hlks's Journal

I found this on the internet. I had accidentally stumbled across it (if you know what the stumble button is you know it's highly addictive) and as I read it it echoed thoughts I had had before. I'll let you read the first third or so of the article which follows:

"

My Great Grandmother was born in 1904 and immigrated to America with her family shortly thereafter. When she turned 12, her Mother forced her to drop out of school and work twelve hours a day in a tire factory so the family could pay the bills. When she was 17, her family pressured her to marry a man she didn’t love in order to gain financial security. Shortly after she said ‘I do,’ my Grandmother came to her senses and demanded a divorce.

Back then, divorce wasn’t as common as it is now and her demand caused a lot of controversy in her community. No one could understand why a woman wouldn’t want to be with the nice man who wanted to provide for her and many dubbed her a strumpet. But my Grandmother stood her ground and dissolved her marriage. However, upon returning home, her family had decided in her absence that she must be crazy. Literally. They had her forcibly committed to a mental institution.

Mental institutions were not the nice, clean, white places of healing they are today. Instead, they were filled to the brim with incompetent doctors who made snap diagnoses and ordered experimental shock treatments. Patients often spent hours strapped down in beds and force fed drugs that made them feel even worse. Some of them were raped, beaten, or otherwise abused. After all, they were crazy. Who would believe them?

My Grandmother told me all of this for the first time shortly after my 19th birthday. I had recently found out something pretty shocking about my past (Another story for another day, don’t worry) and I went to her for confirmation because there wasn’t anyone else I could trust to tell me the truth. She did confirm what I had learned and apologized for her part in it. Destroyed by the news, I confessed to her that I was thinking about going into therapy. My desire for a Doctor to ‘fix me’ is what inspired her story.

When she was finished, she said to me, “All the time I spent in that hellhole, people were constantly trying to convince me that I felt sad because there was something wrong with my brain. But do you want to know what I really learned?”

I leaned in closer, absolutely absorbed by the image of my tough Grandmother who raised her children, nurtured her (Second!) marriage, and was one of the first successful business women of her era spending time in a mental institution. “What Grandma?” I breathlessly inquired.

“I learned that I wasn’t sad because there was something wrong with my brain. I learned that I was sad because my life sucked.”"

Because my life sucked. Yep, those are pretty much my sentiments. Don't get me wrong, I'm not dismissing my bipolar disorder in the least as it effects and infect every aspect of my life. But one thing that seems to be more prevasive and constant in my life is that it just really sucks. I truly believe that if my life did not suck I could be stable with support from a loving family and a bit of therapy. I truly believe I could manage without medication, especially since my hallucinations do not interfere with my life. 

90% of the time if I'm depressed, I have something to be depressed about and it's usually a damn good reason. This was especially infuriating and endlessly devastating when my husband was cheating on me and each time I became suicidal, depressed, angry, or otherwise emotional then the excuse was "it's just the bipolar" as my actual feelings were dismissed completely.. as if I had no actual feelings to begin with but simply something wrong with me. How about the fact that I was depressed because my husband was sleeping with another woman? Not only callously sleeping with this whore, but also becoming progressively more abusive while she was also progressively  more abusive? Because that's no reason to be upset in the slightest. 

At least I know I'm not the only one who seems to view thinks like this. If you're sad or angry, chances are, you have a good reason, and don't let anyone tell you your brain is just broken.. we're human and we're meant to have feelings.. the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

Please read the rest of the blog here: