Living With Trauma: The Healers, 11

How does recovery look? How is recovery supposed to look? When I began my practice as a peer support worker (I suppose that the word "practice", here, sounds a bit pretentious, since that is rather a sacred word reserved for high-snortin' psychotherapists, but really, a peer support worker is really a psychotherapist without the frills. We don't have the years of training and education, and we certainly don't earn the big bucks, but we have been there ourselves, and this gives us an intuitive knowledge of mental illness and recovery that none of our higher paid colleagues can even hold a candle to. So, I have a peer support practice. Sounds nice, eh?). I am aware of many of the stereotypes and clichés of recovery, and this really says more about the dumbed-down kind of culture we live in. I remember seeing a poster montage of images of how recovery is supposed to look: a happy, Caucasian family having a barbecue together; someone jogging with a buddy, a ball game, someone cooking a meal, a guy working out in the gym. All banal, banal, banal and pretty mundane. There must also have been an image of a happy submissive little employee, but I can't remember them all, it was thirteen years ago, but even then I thought, how lame! I also recall another display in a mental health facility featuring cans of Campbell soups with different recovery cliché names about happiness, diligence, success, confidence, self-esteem, and every other recovery cliché you could think of (sorry, Gentle Reader, for the sound of my retching). So, I remarked to a colleague that they were missing a flavour. He asked what it was, and I replied, "Recovery Propaganda Chowder." He didn't think it was funny. And it's not funny, really. How does recovery look for me? To keep certain colleagues and bosses quiet, I simply would reply, I have an apartment, a job, and friends. Uh-huh. I also draw and paint. But when I was ill, I was already enjoying some success as a working visual artist, painting well, exhibiting my paintings and actually selling quite a few. I had time, because I wasn't really well enough to work at a regular job. Or, at least, I wasn't able to find anything I could stick to, without being fired or laid off for not being considered a good "fit." So, I was on welfare, painting and selling my work. Now that I work full time, I have precious little time to show or market my art, though I still work at it every day. So, I would say that my success has been more of a trade-off. I do generally feel better, less anxious, less afraid, but not less angry. I will always be angry. There would be something seriously the matter with me if I wasn't angry. With all the stupid ass destructiveness that our species is wreaking on the planet, the environment, one another and on ourselves it would be absolutely stupid, callous and selfish to not be angry. I am also writing this blog. Every single day, but this could be considered, by some psychiatrists anyway (especially if they don't like what I write) as obsessive compulsive behaviour. Having no family makes me rather alone in the world, since I have no next of kin, I often don't know what I'm going to do on Christmas Day or Thanksgiving, and when I kick the bucket there simply is not going to be anyone to claim my body. I suppose this makes me vulnerable, but I have always known that I am vulnerable. I have always accepted that I am vulnerable. And I have always celebrated that I am vulnerable, because this makes me feel alive, open and receptive to the world around me and it generates in me a capacity to love others. Not really a poster-boy for the stereotype of mental health recovery, am I, Gentle Reader? As a Charismatic Christian with strong Quaker and contemplative tendencies I also claim to have a relationship with God. In fact, God talks to me. Religious delusion, anyone? But I am recovered. I see the divine in everything and I celebrate each moment as a gift from God. Hm, sounds a bit bi-polar, if you ask me? There are lots of features about my life that could be so easily pathologized and turned into yet another label of mental illness, and this is what stigma can do. Except for one little detail: I have never accepted stigma. And now, more than ever, I reject stigma. While I saw a psychiatrist for four years I kept trying to reconcile myself to the idea that I was mentally ill. But now, in retrospect, I have one little thing to say about this: I am not, nor ever was mentally-ill, regardless of any lame-ass PTSD and anxiety diagnosis. There were some rather high-ranking individuals in the Anglican Church (one was a famous housing worker for the City of Vancouver) who were conspiring to keep me quiet because they had swallowed some lies about me being homophobic, anti-gay, and working to influence others against the church's move towards embracing same-sex marriage. All lies engendered by miscommunications and half-truths and none of those lying hypocrites even bothered to ask me personally where I really stood. Truth be told, I was on my own journey towards understanding and acceptance of same-sex issues. But they tried to convince me that I was mentally-ill, sick with depression and needed to go on medication and to apply for disability. When I was turned down for all those things and told that I had PTSD (largely brought on and aggravated by those losers), and began to accept psychotherapy without medications, without hospitalization, and soon was working fulltime at a real job, they all dropped me like the proverbial hot potato, and when I called one of them on her duplicity she screamed at me about threatening her. But this knowledge, in the wrong hands, would have given me a diagnosis of paranoia, or at least of having a persecution complex. My psychotherapist had a one word answer for all of this: "Nonsense." By avoiding the mental health system, by refusing to allow well-meaning professionals to define me as sick and stigmatize me, I have recovered in spades. My life has flow, order, and a sense of dynamic creative harmony, with good order, structure and self-discipline. If I have recovered then this has occurred on only one individual's terms: My Own.