How To Gain Control Over Your Mental Illness
Think of your mental illness as a car, with you in the drivers seat. Though you’re behind the wheel, you’re not driving. Your mental illness is controlling the gears, the speed of the car, the lights and the heat. You have no say over how fast you’re going, where you are going, or the temperature as you get there. You can’t decide to swerve out of the way of a tree, and you can’t choose whether or not to crash into the river. Your mental illness has control over your life, and you fear for your safety and sanity.
Mental illness has a power over us that people without a mental illness can’t understand. There is no “just being happy”, or “snapping out of it”. We are buckled in for life, doors locked, windows glued shut. People outside of the car don’t see what is happening on the inside, and don’t see how much bigger life’s problems are in the side mirrors. We can’t decide when to let our mental illness affect us, because it affects every part of our lives all the time. What we can do is fight every day to gain control over our lives, and put our mental illness in the back seat.
Gaining control over our lives can be a long and trecherous road. We encounter obstacles and difficulties that sometimes feel impossible to get through. We experience mudslides of emotion and a kind of road rage that gets us into trouble. It’s important to call out to others in those situations, because though they may not be able to rescue us, they can help us cope through the traffic jam of bad thoughts in our minds. There is no shame in asking for help, and no shame in receiving it. Asking for help is one way to start to regain control over our lives, and over our mental illness.
To regain control, we have to try. Some days it’s really hard to do that, but in order for us to be mentally healthy and strong, we have to attempt trying. That means taking each day one step at a time; unbuckling the seat belt, unlocking the doors, and breaking through the windows of the car that is our mental illness. It’s a process, but trying will get us to where we want to be. Our mental illness doesn’t have to be a prison, or a place we stay forever. We are people who are affected by mental illness, but we are not mental illness itself. Convincing ourselves of that on a daily basis is another way to break free from the hold mental illness has on us, and gets us one step closer to control.
Along with asking for help and trying our best, we have to be compliant. That means taking our medication, going to all of our appointments, and actively using the coping skills we’ve learned throughout therapy and throughout life. Compliance may seem like we are giving control to something else; medication or doctors, but those things just facilitate us as we alone gain control over our lives. Medication, therapy and coping mechanisms help us cope with the challenges of having a mental illness, and help us manage the symptoms. If we’re not compliant with those things, we would be stuck in the mud, tires spinning.
It is possible to gain control over our lives and over our mental illness. It is possible to be the driver of our lives, and it is possible to stick our mental illness in the back seat. We still have to deal with it, and its back seat driving, but we can do it as long as we ask for help, as long as we try, and as long as we are compliant with our treatment. It is possible to control the car we ride in, choose how fast or slow we want to go, and decide not to crash. Gaining control will be hard, but we can do it. Our mental illness has wreaked havoc over our lives, but it has also made us smarter, and stronger. We’re strong enough to slam on the breaks, break the window, and get out of the car. We are strong enough to take control over our lives, and though it will be hard, and though there will be obstacles, we can do it.
