" criteria didn't send up any red flags. The late Julia Lennon described having periods where she wouldn't sleep for a week at a time, and doctors didn't know what was wrong with her. She was institutionalized on several occasions.

I did get involved in ill-advised relationships with abusive guys, but I never flew off to Vegas to do so. I took on multiple jobs and then crashed, often losing all of my jobs. When I was good, I was very very good, and when I was bad I was nonfunctional. 

I speak openly about my mental health struggles because I would be very happy if no-one else ever had to fight the way I've had to fight. I've been told that I should keep my psych problems hidden because people would avoid me if they knew I was one of THEM. I was told I would never find a job if people knew I'd been to a therapist. 

I was also told that I was "just being dramatic," that I needed to "stop seeking attention," that I was "just being lazy," and that I brought all my problems on myself with my "negative thinking." I can tell you that none of these criticisms did a damn thing to help me improve my life or to do anything except hide my problems and hate myself because I was never able to develop any decent coping skills for dealing with them until I was in my middle years. At this point, I'm still cleaning up the messes made by attempting to hide my problems, such as a storage unit full of stuff and a mountain of debt.

We've come a long way when it comes to mental illness in Western society, but we haven't come far enough. There is still a tendency to see people with mental issues as less intelligent or less capable or as loose cannons just waiting to explode and harm others. The truth is, people who live with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than to perpetrate violence.

There is a tendency to see jobs such as mine as "lesser" and to believe that the working poor, unemployed, and homeless "deserve" to not have basic amenities or a living wage. This needs to end. Everybody deserves the basic amenities, whether or not they are capable of working a "normal" job or at all.

I heard the term "lazy" so many times that I ended up with a terrible complex about taking breaks or doing things that are purely enjoyable and will never turn a profit. I once read a statement from a counselor which said that the term "lazy" should be replaced with "demotivated," because asking a person why they are so lazy shuts down the conversation and thus any chance of helping the person, whereas asking them why they are feeling demotivated leaves the conversation open and may help create a plan for helping them.

Exploitative shows like "Hoarders" should not exist. Like, at all. Capitalizing on people's illness for entertainment is twisted and barbaric. Hoarding is a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is the symptom of malfunction in a certain area of the brain. It is not "laziness." Dealing with hoarding tendencies is exhausting, time-consuming, and life-destroying. People with hoarding tendencies need help from a compassionate professional, not a bunch of lookie-loos seeking schadenfreude at another's expense.

My son is helping me deal with the lifetime of hoarding without help contained in my storage units and the closets and spare rooms of the mobile home that I hope to have in a condition where I can think about selling it by the end of next year. With his help, the storage unit, which is about the size of a one-car garage, is 1/3 of the way clear at this point, and we are hoping to have it entirely clear by June of 2019. 

My late father attempted to "help with cleaning," but his help really only traumatized me and made me feel more ashamed, which didn't lead to me keeping up with the process. My son is understanding when I tell him that I can't deal with a certain item at the moment and we'll need to put it aside. We move on to the next thing. He also suggests creating scrapbooks and art from my vast collection of images from magazines, unlike my father, who told me that "anything that lands on the floor needs to be thrown in the garbage."

My father had piles of papers and magazines all over his house. He had OCD with hoarding tendencies too, but he came from an era when one locked their mental health issues in an attic and never spoke of them. This helped nothing, which is why I have come out of the attic and am speaking openly about my struggles.

For years I refused to make New Year's resolutions because I had learned to equate them with "new you in 52" crap, which really benefits no-one but the billion-dollar diet industry. I refuse to have or promote weight loss as a "health goal." 

I spent 33 years in yo-yo dieting hell trying to hate myself thin. There is no way I'm going to endorse that behavior. I'm going batshit at this point with all the blogs in my sidebar promoting "get paid to lose weight" garbage. You'll never see me promoting these things because dieting inevitably fails for everyone but statistical unicorns.

Diets don't work. Health at Every Size works. If you want to start exercising, increase the amount you're exercising, or eat fewer processed foods, great, but do it for overall health, not for weight loss.

We'll all be a "new you in 52" anyway. We'll have new experiences behind us, and many of our cells will have been replaced by new ones. Don't buy into the "new you in 52" crap. It only leads to frustration. Instead, pursue things that will lead to a more authentic you. 

Your authentic you has nothing to do with a number on the scale or even the amount of money in your bank account. It is the you who is true to themselves, which has nothing to do with looks or status at all.

Best wishes in the coming year,

Cie

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