The World Behind My Eyes

Exactly one year ago from this moment, I was lying in a bed in a new-to-me apartment in Houston, Texas,  feeling nervous and not sure if I would be able to sleep. My parents had dropped me off that day with my luggage. I was there for treatment in a community reintegration program, and we could not know how long I would be there.  I can tell you now, of course: nearly nine months.  My treatment involved hours and hours of therapy every week--mostly group sessions with fellow clients in the program, but also individual appointments, too. I had a team of that worked with me, including a Primary Clinician, Individual Therapist, Vocational Rehabilitation Specialist, Dietitian, Music Therapist, and my Neuropsychiatrist. All of this treatment over the nine months I was in the program followed the ten-week-long inpatient stay I had at the beginning of 2020 (right before the pandemic began) where I learned that I had been misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder for about seven years and that I actu

If you've been my friend for a while and you've been gracious enough to read my blog (which I've been writing for eleven years at this point), you know that I've always been candid about my journey. You also know that I've written on this blog quite a lot over those eleven years and now all of that content is hidden from the public eye. (And if you're new around here, then...welcome. Hi, thank you for reading.) I decided to take it all down last year after my journey took a wild turn last year. You can read about some of that journey in the post entitled "Surrender Before Victory?" that I wrote in December of 2020.  Part of being candid on the internet is that it's ridiculously vulnerable. I probably should have been more scared of that than I was, but at the time I felt called to do it. I still feel called to write but now the story has changed and when I look back at what I documented over the years I now have the new perspective that comes with