In my way of defining emotional recovery, I emphasize three components: trusting yourself, believing in yourself, and wanting to be you. Of course, these three components can be broken down into many more components. In the final phase of emotional recovery, wanting to be you again, I think that you must first establish pride in who you are, before, during, and after your acute illness. I know for me, pride was the last emotion I could comprehend regaining after my psychotic breaks, but it was pride that was critical to developing my current state of well-being and the progress I have made over the years.
I lost my sense of pride when I lost my mind and was cognitively impaired after having been an academic, a path that came to a halt. My sense of pride was lost after navigating a psych ward and losing my sense of autonomy. I lost my pride when I felt embarrassed and ashamed for how I acted during my breaks in front of my family and friends. I felt terrible that communicating my hallucinations scared others. I was so ashamed that for years other people knew something was off about me, but I didn’t always realize it, and when I was aware, there was nothing I could do about it.
Being Proud of Being Alive
I think it’s easy to take for granted that you are alive after being stabilized on medicine after a break. Since you often live in an alternate reality during a break, you can make choices that can cost you your life. I did several things due to my breaks that could have cost me my life. The scariest thing is that no one can reason with you, and you cannot even reason with yourself. You can’t second guess yourself, and everything is as real as the fact that I am typing now.
And you are not just lucky to be alive—you probably made some essential decisions that led to you being alive today. Maybe you agreed to hospitalization, maybe you consented to medicine, or maybe you did not consent to anything. But it doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you are alive and breathing right now. You do have a future, whether you believe it or not.
It took me awhile to want to be alive again, so I did not feel proud of being alive at first. It took me a long time to sense that being alive is a blessing and an accomplishment and not something to take for granted. I emphasize this because I hope it takes you less time to feel this way than it did for me.
Being Proud of Being You as an Individual
I was utterly humiliated and ashamed of being me. I seriously thought of moving to a new city and starting over where no one I met could possibly know that I used to be mentally ill. The worst was not knowing who knew what had happened, or knowing there were people who silently knew I was becoming ill before my breaks happened, even when I didn’t. I’m glad I didn’t move, though. To make the decision to stay put meant I was facing inner fears and insecurities head on instead of fleeing from them. Geography rarely gives you an escape from inner problems.
The biggest battle to win is caring more about how you feel about yourself than what others think of you. So much of the stigma in this illness is detrimental because it tells you to put yourself last, and put what anybody else in the world could possibly think of you as more important. We look to others as a mirror for how we see ourselves. Their approval means we can approve of ourselves, but that is a risky and dangerous way to find identity and self-acceptance. I’ve done that myself, but in doing so, I gave everyone else power over my life and my feelings.
You can’t wait for someone else to be proud of you, especially when you are an adult. Even when I was devasted over my schizophrenia diagnosis and embarrassed, my life was mine, and my parents were not shaken like I was—they still accepted me without judgment. While that was so important to me, at some point, I had to adopt that stance myself and not depend on other people to supply it.
You Can Still Have a Life You Are Proud Of
No matter how bleak and meaningless your life seems, you have to remember this is your perspective on reality—it is not necessarily reality itself. In my teens I was a very negative thinker as part of my depression, and I saw my perception as the only way to look at things. However, it was huge when I could understand that my interpretations were just one vantage point, and other people’s interpretations may be just as valid, or even more accurate.
I saw my life as condemned and unfixable. I didn’t even think a sovereign God could fix my life. I would open my eyes every morning, but did not have enough motivation to get out of bed or have any direction forward, either in a momentary sense or long-term. However, I am so thankful that, even though I was hurting so bad inside and had no idea what point there could be to my life, that I continued to wake up each morning and eventually get out of bed. Sometimes there was little daily structure in early recovery, but maybe I would wash the dishes for my mother, maybe I would walk my dog, maybe I would try to concentrate and read something, or maybe I would look presentable for company coming over.
What 14 Years in Remission Has Turned Into for Me
14 years after my last break, I’ve assigned meaning to these times through helping others, and I’ve never been more proud of myself, in the sense that I want to be me. I embrace my identity now, and I’m proud in the sense that I totally own my recovery. I’m proud that I did not quit, and I kept going to psychiatry appointments and therapy appointments. Even when I wasn’t sure if they were making a difference, I did so out of the principle of self-care and trying. Over time, all my appointments I kept have made a huge difference. By finally caring more about myself than what the world thinks of my illness, I pulled myself out of the mire and rebuilt my identity based on what I feel is a fully authentic existence.
I’m a survivor, and you are too. The goals are positive self-talk, regaining your sense of pride in owning your recovery, being yourself and no one else, and authentically reshaping your future in a way that makes you even better than you were before.
