Do you struggle with mental and emotional disabilities? I do. As a 1st through 3rd grader I had my own boys club. I was a budding leader. Entering 4th grade, something really nasty took over my earlier persona. My mind became captured by the scourge of severe dyslexia. My 4th grade class of 31 kids had a high academic level. But I was rock bottom with my best friend Mike. Most days I stayed after school to catch up, what I could not absorb during class time.
I am going to share my life story with disabilities along with answering this question. What if mental illness can be a plus? I went from the 4th grade to the 5th to the 6th to the 7th on public trial. Without my teachers in each grade willing to leave for home far later, I would not have been able to stay on point with my class. I could have easily succumb to a life wasted by drug or alcohol addiction as a fruitless way out of my misery! I was beset by frightful dreams, all with the same result - failing to graduate from high school. But I did graduate from high school and then four years in a popular Michigan college graduating with 2 earned majors in American History and Philosophy This second major was petitioned for and accepted by the Academic Affairs Board in the fall of my senior year.
Immediately after college, I was accepted to grad school in Massachusetts and graduated 3.5 years later in 1975 with a masters degree and married Nancy, a classmate and my best friend. I have enjoyed a 52 year career in a variety of social service fields. But in the Winter of 2002 I experienced career burn-out and clinical depression. To heal, I worked in large Boston, MA city hospitals for two years. The emotional long-term by-product of dyslexia led me in becoming a career co-dependent and in my psychiatrist's opinion in 2003, I was now in the grip of Bipolar 2. For those of you who cannot imagine what that word implies, it's one scary pit. It took me almost 20 years to admit this mental illness to myself.
Mental illness creates all kinds of baggage. What are we to do in making sense of issues and actions that make no sense? Where is the plus in that? Yet, consider Howard Hughes who suffered from a lifetime of OCD while becoming America's first billionaire or Ted Turner, a life-long dyslexic who with that disability created and launched CNN, the first 24-hour television news channel. "How do you not let mental illness control you? "Be in touch with your emotions. Accept you are feeling a certain way, let yourself feel that way and then take action to diminish unhealthy feelings. You can't control that you have mental illness, but you can control how you respond to your symptoms." Feb. 1, 2019 - nami.org
Would I trade even one iota of my life for something safer, more predictable, less confrontive? Not on your life! Why? I can assure you for every negative loss, 3 to 5 pluses were born. Even though I still struggle with these mental illnesses, my life has been very rich. My career employment includes five states, and we've also lived in Singapore and the Philippines from 1979 to1980. My family of five, from 1993 to 2000, enjoyed living in the cosmopolitan city of Halifax, Nova Scotia in Atlantic Canada. As a non-citizen I had to renew my yearly work permit with Revenue Canada and Immigration.
I've come to the conclusion, that God is a fan of the KISS principle, as well as being a phenomenal wordsmith. If your faith walk is Jewish, Christian or mainstream Islam, interaction with God's Word prior to the New Testament is probably familiar to you. Recorded in Psalm 73, verse 26 an individual named Asaph wrote "My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the rock and strength of my heart and my portion forever". That is what I have faced, yet nourished by my walk with God and scriptures like this one. So, if you or a friend struggles with mental illness, try reaching out to God, for you need not allow the sum of your disabilities to define who you are.
All facts in this article have been researched through reputable resources, without plagiarism.
Be Well.
