What we don’t take seriously…..

What we don’t take seriously we don’t change, that’s why it is hard for me to be around people who need to make everything into a joke. If you don’t believe something is serious then you don’t have to be responsible for changing your views and actions in real life. If you don’t believe racism in any form is serious and wrong, you don’t have to take legitimate racism seriously, if you don’t believe ableism is real, you don’t have to take disabled peoples experience seriously and accommodate their very real needs, if you don’t believe homophobia is real then you don’t have to take lgbtq peoples experiences seriously.

A lot of my life I’ve been told I take things too seriously, when I hear the pain of others I take it seriously, I don’t think to try to make a joke, or to deem others experience as not that serious, if I hadn’t taken people seriously I wouldn’t have changed my mind about so many wrong beliefs I held, some peoples stories broke my heart and changed the way I thought, they reminded me LOVE and empathy should be my first response to others. I’m coming to believe many people don’t take others realities and pain seriously enough. If we had to live others stories, we would want to be believed, we would want to be listened to and validated, we’d want to be met with love and if it required……action, but if others valid experience is a joke to you or not that big of a deal to you, or you believe they’re pain to be exaggerated or not that important because it’s not your experience, then you’ll do nothing, stand for nothing, and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING will change. Peoples stories and reality shouldn’t be your quiet inside joke, or a bit of gossip, others stories should be an opportunity to learn and grow as a human, we don’t need to have experienced others reality to listen and meet people with love, and to take them and their pain seriously.

Posthumously diagnosing.

I remember sitting at a family event shortly after I was diagnosed with bipolar, and a family member brought my (dead) mom up and how they “know” she was mentally ill because of her prayer journal and religious beliefs. I live with mental illness but even I understand I’m not a specialist on others mental health and wouldn’t make such a judgment , I don’t assume to have the credentials to diagnose a dead relative, in fact unless you’re the individuals phycologist or doctor and can do a full mental health assessment you can’t know. In my experience people mislabel attributes they find unpleasant as mental illness (it’s ignorant). Weird religious beliefs are not enough to get a diagnosis…..there is a very long list of symptoms, many which most people don’t know are symptoms of mental illness.

I cannot diagnose my mom, but what gets me is that it was said to me with full confidence that she was mentally ill…. like it was fact…… while talking directly to me who is ACTUALLY mentally ill. Was I asked my experience or my thoughts on the subject? Absolutely not, because people believe they already know and understand what mental illness looks like. Somehow with no real personal experience THEY know and me living the experience should just sit back and learn. If you’ve never experienced mental illness personally or had to go through all of the assessments to receive a diagnosis then you are speaking from a place of complete ignorance.

I accept the fact I don’t know, my mom held some messed up beliefs, many people do, but false narratives and guessing should stop when it comes to others mental health, because it actually just comes off as projecting stigma. Having weird religious beliefs isn’t mental illness….its stigma towards those with an actual mental illness diagnosis, it’s seeing an undesirable behaviour and saying that’s mental illness, observation isn’t a mental health assessment by a long shot. We should stick with what is factually known and in the here and now, not some past experience we think we’ve properly deciphered with our limited knowledge.

There are living people in your life with mental illness, living people who need your care today, living people who need your understanding and support now.

How about we begin being supportive of living people with a mental illness diagnosis and If you really believe a dead relative was mentally ill your response should be empathy, but that rarely happens, those that have the least knowledge say the most, and also display the least empathy.

We have no right to throw labels around for the dead or the living. It’s for the person living with mental illness or disability to disclose their diagnosis if they so choose. There should be nothing said about people living these realities without their voices.

Disability and Bipolar

Yesterday I began watching a movie (The Other Half), the lead character was someone I could really relate with, as the movie went on the more I could relate to this character , then the character said “I have rapid cycling bipolar 1” and I was like OMG. It’s rare to see accurate depictions of mental illness in film so I was quite pleased, and also kind shocked at how it mirrored my experience, even down to the EMS visits, it was upsetting and validating to witness how a person can go from stable and competent to being disabled and unable to remember what happened 5 minutes ago because they were in an active episode, it’s the only realistic depiction of episodes I’ve ever seen.

Living with bipolar I have periods of time I function normally, but it is temporary. Bipolar is an illness of cycles. I can cycle into mania or depression without warning and I will be completely disabled by it. People don’t understand this about bipolar, it disrupts “normal” life. When I am in an episode my ability to rationalize leaves for several days and sometimes when things have been really bad, like when I was unmedicated I would cycle for weeks between mania and depression. This has made living a “normal” life very challenging. I haven’t been able to hold a stable job most of my life, because I start out when I’m well and then I cycle. I’ve had many jobs and when I’m stable I am a very competent and a hard worker, but then I stop sleeping for days, sometimes weeks, my anxiety gets worse, and I lose my ability to function. After not sleeping for a week or two my brain cannot work properly and it leads to a massive meltdown and then a crash. Bipolar has made consistent employment very difficult, it’s why I self employ. I don’t have my drivers license, which upset a lot of people early on in my life. I was told I was childish a lot for not wanting to drive, there was a good reason for not driving, it was a choice I made. Early in my marriage my husband taught me to drive, and I would practice with him and anytime anything unexpected happened on the road I lost control of the car, my reaction to sudden stress is not good, we ended up in cornfields, no serious injury happnened, just a scare. Also as time went on when I’d have an episode I’d threaten and think about taking the car and running myself off the road (I had episodes long before I was diagnosed), I came to the decision it was best I didn’t drive….in fact it was dangerous for me to drive.

Bipolar is considered a disability by the Canadian government but I’ve never sought disability payments, I’ve always tried to create my own work. It’s considered a disability because it disables a persons ability to live and function for long periods of time. I’ve tried to explain this reality to family….you hear about mental illness and lowered income, but I don’t think family understood it was my reality, often in sharing struggles I was made to feel like I was just a problem, that it was a matter of will power, like I just didn’t “want” to work, I was lazy and unwilling. This stigma is common for those who live with an invisible disability. My experience is no different then many others living with mental illness, I deal with the same challenges. It is not easy for me to talk about those challenges because everyone in my immediate family is stable, they don’t live with bipolar, they think my life has been like theirs, that I’ve had all the same opportunities. My life has been nothing like theirs…….everything has been HARDER, especially when I was undiagnosed. It’s not easy to say that one life is harder then another, but it’s reality, those living with mental illness or disabilities have a harder time in life, because the world isn’t set up for these challenges, it isn’t being dramatic or attempting to make excuses, it’s just reality. For a long time I thought I wasn't as good as my siblings or something, I wasn’t trying hard enough, I blamed myself. I’ve had to live a long time with undiagnosed illness and it has made life really difficult at times, that is the truth of my life. I’ve sat through them talking about others with addiction, mental illness, and low income, them not recognizing I lived with the same struggles as those they felt “sorry” for or were annoyed by. My family speaks from a very privileged position and it’s not a position I’ve shared with them, I’ve had to struggle to stay stable, I’ve had to hide the challenges I’ve had most of my life because I believed it was a personal failure. I honestly think if I had been a mentally ill stranger I would be met with more understanding and maybe even support from family, I’ve been met with neither from them.

Thankfully I have people close to me who walk this journey with me and validate the struggle it is to live with bipolar, I have the support I need now. It’s sad that those living with mental illness have to prove their illness is disabling to receive understanding, it’s sad how rarely I see an accurate depiction of life with mental illness, its sad that there is still so little understanding, I hope as advocates continue to break stigma it won’t be so rare, that people will understand the challenges and meet those living with disabilities and mental illness with the support they require to live a more stable life.