i think i might be getting better

i take an array of medications right now. i recently started a medication called aripiprazole, an antipsychotic medicine for my intrusive thoughts and mood swings.

that's a scary word, antipsychotic. definitely one of the darker parts of the hollywood dilemma is that when they run out of ideas, they use mental illness as a motive for their villian. i wish mental illnesses were not reduced down to plot points and causes for paranoia in our everyday life, where we fear some psychopath come into our house and chop us into bits.

yet psychosis is a real illness, as is psychopathy, and sociopathy, and schizophrenia. people who have these conditions need support and medication and therapy to help, not villainization. they, like me, simply have the unfortunate luck to possess a brain with altered chemistry, causing them deep suffering.

but we do love a good villain. we adore a scapegoat, one person to blame when all goes wrong. but more often than not, the person who we'd blame is simply a product of the system we played a part in designing.

• we design a country that cares nothing for the body, so we get a large number of people who consider a staggering death toll to COVID acceptable.

• we design a system that cares nothing for nature, so we get a country happily ready to drill for oil and build walls over sacred lands.

• we force slave labor to build us a country AND we design a policing and prison system to profit off of Black and Brown labor AND we refuse to punish those who kill them indiscriminately, so it should not surprise us in the slightest that the Black community cries out in protest for abolition.

i also have a villain of my own. i call it the mean voice™ and it's been in my brain for a while. i think it started around the time my other PTSD symptoms showed up. 

the mean voice tells me how terrible i am at everything. it tells me how bleak my future looks. it tells me other awful things. (i may talk about them in another blog post with a trigger warning, but for now, just sharing that the mean voice exists is enough.) i want the mean voice to go away forever.

and it's definitely too early to tell, but i think it might be starting to. i began taking that antipsychotic maybe two weeks ago and the mean voice has been AWOL since. i just want to shout from the rooftops with joy, but i'm also afraid of celebrating too soon. but the funny thing is, reader, i feel normal.  

those who have dealt with mental illness might be able to relate with me on this. most of the last year, i've felt crazy. i've felt like something was wrong in my brain and i couldn't fix it and it was maddening and now with just 2 milligrams of aripiprazole a day i feel normal? of course i have to celebrate that even if only for a few days.

remember that thing i was saying about the villain though? there is a system in my head that enables the mean voice to have its way far too often. the mean voice isn't the sole proprietor of wrong thoughts in my head, or of the poor self esteem that leads me to believe the terrible things it says to me.

it's helpful for me to share this humanity with you, reader. perhaps your humanness is accentuated in a different way than mine. i have found that in feeling normal for a few weeks, i now have space to process a lot more of my emotions and to think about their impact. i've had the chance to think about and plan towards working again someday in the near-to-mid future, even considering what career i might want to go into.

i've been thinking about it, and i believe hope is a system too. maybe we could change a lot of things by preemptively deciding to build our systems of the future off of equity and kindness. i think we should give it a try and see how it goes.