My Husband is a Badass in an Unexpected Way

Rebecca Chamaa
4 min readAug 10, 2020
Photo by Jean-Claude Chamaa

I saw my psychiatrist regularly for a couple of years before the day she told me, “I have an assignment for you.” She wanted me to tell one person about my diagnosis of schizophrenia.

I was nearing fifty years old, and only a few people knew that I had a mental illness, and even fewer still knew the severity of that illness. I had kept that part of my life or my identity as a secret. Even my husband’s family didn’t know.

I talked to my husband about what it would mean if we told someone “our” secret, and he wasn’t nearly as concerned as I was. I said, “Maybe we will lose all of our friends.” He said, “If we do, they aren’t worth it.” I also worried openly about how people would treat me knowing that I had a mental illness often characterized by hearing voices, suffering from delusions, and frequently portrayed in the media as dangerous. My husband assured me he was there to support me no matter what lay ahead.

Together, we picked a day and the friend we were going to tell. The Particular friend we chose happens to be a therapist, so we guessed he was a good choice. He also lives with HIV and knows about fear and discrimination.

We met for brunch, and with hesitation, I told him. He didn’t run. He didn’t open his mouth in horror or shock. He had some questions about my symptoms, and then we changed the topic of conversation and went on eating our meal.

Not long after we completed the assignment from my psychiatrist, I was at a writer’s conference in San Diego. There was a memoir teacher there who also happened to be a writing coach and therapist. The two of us talked during a break, and I told her that I had kept a secret for years and recently told a friend. I told her about my diagnosis, and she was supportive and encouraged me to write about it. She said she would be willing to publish a piece about it in her newsletter.

After the conference, I wrote an essay about living in secret with a mental illness for over two decades. The piece came out in the newsletter, and I posted it to my Facebook account, where I was friends with people from high school, college, all of my previous jobs, and various other places.

Social media isn’t the ideal place to post truth-bombs and real confessions, but it was…

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Rebecca Chamaa

Published on/in Glamour, Teen Vogue, Serving House Journal, and many other journals, and websites. Follow her at http://www.ajourneywithyou.com