The Next Chapter

Sipping my morning coffee this Good Friday morning watching a cardinal pair in our crabapple tree, I can’t help but want to pinch myself because after 16 years, today does actually feel good. Last night, I shared with my NAMI Brown County tribe that I accepted the position as Executive Director of NAMI NKY. As is rightly so, they have asked that I formally step down as president for NAMI Brown County. Earlier in the week, I shared my exciting news with Deanna Vietze, Executive Director of the Brown County Board of Addiction Services. Her “congratulations” email buoyed my expectations for a smooth transition into the next chapter for myself and NAMI Brown County.
Sixteen years ago, on my birthday I was on the psych ward: this birthday I will be starting my new job starting out part-time with the potential to be full-time. As a friend said to me recently, “Your journey, Danei, has been nothing short of miraculous.” I couldn’t agree more.
Coming from a family of preachers and teachers, faith has always played a pivotal role in shaping my identity. That faith in God through the act of praying saved my life in psychosis and allowed me to retain my strong sense of identity after all I lived through. Don’t get me wrong, the last 16 years have been brutal. As my first psychologist said, having a nervous breakdown or more accurately called a “psychotic break”, is like having a house with a cracked foundation with a pit underneath it. When your psychological house shatters, it falls into a thousand pieces onto the floor of that pit.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness or (NAMI) was a lifesaver for me, but it took me seven years to find NAMI after my break. Through the NAMI classes and support groups I learned that I was not alone and that mental illnesses are diseases of the brain. Writing has simply been good therapy as I worked through the grief process of accepting myself with a mental illness as well as the more than a decade I call “Medical Russian Roulette” to get my medications right for my unique body chemistry. In my rage at the disease, I threw out everything I believed and started over from scratch. Those were long, hard, confusing years, even after I found NAMI. Due to COVID, we have all had a taste of the isolation, loneliness, and depression that comes with a mental illness diagnosis. I am pleased to report that our society is now more receptive to allowing people to talk about their mental health struggles than when I was originally diagnosed in 2008. NAMI has been at the forefront of combating mental illness ignorance and stigma through research, education, and group wisdom we share based on our lived experience.
As Patrick Kennedy and many others have also communicated, we still have lots of work to do before mental illness is treated with the same medical parity of other diseases. The fact that that I will be returning to work with a board that values me, and my lived experience is something our culture told me wasn’t possible 16 years ago. When I began writing openly about my mental illness struggles it was considered “career suicide”. For me, it was the only clear path back to sanity. As Brene’ Brown in her book, Atlas of the Heart states:
“Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness. Having access to the right words can open up entire universes…Language shows us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.”
I am profoundly grateful that I continued to fight to put the thousand pieces of my life back together. “Praise God, we made it to here,” I say as I kiss my husband thank you for my morning coffee at our beloved Edelen Acres.