thank you

Thank you very much for all that you’ve done. It’s real nice to have our conversation taking a different route for once… for once I wasn’t calling you, overwhelmed with feelings, needing you to calm me down, for once it’s not a one way thing, having you telling me stories, trying to cheer me up, for once we are sharing a nice laugh over things over the phone. It was a pleasant conversation. I feel blessed having known you. Dissolvable risperdal eh? Nice, perhaps I should get some… in case for rainy season…

You know, the one thing that you said to me over the phone today that really gave me a peace of mind was that you are sure that I am not 100% bipolar. You said that perhaps I may be some, a little, but definitely not totally. Besides, if I were, my medication would need to be much higher anyway. And that made me smile… for having a doctor who is not overly biological oriented. And the tale about the obsessive turning schizophrenic, that’s a good one... Just shows how psychiatry is still in its premature stage… But that’s life, isn’t it?

Yea, I guess you’re really right, I am really lucky having a really nice psychiatrist who’s not all into labeling and drugging people up on my side. I guess, looking on the bright side of things, yes, it’s a painful journey having to grow up with and perhaps live the rest of my life with a emotional condition, God I hate the word “mental illness”, but then, that’s what I have right? Have to be accepting of myself right? But then, despite all the tears from this journey, I have a great amount of joy as well, for I’ve been blessed by a great many friends who accept for who I am, not what I present myself to them as… I got to cross paths with many wonderful people in this soul healing trade that has kept me alive enough to appreciate them… those who scolded me and blackmailed me into accepting treatment, those who have been firm in getting me to accept the help that I so desperately need and those so gentle that any wound can be healed by just their words alone… I’m so very thankful for having them by my side, taking an interest in me, and not giving me up as a hopeless case even though on so many occasions, even I feel that I am a hopeless case myself and pitied those who had to work with me…

Yes, those were the times when I was down in the pits of depression, wondering if I should let go and unravel into the realms of insanity, wondering if that’s a better path, meeting madness head on and making friends with it… embracing it and merging with it for all I care, for it seemed so enticing, so tempting, to give up fighting for my life, to give up searching for that apparent faint streak of light at the end of the tunnel which I have never once caught glimpse of. Silent screams and racing thoughts in my mind, day and night…

But it’s gone now… I am me now…

Funny… I guess, it is a blessing, though a really painful and hurtful one at that, to have a critique of a mom who wishes and assumes that everything is normal… perhaps ignorance really is bliss. And sometimes I really do wonder is she the one reason I am still in touch with reality? For her act of ignoring my pain and suffering, her denial of anything psychiatrically wrong with me had in a sickly way done me some good by preventing me from falling into the trap of playing the sick role for the rest of my life…