readingrainrose:

I realized a little while ago (after struggling with mental illness for almost 30 years) that my approach needs to be positive, not negative.  

I don’t mean positive thinking or any of that shit.  I mean, if you’re mentally ill, you often frame management as “an absence of symptoms.”  Which is great, if you’re talking about acne or a torn ACL or chicken pox.  But if your mental illness is as pervasive as mine (anxiety with obsessional features), striving to eliminate every single symptom so that you can be “normal” is a fool’s errand.  And I used to get worked up about it.  One of my future in-laws likes to comment on my knee bouncing, and it wrecked my self-confidence whenever we were over at their house.  “Nervous tic?” she’d ask, in front of everyone.

My current therapist is great. When I talk to her about eliminating a certain habit or tic that I have, she asks me if that tic is interfering with me living the life I want. If the answer is “yes,” then we work on eliminating it.  If the answer is “no,” then we leave it be. My anxiety makes it impossible for me to go to Disneyworld.  But I don’t want to go to Disneyworld, so there’s no reason for me to worry about it.  I could spend all of my time trying to control all of my rituals and tics.  I could exert all of my energy into social situations and “pushing my limits,” but all that is going to do is make me miserable. 

Let’s reframe health as “capable of living the best life you can.”