Lived Experience Forum

[Mosaic]

Hi @parkBear

Welcome to the Forums and thank you for posting so honestly a bit about your experience. It has opened up a really great conversation about ‘authenticity‘ and what it means to live an authentic life. What an important conversation to have – as I think living authentically and maintaining good mental health really do go hand in hand.

In navigating a life of authenticity, I often ask myself the question “Am I living by my values?” Of course, answering that question first involves ascertaining what exactly my values looked like…. Easier said than done! Especially if you are a bit different from the family and culture you were raised in. Whether people realise it or not, we are all automatically ‘born into’ a set or morals/standards/values that may or may not work for us. It is then up to us to critically consider those values for ourselves, and adjust accordingly as we grow into adulthood.

A few years ago I really sat back and had a good hard think about my assumed values (the ones I was born into) and I was actually quite shocked to realise I was perfectly entitled to reconsider a few things! I genuinely believe this has led me towards a more authentic version of myself, and my mental health is certainly better off for it.

Now that I have a better sense of my own personal values, whenever I am considering my response to a new situation or decision I am facing… I always come back to that question… “Would this be living by my values?” For me, it has been my go-to guide in navigating a life of authenticity.

I wonder @parkBear has authenticity been a journey for you too?

Also @Former-Member @Appleblossom @BamBam @MoonGal @Jacques @Former-Member @Mazarita and others feel free to jump in and share some more of your thoughts too.

[parkBear]

@Mosaic Yeah it definitely has been a journey for me; and one which I started consciously in my first year of university. That period of time, in the first years of 'adulthood', is significant for many people I would imagine, as they search for identity and a purpose, and whatever values and sense of self they developed in childhood is challenged by the 'real world'.

For me it led to my first mental health crisis, my first breakdown and hospitalisation. In a way I am glad that I went through it. There was obviously a schism  between the path I was on and my identity that needed to be dealt with in some way. I only wish I had better professionals or a mentor to guide me through that journey. Perhaps many MH crisis's are a result of that schism between the way we act, or think that we have to act, and the way we see ourselves.

@MoonGal do you feel at your most honest  and uncensored in your poetry and art? I sometimes wish I could just quote my poems and lyrics in my conversations, when people ask who I am. I wish I could have dumped my notebooks full of words in front of my therapists and said 'this is what is going on inside my head'

I personally have no concerns about my anonymity, but understand it can be of concern for others. However I do know that my activist nature, my compassion, is both a strength and a weakness in regards to my mental health. It gives me a knowledge that I do not have to be passive when I see injustice and destruction around me, but it also opens me up to be more of a witness to that injustice and destruction. Few things in my life have been more heartbreaking than watching forests that had become my home being cut down before my eyes. Nothing has made me more angry and despairing than the conversations and letters I have exchanged with refugees in detention centres. But it does give me hope that there are brave and dedicated people still working and fighting, even if our victories are too few.

I shall be sticking around for the time being, but thank you and @Appleblossom for your concern

[BamBam]

@parkBear Thanks for your post. I also think mental health issues can be a correction between our values and the larger world. I went through university and a graduate job somewhat unchallenged as I was good at what I did. It's only the past five years or so that I was forced to identify with what my family and community says is true, and that it is different to the previous reality.

At first it led to distress, but more recently has generated great acceptance and gratitude. I think we are always adjusting and learning and can even cheat along the way by choosing the opposite emotion to what we would otherwise go for. I hope this adds to your knowledge banks a bit.

[MoonGal]

@parkBear, oh yes, I am truly myself when I write and create. I wrote a poem about Bi Polar as my first post here on the forums.... It was the first time I had captured in poetry (purposefully) life as a lunatic*. (A Poem: On living with bi-polar affective disorder)

I wrote reams of poetry from when I was in my late childhood/early teens, it certainly is my preferred medium of expression. Word Craft is powerful. A few years ago I bought a shredder and shredded everything I had ever written in my journals and poetry books, 40+ years of madness gone. I would have preferred to have burned them, but you know, fire restrictions, climate change and the bonfire might well have brought the authorities a knockin'.

My writing certainly does open up pathways into my state of being in a way that the stilted, protected conversations I have had (ad naseum) with counsellors and MI professionals haven't. Not that they have all been unhelpful, rather I was just very good at playing the 'game' and it really wasn't until the past few years that I got real with them. I have found CBT combined with ACT therapies both useful, but they built on top of a lifetime of incremental learning and change brought about by an almost compulsive desire to figure out what the hell was wrong with me and to live the best I could with whatever was presenting 'this time'. When I have psychotic episodes, (few and far between) I speak, think and am compulsed to write poetry. That 'work' is usually terribly bone deep and only others who have lived life hard 'get it".

The loss of the forests, oceans, wildlife brings me undone, My rage and hurt-on-behalf-of is immense. Harm to animals - wild or "domesticated", incarcerating kids (on refugees... Nauru, or in gaols across the outback with aboriginal kids) - at times I feel like the flesh has been scrapped off of my being and feel so raw. I get very down, fall into deep depression when I let all the world's ills (read anthropogenic abuses and pillaging) pile up on me. I feel hopeless and helpless and powerless and deeply - both angry and grief stricken - at the same time. As an activist I always try to step up to hope and use anger as an e-motion towards change, I try to en-courage others towards self-determination, to undo the socialisation and let go of the ways that cause harm to ourselves and 'others'  - but yes, i agree that compassion, empathy openess to 'other' and understanding we (we = all beings = including trees, coral reefs... LIFE) are all the same. Earthlings. 

There ARE many good people doing good work, and it is heartening, just so much to be done and apathy & disregard, carelessness and the 'Kardashian Kulture' in others makes my blood boil. I want to scream WAKE UP.

As @BamBam said "I also think mental health issues can be a correction between our values and the larger world. " I reckon that is so true, we have this one life, and struggle in it, I used to call myself 'the canary in the coal mine' because I felt at one time that I was the only one seeing the hidden/false layers (the 'gases' in a mine sense) that others could not see/smell/hear. I don't mean in a deluded sense - more - as a perceptive and sensistive being - I SAW all of the troubes in the world and others would always tell me "You think too much". Social media has helped me enormously to connect with others who also 'think too much' and really care.

Anyways, I have in the past done my bit, and at the moment have to have put all of it down for health's sake, I will no doubt pick it up again at some stage, perhaps wiser in how to be effective and not be brought so undone  by it. 

Glad you are gonna stick around for now. x

* Lunatic used in an affectionate way towards myself.