Every (Wo)man Can Be an Island

Forgive the kitschiness of my title.

I am aware that, technically, there’s no such thing as a person who is an island. Even the most disconnected person has a sliver of contact with the outside world. One has to buy food and so forth.

If you pay attention to my blog, though, you’ll notice I haven’t been around much. For months, posting only sporadically. I have been isolating, you see.

I have spent as much time as possible holing up with myself. Oftentimes I feel irritable when people are around me; I just want them to leave me alone.

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February 2013: Mental Health and Life Paths

For this month’s Let’s Talk About topic, I think it would be interesting to discuss how mental health has influenced the roads we’ve traveled in life.

As an example, I’ll narrate a brief version of my life journey, a journey I’ve discussed in much more detail on my personal blog.

For most of my life, I ignored my mental health issues and got along fine, doing well up through college.

A Quandary: Mental Illness, Public Safety

Due to quite a few recent tragedies, debates about mental illness have been prominent in the public eye. Perhaps they aren’t as visible as, say, gun control laws or Lance Armstrong’s shadiness, but they have quite a presence.

The debate is couched in terms that express “concern” for people who are mentally ill, and no doubt many commentators do feel concerned about people with mental illness.

On This Day

Birthdays are often triggering affairs for me, and, from what I’ve read on others’ blogs, I’m not alone.

My life is littered with many unfortunate birthdays. When I was a child, I had the obligatory sorts of parties. There were play places. A skating rink, even though I could barely skate (and I can’t skate now), so I hugged the wall.

These were awkward affairs. None of the people there were really my friends–just classmates.

En Garde!

Several things have inspired the ideas behind this post. A realization I had when I read Ruby’s post “Behind the Curtain” sparked an idea. DeeDee’s post about compartmentalization has jumpstarted my thinking gears. Finally, there are just my own thoughts of late . . . I think I can synthesize all of these issues, and that’s what I’m going to try to do with this post.

After I read Ruby’s post and her reply to my comment, it occurred to me that I let my mental health issues define me simply by focusing on hiding them.

The Blogging Community

The more I regularly blog, the more grateful I am for the mental health blogging community.

Some of the issues I deal with have become more bearable now that I blog about them. On my blog, I’ve mentioned before that I used to visit a depression forum. I think the forum visits helped me endure through the big break. After a while, though, the forum jumped the shark for me, or I jumped the shark for the forum. I popped into the forum occasionally for a bit. I thought that I should help people out as much as I’d been helped there.

Interactions with Mental Health Professionals

This topic stems from an idea that I had in relation to the post Be Your Own Advocate.

It’s something I occasionally allude to on my personal blog and in my comments on others’ blogs. Over the last two and a half years (has it really only been that long?), I’ve learned a lot about how to compose myself when discussing matters with other mental health professionals.

First, let’s go over my successive period of interactions with mental health professionals.

Introversion and Mental Health

This is a topic that somewhat relates to October 2011’s discussion topic about mental health versus personality. I hope too much of this won’t overlap with what’s already been said. But hey, that topic happened before I became a part of Canvas, so I didn’t get to say my piece then. This topic has been revolving in my mind for weeks, but my thoughts never seem to crystallize into anything solid. Let’s see where I go here.

In the thread for the above topic, there’s a link to a Myers-Brigg type indicator. I took it, and my results don’t surprise me.