My Recovery

I first realized that there was something actually wrong when I was twenty-six. I was desperately, profoundly depressed, and somehow, I managed to get to the doctor and talk to him about it. He put me on anti-depressants, which relieved the symptoms, but didn't fix the underlying problems.

When I was about thirty, I was working at a place that treated its employees in a dysfunctional way, and it started reminding me on some level of my childhood/family. Stress and other pressures started to build, I was laid off along with hundreds of other people. And then my grandmother (the only person in my childhood who ever loved me just for myself and just as I was) died, and the floodgates were not only opened, they were destroyed in the ensuing flood of despair, rage, fear, and other negative emotions.

To sum it up, I had a breakdown that began the year I turned thirty (1994). It didn't happen on a weekend, as most people seem to think these things work. I didn't "have a breakdown" and then get back to work in a couple of weeks. Nope. For years, I went slowly more and more crazy and deeper and deeper into delusion and mental illness, until I was dangling off the edge of sanity, actively suicidal, and profundly sick in many ways.

My marriage was a contributing factor in my illness. It was abusive, and that made it about a hundred times worse than it should have been, and probably prolonged my recovery. My parents didn't want to know me, didn't want to talk to me, didn't want to deal with me. Basically, my life ended at some point. Not my biological life (although I did attempt suicide during this period), but "life as I knew it". I lost everything, absolutely everything. I managed to hang on to a few material things, but other than that, I really just lost it all.

In late 1996, I was admitted to the psychiatric ward at a local hospital, very much against my will. That wasn't quite the low point, though. That came later, in about August of 1997, when I was again at the hospital, a quivering, quaking, sobbing wreck, unable to stop crying no matter what I did, suffering a blistering headache from all the crying, rocking back and forth while wrapped in a blanket.

By the end of 1997, I was mercifully divorced from my abusive ex and by some miracle I had actually managed to get a job, and things started getting better. They've been getting better ever since, but it's always like climbing a mountain. It's hard work. Now and then you get to a place where you can rest and enjoy the view, but then there are periods of intense work again.

By early 1998, I was off all medications. By mid-1998, I had become a valued employee at my workplace (an internet service provider) and started my own part-time business. In late 1998, I legally changed my name. By early 1999, I had moved to Australia to marry the one friend who was always 100% there for me throughout my lengthy and painful recovery. My life is good, much better than I would have ever imagined or hoped for.

Basically, I underwent a complete transformation, and in order to do that, I had to undergo a complete deconstruction. Piece by piece, I worked through memory after memory, looked at issue after issue, and slowly I put aside old issues and put down unnecessary baggage, while rebuilding myself into someone new, different, and infinitely better. I think of it as a metamorphosis.

The period of recovery was profoundly painful and extremely difficult. I'm not kidding here, folks. I'm able to use a calm "tone of voice" now, but it was horrific, it really was. I often wondered if I was actually going to survive, and I don't mean physically (although there were times with my abusive ex that I wondered if he might finally act on his rage and kill me), but rather I wondered if I would survive with my "soul" intact.

As it happens, the "me" I used to be did die, in the same way that a caterpillar "dies" on its way to becoming a butterfly...