Dear Burt,
A lot of people consider me a :flake:.All my life was lived in anxiety,panic attacks,and until the age of 61,a form of anxiety trying to destroy what I had gained was there every second of my life,I called him my MOMSTER.
Those who never knew what you,Jilly and I went and are going through can sympathise,but cannot really understand what we lived,living.
I Understand you,I have Compassion for the 3 of us.
With brotherly love
Normand/loongdragon
Thank You loong, that was beautiful.
May you receive also loving compassion from my heart for your plight and for the overcoming of your internal monsters.
Lori,
Life is hard, and unfair no matter who you are or where you come from.
I think the distinction here is that unless you have been hospitalized and/or medicated for something most definitely wrong with you, and all of your family and friends now know that you had a nervous break down -- well, after that you can never be allowed to go through the normal human range of happiness, gladness or sadness.
Now, you just have to ' snap out of it '.
You now have the stigma and your employer, your landlord and every one knows it.
So now if you get angry at your neighbor and you say some curse word and throw your car keys at them without hitting them, you will promptly be taken down and arrested for attempted murder because you have a mental illness.
This literally happened to me.
If you're ' normal ' then -- aw, the guy just had a bad day, no harm, no foul.
You're never allowed again to express a normal human emotion -- ever.
Because of cr@ppy Stephen King movies.
Better catch him now, before he murders someone !
I was just upset.
I wasn't going to hurt anyone.
Try to live like that, and see if it doesn't make you bitter like me, loong, and Jilly.
To illustrate even further - if you had a shouting match with your husband -- public or private, they would take you down like a dog and shoot you with 1500cc's of thorozine in the hind.
Without the stigma, oh, that was just a lover's spat.
If you can ever imagine being stripped of your dignity and humanity that way -- then, maybe, just maybe you can understand a little bit of the disgrace we feel.
-- Burt B.