Journeying to Mental Health: The Long, Slow, Expensive Way

Because of my experiences, I lacked respect for authority that kept my peers silent, and I was full of fight.

I might be a trained whistleblower.

Whistleblowers have a hard time staying employed in the brutal, corrupt, immoral and unethical world called business.

I’m tired of being the one who gets undercut, stabbed in the back, expected to carry work-shy colleagues, and otherwise victimized, whether that is as a customer, employee, or investor. Those stories, and the different perspective I have, are over at www.practicalperseverance.com.

Here is all about the repercussions of that shit having rained down on you. Don’t take it personally – it’s just business. But it is personal when it’s our person that’s involved.

While I believe there is no need for that, and offer an alternative approach, I’m only hitting red lights in that community. It always was incredibly difficult to find a business person ready, willing, and able to admit they could do better and want to know the simplest way. Usually, they have bulletproof egos that make them think they are so perfect the problem is definitely yours.

Yes, I even had someone get me on the phone to explain why their website made me believe they went under about two years ago. You don’t need me to explain – You need to defend yourself and try to change my opinion about you. Bully.

Where do my skills belong then?

Not in business, maybe in mental health. The people who want help, because it sucks when you live with an anvil on your chest, making everything so hard, but no one can see it.

Invisible pain, like the last of my periods before white-knuckling it into menopause. It makes you want to cause yourself visible pain, just so people will notice you hurting.

Seemingly Trivial Violations

My grandfather had been the kindest person I knew. This seemingly trivial violation should have been easy to drown under the rest of my experience with him, but in truth it left me in absolute fear, because it made me feel that anyone can turn on you at any moment. I felt permanently vulnerable and exposed.

People told me that he’d had a stroke and that people behave differently after one. With that explanation, I was supposed to be able to shrug it off, like I should not care that I endured physical contact that I did not want.

But I couldn’t. I dove into alcohol and sex, since I wasn’t supposed to care about my body anyway. It’s for everyone else, don’t you know. I was slipping away, and it would be years before I got the interventions I needed.

Why didn’t the data lead me there? What’s the point of developing something like the ACE, knowing that the higher the score, the slimmer the possibility of staying alive, and that a mere score of 2 predicts drug and addiction problems?

Where was the intervention? At three, I was already at three.

I didn’t find therapy until forty years later, paid for through my corporate benefits, discovered because I’d finally decided that it would be better to be dead.

It was a brutal few decades. I have much to say about them.

As someone who can figure out pretty quickly how to help a business do it faster, better, and cheaper, why can’t I apply those skills to my mental health journey?

Businesses may not be interested in my pursuit of now, perfect, and free, but in my pursuit of mental health; why not have it now, perfect and free?

Easily Accessible Solutions

I know the easy solution – get in my right brain and stay there. Make art, create, and go with the flow, but my experiences are tainted, as yours may be too.

I did the artist route. I got the awards in high school. However, all the fun went out the window when the critique started. It’s all about how well I captured reality, as if I am a photocopier. Do kids know what those are anymore? You are marking me as if I am a machine, not a feeling, expressing being.

Robert Bateman, I am not.

Today, I have blank sketchbooks, unused paintbrushes, pristine palettes because I can’t start a project without anticipating all the judgment on the final product, even though I have no one in my world to show them to. I eliminated all the negative, judgmental people in my life.

Somehow, my perspective became about productivity and performance, and not about tapping into the other side of my brain and letting it communicate with me.

Art class got messed up with capitalism and consumerism. But what if it was never about the product, but the process?

As a process engineer, I know that being able to understand and see a process is rare. Especially in the service industry.

Watch out in the service industry, for that’s where all the bullies end up. In service, you can’t quantify anything that matters, so everyone calculates everything their way, and then the conflict begins. Who will win? Not the data. Never the data, not in service.

In manufacturing, you have a voice with data. If you prefer nontoxic work environments, stick to manufacturing, if there is any left in Canada. When I was there, I thought it could get better, but there is a chasm between what I can imagine and what I’ve experienced.

Potentially Attainable Realities

Perhaps it’s my imagination that causes me so much pain because I can imagine better. If I couldn’t, could I shut up and settle like all the married women? No, I imagined a partnership of equality, not a job description that involved cooking, cleaning and taking care of a man like a mother. I wanted a man, not a boy.

I’ll stick with my imagination and take the pain because the pain is a message – don’t stop. Not here. Keep going. Move on. Somewhere else is where you belong. I’m sorry you were born so far from where you were needed. You are on a journey, and your destination is decided. You will get there.

I dreamt of myself in heaven. My mother was there at the bottom of a set of stairs, with a lot of baggage. Suitcases and luggage.  I tried to help her ascend the stairs with her bags, but she wouldn’t let go. When she tried to ascend, the stairs would collapse under the extra weight.

You can’t take it with you.

Not guilt, shame, remorse, anger, fear or any of those emotions that my mother had packed in her baggage. You can’t take it with you. You must work it out while you are here, or wait in line for another life to come back and try again.

In my dream, after forgiving my mother and giving her whatever else I thought might help her, I bid my mother farewell, and I ascended alone.

At least I know I am going to heaven, and I don’t have to come back if I can work through all this baggage and leave it here. Beats having to come back and go through all this again.