Notes on recovery and perserverance.

Today is my third day out of psychiaric hospital. For obvious purposes I cannot say where I was but I can say what got me there. I had lost parts of myself along with losing my past relationship and I underestimated how much I needed to grieve. I became depressed and suicidal, but I did not really want to die. I wanted to stop feeling everything that I was feeling. I did not know how to handle the pain of abandonment. So, I got help. Well, I was partly forced to get help by my mother. I would like to share some of the things I learned and will probably need a lifetime to master. 



  1. Being kind to yourself is really difficult! I struggled with being kind to myself because of my deep rooted feeling of unworthiness. Once my psychologist and I started unpacking this we realised that I take on way too much energy that is not mine, and feel deep sense of failure and defeat when I do not rise up to other people's standards, having severely neglected my own wants and needs. I have learnt that for me, being kind to myself needs to be a very deliberate act of settng and respecting my boundaries and acknowledging my worth and greatness.
  2. Boundaries. Boundaries. Boundaries. I have to gloat for a moment and tell you how proud I am for being able to assert my boundaries recently. I still have a lot of work to do with this one but I am not feeling guilty all the time for respecting and acknowledging what I want or do not want in my relationsips. Setting boundaries is probably the biggest act of self love and self care there is. You are letting others know where you are at and where you want to be and what works for you. You are taking up space and existng fully and unapolegetically. 
  3. Honesty. Being honest about yourself  and about who you are. The good and the bad! No one is all good or all bad. There is light and darkness in all of us. Shining a light on the dark parts of yourself means that you are more aware of where you are at and what you need to work on to be a better you. The darkness is still there, but there is less of it, or maybe it becomes less poignant or intense. 
  4. I need to embrace my individuality. In the past year or so I found myself wanting to be so many people other than myself. My self loathing had become so excruciating that I would latch on to ideas that people had of me just to get away from myself. I became ideas of myself. Weightless and meaningless. I lost my voice. In hospital I realised that I am so great. Seriously. I have a mind like no other and think like no other and I can now see that being anyone other than myself would be the most disrespectful disservice to myself. 
I am sure that I will continue discovering a many epiphanies about life and how I want to live it but for now, these are the things that I have learned.

P.S.
Here's a really cool app that specialises in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). CBT along with DBT (dialetical behavioural therapy) are very well suited for mood and personality disorders!







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