Mental Illness

To go through life with a mind or emotions that are not always your own or what you want them to be at any given moment. When every day can be a struggle even if you are receiving treatment. Being medicated and still it is all you can do to get out of bed and go to work. The daily fight to remember to take your medicine, to do your job, to keep focused on what matters most in your life.
People may look at you and see nothing wrong, mental illness as with many other health problems lack those glaring, visibly signs that society wants to see. Society distrusts what they don’t understand and when it comes to mental illness understanding is in short supply. Then society has seen fit to attach stigmas to mental illness that drive some to self medicate or deny themselves the help they so desperately need. People can be cruel intentionally or not; doesn’t make a difference, the pain we can inflict upon others is astounding.
Imagine for a moment what it is like to only be able to mourn the passing of your father a few moments at a time across the course of a year and a half. Being unable to deal with the pain because the medication that keeps you functioning, keeps your emotions on an even keel, keeps the depression in check and the anger on a leash; doesn’t afford you the time you need. That is the price of mental illness that I pay; untreated and I doubt at this point I could even hold down a job, properly controlled sometimes I have to wait for the moments when my emotions want to be free.
I really hope that one day the stigma of mental illness will go away and people will treat it just as they do any other illness. I also hope that as science and medicine advances we will one day be better able to understand and diagnose the brain so that others might never have to experience this particular disconnect between mind and emotion.