On Saturday, I compiled all our medical receipts from 2019 including my hospitalizations. It felt good to get everything organized. Once we file our taxes, that chapter in my life will it all be over? Right? Not quite.

Online, I found a blog post addressed to me after my article in November called, “When mental illness doesn’t follow along life’s schedule”. The following comment was called “Psychotic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)” by NooseGirl:

Danei, thank you for this intimate story of what it is like to go through the recovery process after negotiating the challenges of psychosis… When the reality is that breaking from psychosis is an equally disruptive event — all of a sudden, everything you trusted and believed in crumbles into disturbing remnants of delusion. Your universe is flipped upside down and nearly destroyed. It is a cataclysmic experience.

NooseGirl

She goes on to explain that it is similar to someone with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), you have to relearn everything, to look people in the eye, to trust again. At first the analogy shocked me, but now it has started to make sense. The sense of calamity, the constant anxiety, the despair, and the depression. Yes, I experienced that.

Art as Therapy

After my three hospitalizations, my doctor ordered me to take a two-month vacation from everything. All I could do was draw. I spent a lot of my time coloring in adult coloring books. But then I drew the following three pictures freehand with Crayola Markers. I will warn you in advance these pictures were done on lined paper. Until recently, I did not realize much how art has been therapy for me.

Recovery

“Recovery” is me. I even like the fact that the pen is running out of ink. That is how I felt, fragile, insubstantial, and empty.

Rebuilding

In “Rebuilding”, I am becoming more substantial with the green representing new life.

Rebirth

“Rebirth” reminds me of a stained-glass window. There is good, bad, and ugly in it, but together it comes together to make a completed whole. Am I healed in this picture? No. I am just beginning the process of rebirth.

Our Nation

I believe that psychologically, we are all in shock right now. We are reeling from the global pandemic to the current racial divisiveness in this country. We are headed for tumultuous times ahead. Yet, like my crude three pictures, I believe that we will eventually come through this difficult time in our history. So once again, I give you my art as a means of empathy and support for everyone suffering in the midst of this issue.

Let me end with one of my favorite quotes:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Teddy Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena Excerpt from the speech “Citizenship In A Republic” delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on 23 April, 1910

• 

• 

•