Stigmatic World

It has been the greatest journey of my life to date. It has been terrible, it has been wonderful, it has been everything in between. There are feelings that I will never forget, there will be some that I need to let go of for my own sanity. But in all of this, there are those memories that I will never let be extracted from my mind and soul. I met so many people. Not only did I meet these people, I visited their souls, their fears, their happiness, their beauty, their humanity. Each of these people hold a special place in my heart, because they were the brave ones. The ones who went not around the thick jungle of emotion, but straight through. The hardest way to go. The way where no feeling is spent. They felt them all to the highest intensity. They sat in their bodies and watched almost from afar their souls being eaten alive. Being taken over by numerous effects of their own brains. Their own minds turning on them. Their own bodies at times they could not control. The sorrow we all felt, and that we sometimes continue to feel, is what has made us who we are. It has shaped us into the human beings you now see standing before you. We have worried, and completely feared the stigma. What will our friends think now? How will I get a job? What will the rest of the world think now? That I'm broken? That I'm just a speck on the map? A fly on their windshield? Who will stop loving me now? Who? When? Why? How? 
  All of these things speed through the unquiet minds of someone with a mental illness. You are probably asking yourself what most ask. How will they ever function in the real world. Where will we put them all? Can't they just live in controlled homes? We don't want them shooting in our schools! We don't want them roaming the streets! There is no hope for them! They are lost souls now! God take them from this earth, as they are "the broken ones". Don't deny it. Each and every one of you has had some sort of stigma against the mentally ill. The homeless man standing on the side of the street. The woman frantically walking down the street screaming to nothing but the air. 
  But let me tell you something. These "undesirables" are the ones who once had a mind. They were born. They played as children. They had people who loved them. And then their disease developed, and they were given no chance at life. We as a world allowed them to slip through the cracks. To be thrown away. They weren't taken to a safe place where someone would say, "I care about you, and I'm going to help you now". They didn't have anyone to give them a bed to sleep in. Hope to be given. A chance at a healthy mind. No health insurance. No medication to balance them out. They are feared. Don't tell me you haven't crossed the street hundreds of times to avoid them. Thinking that they are the zombies of our time. Don't go that way. Lock your doors when you pull up to someone holding a sign. Yadda yadda yadda!
  Now let me tell you something else. These people, from all walks of life, these people I have spent so much time with in and out of the hospital, they are the most beautiful people I have ever met in the entirety of my life. They shake off the shame, and show their scars, they show their hurt. They share things with you within minutes of meeting you that you would normally only tell your best friend. You hug, you cry, you hold each other up in the scariest times. They are human. They laugh, they cry, they get angry, they watch movies, they makes jokes, they create relationships, they play games, they dance, they hold out hope. And all the while this is happening, you don't realize that you are making friends for life, all because you just get it. You can look at one another and just know what it feels like to be one of them. Based off of what your mind is doing to you. Others don't understand the terror that "these people" go through. The only way you know it is if you've lived it. The amount of strength it takes to go through hell. The pain. All of it. The numerous people whom I now call my dearest friends, their strength is limitless. They are everything that is beautiful. They are everything that is sorrow. They are everything that is fear. They are everything that is bounty and success. They are the brave ones. The ones dealing with the pain. Not the ones hiding it. To reach out and ask for help. That is everything. That is the hardest thing you have to do. To admit that you are too weak to help yourself.  To seek that help. To admit yourself into that hospital.
  But what happens after time? After all of that hurt, regret, shame, misery? You get it right. You feel alive again. But this time you feel more alive, like you are being born for the first time. You take nothing for granted. You stop to literally smell the flowers. You don't care as much what people say. Because you know your own truth. You know how long you had to sit with all of those evil feelings. You know what it took to sit in your own body and not go completely "nuts". You know what you are capable now. I didn't let it phase me when a radio talk show host said, "Claire Danes plays a crazy person really well in the new show Homeland". Because I know he has no idea what he's talking about. He has NO IDEA. Otherwise he wouldn't have said those hurtful words. If he understood that a mental illness is like having cancer, or diabetes, that its not something you asked for, and that it is a legitimate medical condition, maybe, just maybe he wouldn't have said what he did.
   To those I have met along this journey, I love you. With all of my heart, my body, mind and soul. You are my heroes. You are the heroes of the world. Because you have overcome the hardest thing there is to overcome. Yourself. We are warriors of pain. We are the warriors of our time. This life is a beautiful life, and our wisdom and richness will exceed our expectations. I would not take back any of the hurt, no part of these long six months, not for anything. Because look at me now! I am a pain soldier. And in return, I see the beauty in ever little thing. All I need to do is look. I am not ashamed to tell people what I have, because I know that it does not make me who I am. I am not my disorder. I am Laney. Anyone who judges me and doesn't get to know me because they know I have a disorder, well they weren't meant to be in my life in the first place. And who would want them? Hello life. Here I am.