What Made ME so special?
My battle for belonging, while growing up with a mental illness
Good day dear readers. My name is Leif Gregersen and I would like to be your guide, even though I look a little crazy in the below photo and have yellow teeth. I am trying something new, but keeping the main structure of my past efforts which was to write a mental health blog on my author website. I will keep my archives there along with information about my writing, but I will keep on blogging on this website. My old website is at www.edmontonwriter.com my blog, which I try to add to weekly if not more often, will appear on this website. I would like to start out by letting my new readers get to know me as I convince my previous readers to join this new project. By relating the stories of me developing mental illnesses and overcoming them I want my readers to get to know and even like me and seek out my advice if desired. After I have gathered a few subscribers, I will start to write more about some of my daily challenges, mostly as they relate to mental health, and give the best possible advice I can as a person with lived experience, but I will not recommend any medications or give advice best given by a qualified physician. Please join me dear readers in this new journey and subscribe below. I would love it if you would send me any comments as to what you would like to see this blog discuss, and how I can help you or your loved ones to heal from the illnesses that I have dealt with for many years.
As a child, I was happy and enjoyed many activities, from math problems to drawing stories about space ships and soldiers. I loved to play chess with my dad, but I expected everyone to treat me with the same kindness and reverence that my family did. As I began elementary school I showed a great deal of promise after taking a lot of tests given by our special education teacher. I was believed to be gifted, but no more than a handful of other students in my grade. They assigned me to a special program called enrichment, and for most of the rest of elementary school, I had the amazing experience of being paid special attention to and to be known as smart, or even genius.
The problem was, I was a sensitive child and when friends turned on me or teased me, I never took it like a normal kid. The insults hurt me to my core and I swore I would never be friends with those people. I could have used my sharp language skills to insult them back, but instead simply retreated, developed social phobias, and ended up in fights far more often than I should have. But in many ways elementary school was wonderful. I played football every day there was grass not snow on the field, I was good at volleyball, basketball. I loved running around challenging myself and most of all I loved to read. But at some point, I started to show signs of anxiety and depression. This only made the teasing and being shunned by other students worse. I was always looking down at the ground, I would ‘turtle up’ when a teacher came to look at my work. I found a great deal of solace in books, from stories of “The Great Brain” about a young child who always seemed to outsmart people and separate them from their money, to the numerous volumes of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books I loved to read and read over again. There were classics like “Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH” and “Sherlock Holmes” all the while, myself and the small group of friends I had were in love with Star Wars. We collected the toys, the cards, pretended to have light sabre battles with floor hockey sticks. My brother and I even had our own space agency he called GARSO, which was Gregersen Aeronautics, Research and Space Observation. Our organization included rockets, a telescope and books about space, science fiction, and Star Trek and Star Wars. Despite my depression, life was incredibly fun at times.
Then I went into junior high and everything seemed to fall apart. None of the fun things about school carried into this teeny bopper’s “rite of passage” even the other students no longer cared about space or toys or books. All they could think about was the opposite sex and the chances they had to go to dances. I was too shy for dances, and even if I did go to one, I would never ask a girl to dance. I later joined the Air Cadets where they also had dances, and I will never forget a young woman who was 3 or 4 years older than me who I had the biggest crush of my life on, literally begging me to dance with her during a slow song and I just kept saying no. I was locked inside a world of my own design.
Close to the end of junior high things had simply gone out of control. I got into trouble at school for carrying knives, for scaring people. I was being bullied, but I bullied others. One day my brother put out a challenge to my bully and was badly beaten up. Life seemed hopeless. As my grade 9 school year came to a close, I was sent to see a psychiatrist who had me stay on a psychiatric ward to be evaluated for two weeks. This was the worst time of my life to that date.
Just to give a bit of a preview, as I write this I have experienced a full recovery from my mental illness. I have good friends, have written 12 books, been published in many newspapers and magazines and online, and I am soon starting a new job teaching patients in the psychiatric ward about poetry, so they can hopefully find a creative outlet for their mental health issues and other difficulties.