Smoke

One of the first things that mental illness teaches you is not to trust yourself.

The things your head tells you are sometimes disturbing sometimes sad and sometimes confusing. I spent a huge portion of my life wholly paranoid and worried that I would be institutionalized. I heard voices and was convinced my family were trying to hurt me. I spent a lot of time trying to hide things from everyone, because I was so scared and angry.

One night, I was in the car with my younger brother, and I said You know how sometimes you hear a voice whispering to you, but there isn't anyone there? And he turned and gave me a long steady look and said No. I really don't. And that was when I knew that it was not normal. Or ok.

It has taken me a decade to learn to trust my feelings. I had to get my medicine to the point where I was fairly stable, which was hard enough, but then I had to learn to listen to myself. This, in direct conflict with a lifetime spent ignoring those things, labelling them untrustworthy, knowing myself to be untrustworthy.

Today is not then. I rarely doubt myself these days, rarely hesitate to make decisions, to trust my instincts. So hard to achieve, some days I thought I never would get it, that I could never read the social signals, that I would always be other, outside, apart.

And today I am not other, I am a part of, I am inside, and finally I am whole. I can read the social cues, and, as they say, I intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle me.

What a gift.