"With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts."*

I had a huge breakthrough in therapy yesterday.  

The day before yesterday I was feeling crappy.  I played hooky from therapy and casually mentioned to someone that I didn’t want to take my meds anymore.  Mind you, I didn’t say I wasn’t going to take them; I had just mentioned “I don’t want to take them any more.”  

Yesterday, this person took that information and ran scream and yelling like a banshee with it.  I obviously “had problems” with the medication I was taking, had problems with “impulse control” and “had challenges to face that (I) obviously had issues dealing with”

Wow! No shit Sherlock!  The problem isn’t those issues, the problem is this person, who took what I had shared, in intimate, trusting detail and smacked me in the face with it.  Nice!

Obviously the session in therapy was about this conversation with someone I considered a person to trust.  And I made a breakthrough.  Do I really deserve that sort of comment coming from someone who cannot seem to get past certain things in their life?  So, I have issues, I don’t hide them, I don’t pretend they aren’t difficult to deal with and I don’t compartmentalize them and put them into neat little boxes, all wrapped up and sealed and pretend they aren’t going on in my life only to bring them out in therapy and then continue on my merry way as usual, allowing them to make me feel bad about myself, yet really, not facing up to them.

OCD: yea, I know I’m obsessive.  I’ve always known that.  I obsess about small things that I have no control over and major huge issues that go over and over in my mind.

Depression: I was depressed, happy pills help, some days are better than others, but I’m working hard to keep on the medication I’ve been given, because, even though sometimes my mind fights with me about taking them, I know I can’t be without them, because I’m the one who went through the depression and I’m not going through that again.

Seasonal Affective Disorder: I despise the cold with a passion! And it’s a mental illness.  Deal with it.  “This too shall pass”.  But I cannot stand being cold.  I can never seem to warm up and there’s no such thing as anything being “too hot”. One of the things I found out is that the cold, or the inability to feel warm, is directly related to my eating disorder.  Lack of fuel, lack of muscle, lack of body heat. Insomnia, while not a mental illness categorized by NAMI, is also related to the ED

And of course, my buddy, my major, longest running, constant companion; My Eating Disorder.  That’s not going to be cured in a couple of weeks.  I am well aware that I fight losing it, I fight “fixing it” and nothing anyone can say, do or try to guilt me into doing, will change the fact that that is my biggest hurdle. I’m working on it. 

My breakthrough yesterday wasn’t about any of these “mental disorders”.  It was about sounding out the things I had heard, what had been said to me and whether or not I really needed that sort of thing in my life.  

I’m so glad I am strong enough to slip on the mud, and still be able to get up, wipe myself off and be tough enough to continue to wade through it.

It’s going to be a lovely day!

* Eleanor Roosevelt