Posts tagged guilt

You might do stupid stuff here.  Or you might do awesome stuff, or boring stuff, or wise stuff, or helpful stuff, or damaging stuff, or whatever.  You could do illegal things, if you tried hard enough - you could also save a life.

Being here is like being anywhere: it might mean you’re not doing some other thing, I guess, but there’s not much worse than that.

Separate the forum from the behavior, please.  Just like saying “she was at the mall” tells you nothing about whether the person was doing something worthwhile while they were there, saying “he was on Tumblr” tells you nothing about whether what was happening was worthwhile or not.  You might be wasting time on Tumblr, or you might doing something very important.  And by the way, that decision is up to you every minute you spend here.

[Please note this actually applies to pretty much every central portal on the internet, and obviously to the internet itself as a whole.  Being online is like being on earth: by itself it actually tells people very little about your activities.]

A lot of us with mental illness or addiction are unable to forget or stop worrying about the things we regret. Offhand, I can think of several dozen regrets, personally, without really trying:

• I regret stopping taking that antidepressant my doctor gave me way back when I was 17, and the one I got when I was 19, and the one I got when I was 22…
• I regret stopping my visits with the school counseling center.
• I regret that one time when I screamed “YOU ARE BEING AWFUL TO ME, I HAVE BIPOLAR DISORDER!!!!” at 4am.
• I regret all the times I stopped going to classes but didn’t bother withdrawing, and my resulting GPA.
• I regret getting really angry and moving across country instead of admitting I was scared and didn’t know what to do and really needed help.
• I regret giving into hypomania all those times, and doing all those things I did while I was hypomanic.
• I regret not calling and begging for help from my student counseling office, people at church, my parents, my stepparents, my parents’ friends, my professors, my doctors, etc.
• I regret all that money I spent on those credit cards all those times.
• I regret most of the actual choices I made between the ages of 11 and 28, come to think of it.
• I regret hiding my worries and mistakes and problems from everyone who could have and would have helped me, starting when I was about 5 years old.
• I regret the things I said to my family and friends when I was angry and depressed, or scared and depressed, or confused and depressed.
• I regret saying the things I said to my family and friends when I was hypomanic.
• I regret sleeping away all those years.
• I regret not going to all those classes I didn’t go to, and the resulting GPA.
• I regret putting my pride before my mental health.
• I regret that I changed majors because of temporary symptoms of my illness instead of for a reason like “I don’t want to have that career.”
• I regret attending college when I should have been in an inpatient facility, getting better.
• I regret that one time when I was hypomanic and signed up for 27 credit hours, and the resulting GPA.
• I regret keeping secrets about how my life was at my mom’s house from my dad, and at my dad’s house from my mom, and at BOTH houses from a lot of people who could have helped me and my younger siblings.
• I regret all the times I responded to my own suicidal ideation by withdrawing from the world or looking up ways to kill myself.
• I regret letting my OCD control so much of my life, to the point that it’s darned difficult to go back to being “normal.”
• I regret spending so much time avoiding life, instead of trying to figure out why I wanted to avoid it, and then fixing that “why.”
• I regret ignoring all that advice from well-meaning people who told me I was going to regret all those things I did anyway.
• I regret the times when I haven’t said something I should have to a doctor or therapist.

But there’s still plenty of hope for me, despite all of that.

Every single day I can make choices that affect my course and speed, as it were.  Yes, I’m in more rocky, hazardous territory than I want to be, but I have yet to run aground.  Yes, the skies are threatening, but my ship has not yet sunk.  And it’s not like I know where I would be if those things I regret, had gone differently.

You’re in the same situation.  How do we know that?  Because you’re still here.

A friend of mine was in an inpatient ward, suffering very, very badly from serious symptoms of her illness.  It had been years since she had been in a situation that she felt was really great.  It had been a while since ECT had robbed her of her memories from the better part of a decade and her ability to work full-time.  Life, by most objective standards, sucked.

But she chose to participate in her treatment anyway.  She chose to try another new medication scheme anyway.  She chose to tell fellow patients on the ward all about NAMI and peer support groups and how helpful they are.  And when she was released, she went back to being an advocate and a peer support person and all of that, because her ship wasn’t sunk yet, and there were still choices to be made.

That’s the hope, and the promise.  No matter how badly you’ve screwed things up, no matter how many opportunities you think you’ve lost (or, yes, truly and irrevocably have lost,) there are still choices and options open to you.  There are still people willing to help you, things to try, places to go.  There is always hope, at least until the moment you die.

At that point, well, let’s just say I’ll leave my opinion out of it for the sake of my diverse audience.  :)

I don’t know what the results of my choices will be.  I don’t know what course my illness will take.  But I know that I still have some choices.  They might be big opportunities or small opportunities - choosing to try to make and eat something for lunch, choosing to take a shower, choosing to put my CPAP mask on, choosing to fill my med boxes and set them up where I can find them, choosing to share my story on Tumblr, choosing to go to a peer support meeting, choosing to call a warmline when I’m feeling like I’m in a bad place, choosing to call 911 if I feel like I’m a danger to myself or others, choosing to read a few paragraphs in a book about forgiving myself.

And yeah, I still really, truly, 100% regret the stuff I said I regret.  It hurts.  I 100% wish I hadn’t made the choices I did, that things hadn’t gone down the way they did.  If I had a time machine, I suspect I’d go back in time before I even clearly thought about the ramifications, I regret it all so much.

But I know there’s hope anyway, and that takes the sting out of those regrets in a MAJOR way.

So, I just (a minute ago) found out that a person (older adult/authority figure) who made my life really awful from the ages of 16 to 19 and kept me from doing something I loved to do for the decade after that, has passed away. And not only am I not feeling sad for her or her family, I am not letting myself feel guilty for that.

Now, the only reason I can do that is because I dislike her so much that I would have to force myself to feel bad about not feeling bad about her death and my non-sympathy towards it. But it’s nice to have one shield still standing right now.

youmeadhd said: much luck on the math skills for the grad. school test prep! will you be requesting accommodations for your testing?

This is a really tough one for me.

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