I used to wake up every morning thrilled to go to work--I had the job of my dreams. Then mental illness hit. I was misdiagnosed with depression, took the wrong medications, and disaster struck. A tornado blew through my brain and took that dream job, my whole career away.
My first year on disability is a blur. I think I spent most of it in bed. My doc and I agreed that hospitalization wouldn't quite meet my needs, so back before Zoom, my wife arranged to work from home to keep an eye on me. She didn't think I was safe around the stove. Frankly, I knew I wasn't safe around knives.
In the winter of 2010-2011, Helen drove me sixty miles each way every week through rain, snow, and deepest Iowa winter dark, so I could attend NAMI's Peer to Peer meetings. For twelve weeks, I met with other people with mental illness. Together we rebuilt our lives. We learned how to recover.
Peer to Peer describes a three stage process of recovery: crisis, rebuilding, and transformation. The group itself was the beginning of my rebuilding, learning how to be in a room with other people again, learning about my illness, learning all the habits of self care: how to be here now, how to evaluate my state, how to make wise choices based on current realities, and how to imagine that something else might yet be possible.
My life is different now. I never went back to that dream job. Recovery doesn't mean returning to what was. It means salvaging what can be salvaged, discovering capacities that weren't used before, dreaming a new dream, and building something new. Today I am an author.
My therapist used to say Chaos precedes creation. Rebuilding is not about return, like resurrection is not about an idealized past. It is about something new.
Who knew?
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