A personal essay by Megan R., DBSA Young Adult Council Member
Can you recall a time when you were stuck in a spiral of shame, not knowing if you were going to make it out on the other side? You have acted unlike yourself, and it brings you to a long period of haze—half there, half in a state of zombie-like sleep. Those of us with chronic mood disorders know this feeling all too well. It is a sensation where it feels like physical pain to your body. You can’t quite figure out what is happening, but you know that all the factors in your life led you to this. Maybe you hurt someone, or have said something wrong, or created ongoing dysfunction in your life. When these moments happened to me, it was the birth of a battle—where I fell all the way to the bottom of the earth, and climbed up like a warrior on fire.
When you have an unmanaged mood disorder, this can happen, and there is little talk about it. Often, it is at this point when people who are able to have a support system and proper care get an educated understanding of their illness, and a treatment plan moving forward. However, there are underserved individuals out there without proper resources living in feelings of despair, stuck in a cycle of illness without support due to inequity. Many people say the word “recovery,” but I believe it is a continuous management of the self to be able to live a life worth living. There is a constant pull of tension between, “I did this, therefore I’m a bad person” and “I didn’t know better. I wasn’t myself.” A safe support system can plunge you forward to a more stabilized state—your family, friends, a therapist, even an animal. It is the people that know the depths of your soul, and having them is half the road to forgiveness.
There is no point in time where you “reach” forgiveness. It is not a checkpoint. Overbearing feelings of guilt and remorse still return like jarring memories from a distant past. The further you get from the guilt, the more it will shock you when it creeps up. Your brain will say; “but I thought we got past this.” There is a quick realization that you have to fight your mind not to sink deeper into the hellish depths of shame. Each time it returns, you make a choice. It is at this point that your warrior-like senses come into control. You speak to your mind and make the choice, just like the last time. “We did get past this; and we are choosing to forgive, again and again.”
The guarantee of life is that you will hurt someone again, and someone will hurt you. In a perfect world, all of the ones we hurt would forgive us and we would forgive them. But we must remember that pain exists, and pain is an antonym of love. We are told on social media to love ourselves, but not the bone-chillingly ugly, dark side. If you begin to love that side, you begin to understand why it is there, and that it comes from the pain within.
Forgiving myself led me to the full openness of life. It made me want to forgive others. It made me open my eyes and see that each of us is full of good and bad, but no person is good or bad. We just “are.”
