mental-illness

This is glorious!' I cried, and then i looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said 'Yes', without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.

Mental illness" is among the most stigmatized of categories.' People are ashamed of being mentally ill. They fear disclosing their condition to their friends and confidants-and certainly to their employers.

When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker__ but as survivors. Survivors who don__ get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like.

Being the people we are, and feeling the way that we do, getting excited about going somewhere new can be terrifying. Of course it is, I get it! But if you don__ travel, you__l regret it. Your soul will forever be empty.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Though my mental illness is more likened to a big, nasty green monster than something heart-wrenchingly beautiful, I think I have learned many wonderful lessons from my many afflictions.

Dropping in and out of your own life (for psychotic breaks, or treatment in a hospital) isn__ like getting off a train at one stop and later getting back on at another. Even if you can get back on (and the odds are not in your favor), you__e lonely there. The people you boarded with originally are far, far ahead of you, and now you__e stuck playing catch-up.

And when I realized you had secrets too, I was glad. I thought we could be honest with each other. That we could finally rid ourselves of all the clutter from our past. Not our possessions, but the stuff we carry around inside our heads. Because that's what I've realized, living in One Folgate Street. You can make your surroundings as polished and empty as you like. But it doesn't really matter if you're still messed up inside. And that's all anyone's looking for really, isn't it? Someone to take care of the mess inside our heads?

He was fucking sad. That's it. That's the point. He knows life is never going to get any different for him. That there's no fixing him. It's always going to be the same monotonous depressing bullshit. Boring, sad, boring, sad. He just wants it to be over.

She can__ worry. She can__ __ix._ She can__ love.

Can you revive wilted tulips?

As I accept the flowers, I release my grip on the balloons, and they bounce gently against the ceiling the way they did before__overing, annoyed, frustrated, contained by the ceiling and disappointed by the limits of life.

Just as I__ about to continue walking along the shoreline, the left third of the iceberg breaks off suddenly and crashes violently, like a high-rise apartment building imploding in the heart of the city. Tears roll down my face uncontrollably as I watch the two distinct halves of the iceberg drift further and further apart from each other. It__ devastating to watch something that seems so strong and unbreakable crumble in an instant. Even more devastating is the feeling that there__ nothing I can do about it.

For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.

The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.

I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.

The truth will set you free, they say, but believe me, nothing will set you free.

I will be stronger than my sadness.