I’m so proud of being loved by you

With the title of this post I am of course dating myself, which is okay. When guys see me on the street, they say, hey, old school. The hipper ones just said school. One guy said Fred, as in Frederick Douglass.

So you know from that introduction I am from the baby boomers generation. In my mind I am listening to a song by The Impressions “I’m so proud of being loved by you.” There ‘s a line “compliments to you from all the people we meet” that resonates with me. I think of this as I write about a young couple: Diana Vang and Jonathan Brostoff. I met him when he was a student at UWM involved in something called compa that included some Catholic worker activists. We worked on issues of social injustice such as the mistreatment of workers on tomato plantations whose food was used by Taco Bell.

Jonathan was a great guy and well-liked. So I was not surprised to learn he had snagged a nice woman like Diana. I met her when I attended the UWM Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.  She’s religious, smart, interesting, devoted to the community and wants to make a difference. I can see the two of them being great parents years from now. A lot of very positive traits. So when I talk with peers about relationships, I sometimes throw in things about being proud of the person who loves you. Are you proud knowing that your girl friend is the person that she is? Do you think how lucky you are to have met that man who you hold in your arms? Are the values you hold most dear reinforced when your sweetheart leaves to go to work?

If not, what’s wrong with that picture? Are you proud of being loved?

All day and all of the night

Kinks-Size (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All day and all of the night. I looked on the coffeehouse calendar this week and saw an intriguing event featuring songs The Who and The Kinks, two seminal groups from my youth. I decided this could work as a night of cheap entertainment and fun.

He’s a well respected man about town doing the best things so conservatively.” At least until he met Lola.

And why not? I had a disappointment in my brief romantic fling but that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy my own company. It helped that I was being treated to an amazing blend of guitars, banjos and voices. I recognized a few faces although sometimes it’s good to go where  everyone doesn’t know your name.

Tomorrow will be the second level of friendship which is witnessing. My neighbor needs a group to witness his living will. In return for my presence he will take me to the YMCA for my exercise.

Then it’s off to work and spreading the word about the Wellness Recovery Action Plan. What a wonderful mix: acoustic music, a gathering of voices, the marking of life’s transitions, encouraging resilience and a lot of good old fashioned sweat. Like the Chairman of the Board Frank Sinatra said, that’s life.

A photo of the Kast Off Kinks. From left: John Gosling, John Dalton, Mick Avory, Dave Clark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Why am I always opposite?

Anyone who has never been diagnosed with a mental illness should leave this blog entry immediately

Rethink Mental Illness (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

, because I’m not talking to you. I want to talk with people who have experienced trauma and gone on in their lives. There are more people than you would care to know who have had life changing events, such as abuse, witnessing abuse done to others, served in the military or been traumatized in civilian jobs. In fact trauma informed is the key phrase in peer support these days right alongside person-centered. We are recognizing that we are not just a mass of chemicals to be balanced. It’s just not enough to adjust one’s serotonin levels and believe that everything will be fine.

One of the ways things will continue to remain difficult is when we seek out romance. Most of the women I have been involved with as an adult have been in recovery from a severe mental illness. One of the major struggles in these relationships was whether I too had a mental illness. As it happened, I had a problem that I was unwilling to acknowledge for many years. My failure to acknowledge what I was experiencing cost me dearly.

Even more painful was the recognition that just because my significant others had acknowledged their issues did not make having a relationship any easier.When I wrote the title, why am I always opposite I had in mind the phrase “opposites attract.” A woman experiencing bipolar disorder today may act far differently than 5 years ago. Just as I act far differently today than I did 5 years ago.b I’m much quieter than I was, I like larger living spaces and I enjoy my own counsel more than ever. I have positive communications at work that never had seemed possible in the not too distant past.

I learned a lot from the way that I sabotaged my previous relationships. At first glance the woman I am dating currently is as different from me as night and day. But I am committed to seeing what we have in common and how it bring us together. I am tired of being the opposite of every woman that I meet. Sometimes it’s good not to be so different. Otherwise I may traumatize myself.

Português: Gato Psicótico criado pelo autor. English: Drawn by early 20th-century commercial cat illustrator Louis Wain near the beginning of his mental illness (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

V.I.D.A. (Photo credit: Pensamentos Filmados)

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Found a new supplement

Health food store (Photo credit: PR®)

Prescription placebos used in research and practice (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Prescription placebos used in research and practice (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Readers of this blog will remember that I started taking SAMe late last year with excellent results. However I have found the supplement a little expensive. It was better than the placebos from the drug industry I had been taking but wow a 2 week supply could set me back a few dollars. With that in mind I called a local health food store and asked about their recommendations.

The fact that health food store was so nearby was remarkable, too. It is conveniently located next to a liquor store. The person I spoke to at the store recommended deproloft-hf  which has a lot of B vitamins  and other interesting ingredients. The list of ingredients includes something called GABA that I intend to investigate a little further. I am hoping that readers will have had more experience than me with supplements in general and this particular compound.

I want to be able to have the excitement and fun that was available before I began slowing down my thoughts. I don’t want to race until 3 AM but I also don’t want to feel numb. There ought to be a happy middle ground available that says, it’s okay to kiss your girl friend. Stay out and have a good time for the weekend? No problem. Gotta work on Monday. We got your back, bro.

With that in mind, let the comments fly. Who likes supplements and who prefers not taking supplements or medications?

 

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Life Without the Placebos

Followers of this blog will recall reading about my decision about 10 weeks ago to completely abandon the mood stabilizer and the anti depressant I had been taking for several years. The people in my care team, including my psychiatrist, my nurse practitioner and my immediate family were aghast at my decision. They remembered a lot of the problem that had arisen in the past after I abandoned the safety net provided by chemicals. Nonetheless, I stuck to my rights and to  me it has been the best decision I ever made.

Is this something that everyone could do? Probably not. For one thing I have a a lot of coping strategies. I’m highly educated, work experience in several fields, access to resources in person and over the Internet, a pet and a lot of self-understanding. I have people in the programs where I work who complain about their medications and the length of time they have been taking them. However as soon as they remove these medications from their symptoms they begin to deteriorate. To a certain extent their bodies have been trained to look for these medications and their minds keep asking, where’s the stuff?

Even the most ardent mental health advocates usually  recommend a gradual approach to weaning yourself off medications. This process involves finding other strategies, such as one might develop using a wellness recovery action plan. I developed my plan several years ago and I have helped others. These plans cover many different areas such as exercise, coping with environmental triggers, friendship, employment and romance.

When I moved into a clean and safe duplex recently it was a direct result of the success of my wellness plan. My mind responded positively, too, saying, “I like that, give me some more.”  In other words, now that I have a nice place, how about some company? I worked with a woman over the weekend who I have been dying to get to know for more than a year. As it happened, she moved recently and lives about ten blocks away from me. Walking distance, another one of the coping strategies.

I got a dvd player last week and hooked it up to my big screen television. I bought some dvds, watched one of them at home and decided I should bring it to work. My Internet provider ATT forced me into their rebranded service Uverse which sounds like something that the Unitarian Universalists would have created. It’s a little faster than my old service and works better with my blog. And the aforementioned pet, my little cat, has more room to roam around without getting underfoot. That was one of my pet peeves, pun intended, at my old place.

So you can just imagine with all of these things going on, how would ever have time to become depressed? So my advice, for those who want to replace those little placebos, is to get a life. Really, you’ll be glad you did.

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I’d Rather Write Than Have Sex

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

I just spent the afternoon blogging, reading about emotional intelligence and anger management  and I feel great. Among the comments I made I said that the happiest moments of my life have been when I was writing and reading. I cannot remember a time when I was unable to read. One of my life challenges has been tearing myself away from my writing to be able to communicate with a partner.

I am one of those who awakens in the middle of the night thinking about something to write. We keep some kind of writing instrument available at all times. What better way to spend one’s time than learning about Dr. Albert Ellis? I studied him in school but I was frustrated by the way I learned about Dr. Ellis, Sigmund Freud, the bio-psychosocial model and almost anything else I learned about psychology. I really felt connected to certain ideas like person-centered thinking. And yet as an undergraduate I could not study these things in the depth that I desired.

That is why blogging and its connection to lifelong learning has been such a revelation. I can decide for myself what is or is not important. I can think about these ideas when I meet with peers. The words of famous or even obscure people are a click or two away. And best of all there is no cost.

I am fairly certain I will seek out a companion at some point next year, but she will have to share me with my true love, writing. Power  to the imagination!

A Weighty Issue

Here is another one of my awful puns. Weight for it. Weight for it. Step off the scale, please. Over the years I have seen countless articles about the problem of Americans being overweight. But when I look at me and the men in our family, I keep wondering where are all of these heavy-set men? Most of the women I have been involved with have outweighed me. Sometimes by 40 pounds or more. There was one little cutie who did not. But she lived in Boston which probably explained the fluke. Another woman talked so much I was worried she might drive me crazy.

Almost everyone who is a consumer in the programs where I work weighs 20 or more pounds than me. When I was growing up  and eating as much as an average Hmong family, people who knew me, wondered where I put the weight. My dreaded metabolism burns off any small amount that I might attempt to gain.

At one point, after I became a consumer of medication I thought that I would steadily gain weight. In fact that was one of the main reasons why I resisted becoming a consumer in the first place.

A lot of people who were diagnosed in their teens and twenties  now have 20 or more years on powerful psychotropic medications. Their weight has gathered in the worst possible places: in their bellies. They end up in relationships with other big-bellied people. The few relatively slender women I encounter who are relatively near my age are not available because they are consumers. I also keep wondering where the excess women whose husbands were killed in the various wars we keep fighting have gone? Did they run off with with younger guys? Damn those cougars?

The hunt for the slender, unmarried, childless woman/not a mental health consumer continues.