Mental Health: You Only Get To Keep It By Giving It Away
What I learned from support and educational groups about my illness
I have schizoaffective disorder with anxiety. It is odd, because the illnesses developed in stages. I couldn’t even say if my illness will progress to some even more horrible disorder, but I do know that right now I have an amazing life that I wouldn’t give up for the world.
Things aren’t perfect, and something I learned in my 53 years is that if you wait for things to be perfect, you will likely miss out altogether. As a student in junior high, I started to like girls a lot but I kept telling myself I needed to get the best looking girl so I could show her off to my friends and not have people say things like ‘yes, Leif has a girlfriend—but she’s overweight.” or something like that. I suppose a lot of teens are conscious of their image like that, but with me, I let these insecurities guide my whole life. I never went to a dance in junior high, not once. I did go to dances with cadets, but I was a total wallflower. Then I discovered that I could drink a few beers or down a few shots and it would give me the confidence I needed to approach girls and ask them to dance. I had some pretty empty experiences on the dance floor that brought me no lasting happiness, and on top of it I developed a drinking problem before I was even legally old enough to drink.
It was saddening to think when I left high school behind that there would be no more dances, I thought there would be no more romantic opportunities. Fortunately, other things started to develop where I formed proper adult relationships with females that sometimes developed into more. I think what the most powerful word I could use to describe how this situation changed is the word “community.” Until I became a contributing member of a social unit larger than me and one or two friends or family members, there were few chances for me to meet and get to know anyone. One of my first experiences with being a part of a community was going to church. The only problem was, the church was a bit of a cult, and they had some strange ideas about a lot of things. I don’t want to trash the church, I met some incredible people there and I really started to grow as a human being when I was in it, but it was almost like it was set up to exclude people like me from really being accepted.
What I wanted to mention was that eventually I found a community in a group home which was operated specifically to benefit people like myself who were in recovery from mental illness. Here I felt like an equal, valued person and with the support of some incredible family members, I started to truly grow as a person.
Where the whole idea of ‘giving away mental health’ came in happened later. I was sort of mentored by the dude who ran the building I lived in and he encouraged me to take on new things like teaching writing classes which led to me being hired by the Schizophrenia Society as a lived experience presenter of mental health information and my own story. It felt a bit odd at first that I would go in front of audiences, from a high school class of 30 to a University lecture hall with 300 students. I would tell them about my illness, the crippling depression I went through, how I started to lapse into psychosis which made me believe all kinds of bizarre things and I even acted out violently though thankfully no one ever charged me with a crime. Telling my story kind of freed me, validated me. I love working for The Schizophrenia Society because when I do, I don’t need to hide my diagnosis or my past. They actually want me to have a diagnosis and an interesting story to tell.
Recently, I decided I wanted to attend Toastmasters. I thought I could not only enhance my speaking skills for my job, but also develop my abilities and possibly connections so I could land highly paid speaking gigs. It has been such a wonderful opportunity for me. I can’t say enough about the kind and supportive people who are in Toastmasters, and they definitely give back to society. One of the things I have become very keen on doing is going to a special meeting in an place that serves people with developmental disabilities. I love going to these and see what a challenge it is for these people just to belong, just to contribute something from their heart through learning about each other in the meetings. I think one of the reasons I love this type of work so much (I used to volunteer to do similar stuff when I was in junior high) is because I prize my intelligence so much, and I see people who live without my abilities but they are still wonderful, very likeable human beings.
I am starting a new job next week that I hope will give me more of this good feeling of reaching out and of helping people. I will be teaching poetry classes on psychiatric wards in Edmonton Hospitals. I used to do this work at our local psychiatric hospital, which I had once been a patient in. This new opportunity, though it is just a temporary job, seems to hold a lot more promise. For the first thing, I am now officially an employee of the University of Alberta. Since my sister first started going there, perhaps even years before, I had dreamed of attending University. I even had saved and carefully preserved a large collection of comic books that I thought I would be able to sell and use to fund my University education. I did get a chance to attend a class at the U of A, but to imagine that I am actually now a staff member just blows me away. Today I had a 3-hour training session and everything about it, from feeling highly respected and a valued member of society, to learning about how to manage risk in potentially dangerous situations makes me feel better than a rockstar and with less drugs.
So that is really all I have to say for now. Thank you, dear readers for coming along with me on this ride through mental health recovery. Some of you have been subscribing for years, and now that I am on a great platform like substack, I really want to start to reward everyone for their support. Look for great things to happen!