Well, I’ve been brooding over how to write this post for awhile, as Thanksgiving was a bit of an unanticipated setback for me. This past six months or so, I’ve been making great strides in learning to have joy and love and acceptance in my life, and I have been enjoying life and feeling great peace and healing taking place day to day. As a friend put it, I’ve really been “blossoming” as a person, coming out from a long seven years of tribulation, emerging from under the burden of the mental illness and the voices. 

I wasn’t prepared for how being with family would reawaken old hurts, old self-perceptions, and old thought patterns, many familiar from when I was first diagnosed, and very ill. I felt like all the progress I have made as a person learning to live with a mental illness was rolled back to the seven years ago when the voices first started, and my world changed rather suddenly and quite entirely. I couldn’t help but feel at the Thanksgiving table that I was a failure in my family’s eyes. No one asked me how life was or what I was doing with myself currently, which I can understand, as that is an uncertain topic, but I still felt awkward and left out. I couldn’t help seeing the vast difference between my family’s perception of me now, as compared to Thanksgivings not so long ago when I was a successful student at Harvard College, involved in many extracurriculars and entirely enjoying my academic studies — active, vivacious, on top of the world. I kept thinking how they must feel pity for me. I’m on disability, not working, and most painfully, I could think of almost nothing all day to contribute to the light-hearted table conversations. It was difficult. I had to leave the table, and went to the guest bedroom to staunch the floodwaters of tears that threatened to be unloosed at any moment.

Both my therapist and my psychiatrist have really come through for me on this issue of feeling inadequate or incapable. Both have stated very strongly that I don’t need to be comparing myself to how I was in the past, before my illness, or to what others may expect of me, or to harbor unrealistic standards for myself. Both pointed out that I need to accept myself as I am, where I am at, as someone perfectly adequate and capable although someone living with the limitations of a genetic illness.

The good news is that I was so very ready to hear these sentiments from my care providers. I’m ready to be at peace with myself, to accept myself as I am, to feel accepted and loved by others such as my family for who I am, although that may be drastically different the past. I’m not upset with my family — many of them don’t understand my situation, my mental illness, what I’ve been through — they just haven’t had the exposure to those issues, and haven’t been so much a part of my life that they have learned by being around me. I don’t know what they think of me. It’s hard because some family members seem afraid to have a conversation with me about it. They’re afraid of me, they don’t know what to say or how to approach me, and I can understand that as a normal human response, but it still just makes me want to cry, for myself, and for all of us.