Proud Work in Progress

    I've always been the kind of person, that when somebody compliments something I worked on, or even when my therapist praises the progress I've made, I'll say something like, "Yeah, I did that, but I still want to/need to (insert goal or desired amount of progress)." I've always sort of felt like, whatever progress I made didn't deserve recognition because I hadn't reached as far as I wanted to go yet, and I could only truly be praised or celebrated or complimented when I reached the goal I had in mind. I mean, you can't say how great something is while it's still in progress, you have to see it finished to decide, right?

    I do that sort of thing a lot when it comes to dealing with my OCD and panic disorder triggers. I'll do a small exposure, and then if I don't feel like I exposed myself to whatever the trigger is for as long as I imagined I would, the mission feels like a failure. My therapist is always quick to correct me. She always points out, "Yeah. You got anxious/left/turned off the thing, but you still did it. It doesn't matter that you didn't do as well as you expected yourself to, the main point is that you did it. Then you recognized your limit, and you stopped. That's good. That's progress, and it deserves to be acknowledged."

    I actually say things like this so much in my sessions that my therapist says things like, "Did you hear what you just said?" Or, "Do you realize what you just did?" Then she always goes on to explain to me that, any progress at all, even if I fell short of a goal I had in my head, still deserves to be acknowledged and celebrated. She always lets me know that, even if I know I still have work to do in an area of my life or in dealing with my mental health, I'm still allowed to be proud of how far I've come.

    I've been in therapy for six or so years at this point, and that idea still feels weird to me. I'm supposed to be proud of and happy with how far I've come when I still have so far to go? The answer, according to my therapist, is yes. YES, I AM. 

    Here's the thing about progress for most of us, but especially for those of us that live with mental illness: progress is an ongoing journey that continues for our whole lives. Humans usually don't reach a point of progress at which they say, "Okay, I'm finished with this growth business. I've made all the progress I'm going to make in my life. I'll stay like this from here on out." When we usually begin to see growth in one area that we identified and have been working on, we pick out other things that we want to grow about ourselves or in how we deal with our mental health, and we begin work on those areas. This process goes on and on, because the more you grow, the more you can find other areas that you want to work on and improve because improving generally makes us feel good about ourselves. The goal or desired level of progress and growth just keeps changing. So, if we're not proud of ourselves and happy with ourselves while we're growing, when are we ever going to be proud of ourselves and happy with ourselves?

    I can tell you that I'm still not where I want to be in terms of progress and growth. I'm still a work in progress, and I'm probably always going to be a work in progress. That's okay. I'm still proud of where I am today because, I can tell you, it's a far cry from where I was five years ago, or even a few months ago. 

    I'll end with this: If you're anything like me, you're probably too hard on yourself sometimes (or, a lot of the time). It can feel so hard to celebrate yourself and be happy with yourself and the work you're putting into yourself when all you can see if how far you have left to go instead of how far you've come. The thing is that, especially with mental health, the whole process of progress and growth can be lifelong. So, if you're not celebrating yourself while you're a work in progress, when are you going to celebrate yourself at all?

From the Outside

    I had always thought of myself as someone who had a lot of experience with mental illness. Both of my parents had clinically diagnosed mental health conditions. I watched my grandmother take anti-anxiety medication for the entire part of her life that I knew her, and I watched her still battle her anxiety even with her medication. I had other friends and loved ones who had checked into in-patient treatment for mental health concerns, many of them more than once. I also personally knew people that either struggled with suicidal ideation or had actually attempted to take their own lives. 

    Up until my own struggle with OCD and panic disorder began, I felt like I understood what it was like to have a mental health condition. I had seen my loved ones struggling and suffering with mental illness, and I thought that since I had also struggled and suffered with difficult things throughout my life, that meant I understood what they were going through. I thought all suffering was the same because from the outside looking in, suffering just looks like suffering, if that makes sense.

    Prior to the beginning of my own struggle with mental illness, all of my "experience" with mental illness had been from the outside looking in. As you can imagine, when I suddenly found myself on the inside of that struggle looking out, it was a completely new experience. Sure, I had seen mental illness in other people. Sure, I had a basic knowledge of the causes and symptoms of various mental health conditions thanks to my bachelors degree in psychology. But...neither of those things prepared me for what it was like to feel a mental health condition wreaking havoc on my mind, body, and life. 

    I had ideas of suffering and mental illness, but I honestly couldn't wrap my mind around how this "thing" could interfere so much in the lives of people so as to make it nearly impossible to get out of bed, to leave their homes, to be a functional human being, or to stay alive even, no matter how hard they tried. From the outside looking in it's so easy to mistakenly just see people that maybe aren't trying hard enough or to see people just "giving in" to their mental health condition, or people who chose "a permanent solution to a temporary problem" instead of people that have expended tremendous amounts of effort trying to be as functional and as normal as possible until their stores of energy are depleted.

    Then, it happened to me, and like many of my friends and loved ones, I found myself thinking, "Other people really don't understand what this is like. I didn't...until now." From the outside looking in, I had never experienced the kind of suffering that comes with mental illness. (Nobody tells you that it's a different kind of suffering. Not worse, better, or more traumatic...just different.) I had never experienced that kind of fear that comes with not knowing if I could trust myself and my own thoughts. I had also never experienced the kind of prolonged anguish that can make a person think it would be a blessing not to wake up the next morning until I was living in it. 

    From the outside looking in, it's so easy to pass judgement on the way people deal with their mental health. When you aren't trapped on the inside of that struggle it's so easy to say that you would have handled something differently or that you never would have allowed your mind to run away to whatever place someone else is in. You don't know what you'd do though, until it's happening to you. None of us behave as logically as we imagine we will in any given situation where fear and pain are the dominant emotions or when survival mode is activated. 

    I'll end with this: As cliché as it sounds, mental illness is one of those things that it's impossible to truly understand until it happens to you. Sure, you can have experience dealing with other people's mental health, but that experience is that of an observer watching from the outside of the struggle and the suffering, untouched by it. That experience is completely different to the experience of the person with the mental health condition who is trapped on the inside looking out, who can't have distance from it. From the outside looking in, it's so easy to view a person's struggle with mental health through the societal lens of the stigma that tells us that those people are lazy or dramatic or attention-seeking instead of simply seeing people that are trying their best with the internal and external resources that they have at any given moment. 

Just Listen to Us

    Figuring out life with mental illness can be hard, especially in the beginning. We have to figure what our triggers are. We have to figure out how to manage symptoms. We have to figure out what treatments work best for our brains. We have to figure out how to have difficult conversations with loved ones, bosses, and even potential partners about our mental health conditions. We have to figure out what bits of our old lives we get to keep and what bits we have to change for our own wellness. Basically, we have to figure out how to navigate life all over again with this new, scary thing that we have to take into account for practically every decision we make.

    The whole process is frustrating and painful, and it has probably been a trial and error process for us, but then....we figure it out. We figure out how to identify and handle existing and potential triggers, how to manage the symptoms, how to live as fully as possible while we keep an eye on our ever-present mental health condition and travel along our wellness journey.

    While we're figuring things out for ourselves, our loved ones are also trying to figure it all out alongside us. They see us struggling. They see us at our worst when our mental illness is wreaking havoc on us and our lives, and they hate it. Our loved ones would more than likely do anything to make our suffering stop, but they have no idea how to make it stop. They can't take away the mental illness, and so this might lead our loved ones to try to protect us from our mental health condition. 

    In an effort to help us manage our mental illness, our loved ones can sometimes make mental health decisions for us to avoid certain situations because they assume the situation will be a trigger. Sometimes, even when we insist that we would be fine in X situation, our loved ones will stand firm and say something along the lines of, "No. That will definitely make you (insert symptoms here). I know it will. So we just won't do that/watch that/talk about that."

    While we understand that this protectiveness comes from a place of love, it's not the most helpful attitude to have when dealing with someone else's mental health condition. Just because we have a mental health condition doesn't mean that we're like children that don't know what's best for ourselves or how to take care of ourselves. We've put in the work in therapy to learn these exact things.

    It would be so much more helpful if they just asked us, "Are you okay if we do this/watch this/talk about this today?" and then ACTUALLY LISTENED TO US when we gave them an answer. If we've been living with our mental illness for some time, and especially if we've spent some time in therapy, we know our mental health boundaries. We know when it's a good time to challenge our mental illness and when it's a good time to leave or avoid a situation to be kind to ourselves. So, if we say we'll be fine in a situation, we mean it, because we wouldn't risk creating a bad mental health day just to prove a point. If we legitimately feel like it might be a bad day to be exposed to anything we can opt out of, we'll tell you that. 

    Also, if something has been a trigger for us in the past, that doesn't mean that same thing will ALWAYS be a trigger for our mental illness. We can and do work through some things like that in therapy so that we don't make avoidance the default coping mechanism. You can always ask, "I know this has been a trigger in the past, but how do you feel about it now?" instead of assuming that it's still an issue. We know that if we want to maintain wellness it's best to answer questions like this honestly instead of giving you the answer we think you want from us.

       On another level, just assuming that something will be triggering and then telling us that you know a certain thing will be triggering isn't a good idea. If we aren't careful, thinking about why you think something would be triggering (especially when we're dealing with intrusive thoughts) can create a trigger where there wasn't one before. 

    Loved ones can still be protective, and we appreciate that in the right context. Save the protectiveness for when someone is arguing that our mental illness isn't a real illness or when we confront someone for using our mental illness as a "quirky" personality trait. That's when we need it. We don't really need it when we're just making decisions about what we can handle in regard to our mental health condition. Odds are, after some time in therapy and after we've (mostly) figured out how to navigate life with our mental illness, we don't need you to try to protect us from ourselves or our mental health conditions as much as you still think we do. (But we love you for wanting to.)

    I'll end with this: I know, you want to figure out any way you can to protect someone you care about from the suffering that comes with their mental health condition. However, when it comes to trying to help someone manage their mental illness, making the decision for them to avoid certain things without talking to them about it isn't the most helpful thing you can do. We're so glad you want to help, and honestly, the most helpful thing you can do is listen to us about dealing with our own mental health condition. It's okay to just ask, "Do you feel okay with X?" instead of just assuming you know best because you love them.