I came home from my most recent trip to Vancouver, saw my folks, who saw some of the pics, & immediately they said – “so you’re good – looks like everything is moving forward now.”
I proceeded to spend the next 2 days in bed, working from my phone, barely able to lift my head off the pillow. When I told them this, their reaction was what it always is – “But you looked so good in the pics. Aren’t you OK now”?
Can any of you relate?
When we come down w something as common as strep throat/bronchitis, we take an antibiotic, sleep & we go from being “sick” to being “healthy.” Black/white.
Having a brother who’s faced Leukemia 2x, it’s not so dissimilar w “physical” health conditions. They measure blood cell counts, & if the chemo/radiation works you go from being “sick” to “remission.” There’s this concept in all of the above examples of going from being sick, to no longer being so.
For those of you who battle MH complications at the disorder level, maybe you feel my pain that those arnd you, those who care about you, those who want to see you succeed, believe that MH too, has a “sickness” period that leads to a “cured” outcome. It’s hard to blame the ppl around us for believing this, when the models they know are the examples above. But it’s case in pt of the education gap that exists.
In the world of MH, we’re never “cured”…we’re always a work in progress.
My 1st yr working at the NBA, my boss was describing season ticket holder “retention” to me. He said – it’s like a bucket w holes in it. We’re constantly trying to fill the bucket (new fans), but the question is do we fill it enough given what’s coming out of the holes (fans not renewing).
MH feels like much the same as that bucket example. Whether it’s sleep, overwork, med management, supplement management, STARR practice diligence, situational life events, our own spinning thoughts, etc., we have a lot of “holes in our buckets.” When it comes to MH, unlike the way physical health complications are viewed, we’re never “cured”…instead we’re always working to fill our buckets & plug our holes.
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