to try to make other people understand it. That's a part of what we do here.

As I've grown more distant from the major upheavals that I suffered, the less I try to make people understand. It's been almost 13 years. It's like it's not a part of me now. I just take these little pills in the morning and the evening. I don't even think about what they do anymore. However, I never miss taking those pills, so some part of me must still be acutely aware that my reality depends on them.

After I was diagnosed and started getting the proper treatment, I wanted to tell the whole world about what I had been through. I thought of my struggles as my lost decade or ten years in hell. Living with the symptoms of that illness for a day was traumatic, let alone ten years. I wanted to try to make people understand. The ones that bothered me most were those who didn't think mental illness was real. There was nothing so insulting as someone telling you that after you had struggled with a broken brain for a decade.

I tend to be a lot more private about my illness now days. It is very tiresome to fight stigma day in and day out. I don't want anyone at my current employer to know about it. I see a psychiatrist four times a year now for check-ups and to get my prescriptions. When I need to leave work early for that, I just tell them that I have a doctor's appointment. They've tried, and sometimes rather sneakily, to get me to tell them what I go to the doctor for, but I don't. If I want to work and have a nice life, it could depend on my silence on this issue.

Maybe someday I will write a book.

but, I understand that it's hard to get anything on the topic published without including a hint of a cheer-leading hope promoting over-coming narrative. Struggling and fighting to survive seem heroic, by comparison isolated avoidance isn't much of a story.

Still much of that seemed familiar and I thought that may be a useful hint of reality for people at the front-end and people whose isolation leaves them wondering if it's just them.