"You're hurting ME and MY family."

Said by my biological dad, after I told my therapist about a fight my family had that caused me to have a panic attack. 

I have been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, anxiety, body dysmorphic disorder, and major depressive disorder.

Through years of family and individual therapy, my therapists and psychiatrists have concluded that my eating disorder, anxiety and depression were partly caused by my family dynamic. Fighting, lashing out, aggressiveness, hostility, hatred and anger filled my house throughout my childhood. Or this is how I perceived it.

In 2014 my dad lashed out at me, saying that I was hurting HIS, not OUR, family, by making up these stories about how painful it was for him to live through this. According to him, I've overdramatized my family's problems for attention, and I lie to my therapists and psychiatrists. I was making HIS family seem like monsters, and ME as the poor little victim.

I haven't felt part of the family since he said those things. I've been the outcast. The insane one. The crazy one. My parents love me, our family dynamic is better now, but because of that comment I've truly come to the realization that my parents' support through my recovery is all an illusion.

They are ashamed of me and wish I were different.

Expectation.

My husband left me when I was in my first year of graduate school.

I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder years before that, and I was so heartbroken that I knew I was going to break the f*** down, I knew I couldn't make it as an academic, that a PhD program was no place for my broken ass.

I tried to tell my adviser that I was going to drop out. He just looked at me confusedly and said "No you won't. You can take time off to rest and heal some if you need, and everything will be right here when you're feeling well again."

WHEN you are feeling well again. Not IF. 

With a mental illness/disability label attached to your identity, the expectation is that you will suffer and be less capable as others of both enjoying life and thriving in it. This expectation may be realistic and may be supported by diagnostic criteria or your own past experience.

But when the world has low expectations for you, you can end up with low expectations for yourself, and therefore meet those expectations.

He expected me to surmount what I was facing, and I will never forget the strength that gave me.

Challenge the holes your identity categories have pigeoned you into.

"Are you manic?"

A competitive high school acquaintance asked me this very bluntly, and in a very cutting way.

It was one of the first times I realized that my depression was apparent on the outside.

These words still echo in my head any time I hit a really high high, or a really low low.

I don't even think she'd remember asking me that, but it's one of the cruelest things anyone has ever said to me.