My name is Erin and I’m a contradiction.
My life itself has been a crucible and, having been baptized in flames, I have developed my wings, if counter-intuitively. Being a phoenix is hard but rewarding work, and I am unashamed to be both ember and embellishment.
I am mentally ill and have, in addition to other, lesser diagnoses bipolar disorder (type II), complex post-traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Conversely, I am mentally well: I maintain a typical 40-hour work week while raising two young children, traversing a marriage, pursuing a master’s degree in counseling, and volunteering in a hospice.
When in the past I leaned in favor of my illness, I developed negative coping mechanisms, viewing self-care as synonymous to self-annihilation. I would inhale lines of pills whose names I couldn’t pronounce, whose effects I could neither name nor comprehend. I’d whittle myself away to nothing, hell-bent on the number 210, as though that specific daily caloric intake would summon nirvana. I would drink a 1.75 liter of vodka on an empty stomach and would whittle away my skin with razor blades. And I likened it all to giving myself a hug or a proverbial pat on the back. I have been sober nearly 10 years.
Leaning, as I do now, in favor of my wellness, I foster positive coping mechanisms or more societally acceptable ways through which to conquer my life. In the here and now, my self-care seems the antithesis of what I once thought to be as such. As it stands, I am clean and sober.
I am literally double the weight of the skeleton to which I demeaned my former self. While I was once resistant to therapy and psychotropic medication, I am now an avid supporter of both.
Need someone to write the anthem for anxiolytics? Or the prelude to Prozac? Then look no further: I am your girl.
After nearly 14 years of therapy, I am now eager to praise. I am unashamed to admit, for example, that I’ve been with my therapist longer than I’ve been with my husband and that he (unlike my mother who only gave birth to me once) has given me life countless times. She has quietly resuscitated me, time and time again, as if the world itself needs my person to maintain its gravitational pull. She has held a mirror in front of my face, made me take a long hard lookinto my cavernous eyes, and convert the abyss into Elysium.
I suppose I am the opposite of Alice: I’m not ten feet tall, I no longer have the capacity to feed my head with drugs, and I have climbed out of, rather than into, the looking glass. Disproportionate though I may now be, I boast my asymmetry.
Self-care looks different now: Though sometimes imperceptible, its reach is vast and its impact profound. Though I am medicated and still actively involved in every-other-week therapy sessions, neither of these truths negates the deeper one: Beneath all of that, I am still mentally ill. I am not mental illness, but I have mental illness and, try as I might to thwart it, still I fall prey to its menace.
On days where my obsessive bad thoughts consume me or when hypomania has the reins and insists I promote myself in all capacities, when my thoughts spin into oblivion or slow to a herculean hell-hole, I enact self-care with precision and imminent vigilance. On these days, I nod to my husband to pump up my bike tires so I can pedal furiously toward the horizon. I used to get high on pseudo-adrenaline, but now I submit to the possibility that I myself am drug enough, able to activate endorphins at will. For me, paradise exists in the process of pedaling on, despite not exactly arriving.
Another important aspect of my recovery from my former self is my active pursuit of the grace in others: I work with intellectually delayed students at a local high school. And, while the world says that my students will not meet certain benchmarks or achieve certain goals, my students step up to the plate every single day and show the world how lopsided is its prejudice. If you want to see the expanse of the mind, befriend those who others mislabel as delayed and you’ll be floored by staggering genius.
As a hospice volunteer, I provide companionship for the dying. In the pursuit of life, acceptance of death is key. And listening to the dying, even when the words are incomprehensible due to various manifestations of dementia, is crucial to appreciating life. I have listened to the death rattle more times than I can count, but it is beneath that very noise that one can hear life’s resounding echo.
And as an aspiring counselor, I intend to use my personal experiences with mental illness to better help other people navigate their own. As a born empath, I find that people come to me with their quirks and their tragedies, those things from which they hide and to which they needlessly cling. I am the keeper of many secrets. I have tiptoed through the dregs to find the dignity encapsulated in darkness.
I am Erin and I am a contradiction. One of the most awesome hand-me-downs of my familial inheritance of bipolar disorder is my ability to view both wreckage and reincarnation with the same gratitude, to find recovery in the addict, genius in the intellectually delayed, life in the dying, and redemption in my fellow mentally ill.
