I received a letter from a new friend, expressing her gratitude for helping her to understand what her boyfriend is going through with his struggle with mental illness. As I am undergoing withdrawal from a medication and am somewhat manic and dipping into depression, I am using my illness to my advantage ny writing about my condition, while I am in my condition. Thought I would share this. This is part of my recovery.
1/29/08
Dear _________,
I'm sure that everyone deals with their mental illness differently. For me, just recently am I able to even refer to it as a mental illness, as most of my life, there was too much guilt and shame associated with that term. Today, it relieves me to know that I have a disease, an illness that is treatable. And today, I do all that I can to help myself. This definitely was NOT always true ...
All of my life, I felt different, disconnected from my peers, inferior, insecure, filled with anxiety and full of shame as I drew the conclusion that I was defective, lacking of whatever human characteristics that if only I'd 'buck up' and exert myself more, I'd be OK. I was not OK and didn't realize at the time, I could not. I had great anger within myself, feeling very sorry for myself at the unfairness of 'not asking to be born, yet being born with a defective attitude and forced to go out there and function when I could not." The image was one of being thrown out into life with a straight jacket.
My inner belief, my sub-conscious belief was that I was inferior and spent most of my life in one of two extremes ... depression (self hate) or grandiosity (over compensation for the same feelings of low self worth and insecurity). With the grandiosity, came a sort of anger/rage at others, a jealousy of sorts for them being normal and me being handicapped ... an attitude of I'll show those bastards that I'm not only as good as them, but I'm better!"
Unfortunately, this inner, sub-conscious belief system made it impossible for me to have any real intimacy in my life. I never had relationships, I took hostages. Never intentionally (consciously) but nonetheless, my inner belief would not allow real intimacy. It was the WC Fields syndrome "I wouldn't belong to any club that would have me as a member." One of the best books I've ever read about this was Scott Peck's, 'A Road Less Traveled,' the section on relationships is brilliant! I saw, for myself, that even though my conscious self craved to be understood, loved and cared for, eventually my sub-conscious, my ego, had to be proven right. And my ego, believed I was an unworthy, pathetic human being. The ego's primary job is to maintain an identity, any identity, because without an identity, it threatens itself to death, to obscurity.
The ego, my inner sick belief system, relentlessly shouted at me that I was defective and inferior. It was never-ending and would wear me down. It always won out, eventually making me become more and more distant, cold and eventually doing something (or nothing), thus ending the relationship. This is the only way that my ego could reassure itself, "See, I was right. You don't deserve her. Your worthless. Your pathetic. She is better off without you. You will always be alone, You will die alone."
