3.  Moving Into Advocacy:

     Understanding

     Acceptance

     Advocacy/Action

Now we are able to understand what has happened and what may be.  We accept the illness as "companion" and a guide that has much to teach us.  We are okay with this.  We decide whether we want to quietly go about our lives and do what it takes to live well, or speak up and be an advocate, in service to our peers and others in the community.

As you could guess, I consider myself in the center of advocacy.  Yet at times, there's "catastrophic event" thinking or "learning to cope" mechanisms.  I want to talk about something I've observed along the continuum of stages of emotional response to trauma.  I realized that at times of unease, I was celebrating an anniversary or revealing myself, or undertaking some great emotional work in my recovery.

Those times were when I disclosed, or faced a truth head-on.  In September 2004, a month after I was the featured reader at the Cornelia Street Café poetry event, where I read the breakdown scene from my memoir, I had a mini-meltdown traveling into the City again.  In July 2006, when I started the exercises in the Artist's Way, Julia Cameron's book on creativity and recovery, I uncovered things that left me vulnerable, too.

I would tell you or anyone to rely on your close friends for support, examine what's going on, and know that the feeling is only temporary, you'll get through it, and other feelings will come up in its place. Such is the nature of life, and of living with schizophrenia.

So as you move from stage one through to stage three, know that your responses to the trauma are natural.  As you advance in your recovery, some things will come easier to you because it gets better with age.  Next week, I'll be blogging about "Recovery at Mid-Life" because I want to instill hope for the future.

There is hope.