Part of my healing process is not only coming to terms with my trauma, but also being able to accept myself. Over the course of my life, I have been diagnosed with about every mental illness and disorder that exists, aside from probably schizophrenia. With severe mental illness it can become difficult for even the best psychologist or psychiatrist to properly diagnose a patient. This is due to the fact that once mental illness reaches a certain level of severity, a lot of symptoms that are normally attributed to one illness, actual start to overlap. This is part of the reason why so many people with severe mental illness end up in psychiatric institutions…simply because we are difficult (and sometimes impossible) to treat. We wander around for years, from therapist to therapist, from psychiatrist to psychiatrist, desperately searching for an answer but never finding one. Sure, you get put on medication and you get to talk about your feelings, but sometimes that just isn’t enough.

Many of the patients I met during my stays in the psychiatric hospitals were exactly like me. They either had early childhood trauma or were born with a chemical imbalance in their brain (aka mental illness) which then manifested itself as explosive behavior during adolescence. Due to this explosive behavior, we were put on medication at an absurdly young age, and forced to go to therapy. The thing is about being a child and being in therapy, however, is the fact that you really don’t understand what is going on. You kind of know why you are there, but not really, because children simply don’t have the same cognitive abilities as adults do. You just sit across the strange person with a clipboard and try to answer questions (that you barely understand) to the best of your ability. Nowadays, they have found ways around that communication barrier and know how to talk to children in a way that they can understand, but this was not the case 20 years ago. So, at 8 years old, I’m prescribed my first anti-depressant; ever since that day I have continued to take medication.

At one point in time I was on so many medications that I could barely keep them straight. When I would hold them in my hand to take them, there were so many pills that I could hardly keep them from spilling over the side of my hand. Fortunately, I am on about half that amount now. Interestingly enough, I am actually starting to get brain function (that I haven’t had in years) back. This includes everything from emotion regulation, to cognitive abilities, to even memory function. It really makes me question if I ever needed to be on medication at all. Perhaps all I needed was a good therapist who specialized in behavior disorders, since behavior disorders almost always stem from childhood trauma. Perhaps they would have seen what was really going on and gotten me the help I so desperately needed. Perhaps I could have avoided the decades of suffering that ensued after.

I could ask questions like that all day, but ultimately I know it won’t change my present nor my future. All I can do now is try to make as many positive life changes as possible and keep moving forward. Each day is a blank slate, and the world is my canvas. All I need to do now is create my masterpiece.