I’ve been told that I’m the exception. This doesn’t make me feel better. And it’s simply not true.
I interpret that shopworn comment as a barb that discounts the role of a person’s personality–who they are and their traits and strengths–in enabling them to recover.
In the April 2015 issue of Current Psychiatry an article stated the people diagnosed with schizophrenia can hold jobs.
Who are you going to trust–a medical journal or some outsider on the street whose opinion is conjecture and not rooted in fact?
Recovery appears to each of us in different guises. Our recovery is as individual as our thumbprint.
Celebrating differentness is the first order of the day.
Those people who view peers in terms of our illness and symptoms are setting us up to believe that recovery is a dim star.
Aside from other people not being able to see beyond color or gender to the person inside:
Peers living with mental health issues are often not seen as our true selves apart from our diagnosis.
The premise of my memoir Left of the Dial was that I healed when I was able to use the creative process on my job and outside of my job.
The point wasn’t and isn’t that everyone living in recovery should be able to have an M.S. or L.C.S.W. or J.D.
The exclamation point [!] was that I recovered because I found the job I loved that enabled me to use my traits and strengths.
I recovered when I stopped buying into the myth that I had to do what everyone else did–have a corporate office job and a normal life [average or ordinary; conforming to a standard or type].
In daring to go down a path that differed from the norm I was able to recover. This was my road. Your road again will be different.
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In the next blog entry I will talk about a written exercise I created to heal from self-stigma when a bout of doubt had come on.
The point is you should take pride in who you are. You should figure out the kind of job that will best use your traits and strengths.
WorkingAssets 