On Living With A Mental Disability

Life is trying and failing and trying and failing and trying again, over and over. You reach a great place, the place where you feel you belong. You stay there for a while, then something goes wrong and you go dark for awhile. Rolling over and over in the darkest parts of you like a pig in mud. And you stay that way until you decide to get up again.  Getting up again and failing and getting up again, is life. The highs and the lows, the failure and the trying again. This is life. To settle for failure is mere existence, to settle for misery and never becoming who you could be. Settling for failure means you give up on your future, and to get up again is to decide, daily, to live.

The fight is hard, it is every day, it is unrelenting. This is what makes us crack. What makes us wallow in sadness and despair. But one day (and no one can tell you when it is time for you to get up, this is something only you can know) you will be inspired, and you will start again. Innumerable times I have thought, this is it, I'm staying here forever. It's easy, and it's painless. Giving up is seductive as fuck. It's a warm bed calling to you, a siren's song of all the terrible things that have happened to you because you got back up. Calling you back to the warm, secure safety of doing nothing. I'm always tempted to say, This Is Who I Am Now. I'm done running after a dream. A mind that wants to do the easiest thing (because the easiest thing cannot hurt you) will tell you anything to get you to listen.

But deciding to try again, and again, and again-facing pain and fear and discomfort, purposefully choosing all the things that make you want to run- choosing this is what makes you a warrior. A phoenix.

Many, many times I have wallowed in my room, painting my nails black and binging Netflix, thinking, "This is it. I'm done. I give up. I GIVE UP. I am so done, I'm not strong enough, it never ends, when will it be over? When can I just be done?"

But the truth is, you can never be done. You will always fall, and you will always get back up. Understand that. You will never be done. Your fight will never be over. But it will get easier. You will get stronger.

I hold this hope close to me every day, slogging through the challenges like concrete in the daily struggle, knowing that as long as I keep going (and I can't help but keep going) it will get easier every time. If I remember the cycle, recognize that with every downswing there will be an upswing, and the journey will get easier, I am able to keep going. I hold the dream of my ideal self in front of me and I fucking run.

Sometimes I fall. Everyone falls. I am writing this while planning my upswing from a deep chasm. But I'm on my way up. I learn from the things that didn't work before, the things that made me fall. Strict routines, repetition, long-term goals. The words 'should' and 'forever'. You will learn from your failures, and use this knowledge later so you won't fall down the same holes. 

Two years ago I fell as deep as I have ever been. But I rose from those ashes just the same as I will rise from these. Though in my darkness I tell myself I'm weak, that I'll never be anything, the truth is I already am something. I'm a phoenix. And if you're alive today with a mental disability, you are too (even if you're reading this from bed).