- So the years that I feel I lost to my mental illness
are something that if I think too much about,
I can get pretty down about to this day.
I'm not alone in the feeling
that I lost years of my life due to my illness,
my mental illness, schizoaffective disorder.
And if we look at this from a literal perspective,
I suppose yes, people who are living
with schizophrenia spectrum illnesses
do literally lose years of their life
due to shortened life expectancy from the illness.
But I'm talking more about the years that I feel I've lost
and that I know other people feel that they've lost
due to not really being able to live life
the way you want to and as fully as you want to,
and being in and out of the hospital
when you're trying to work toward getting a diagnosis
and figuring out what's going on,
and then, you know, the readjustment
of expectations about how your life goes.
You know, making sense of that prolonged period
of time in your life can be a painful and difficult thing.
And when I look back on that period of life,
sometimes I'm left with this feeling
that I lost those years of my life to my mental illness.
And so in this video, I'm going to be sharing
about what those years were like for me
and what the process of coming to terms with those years
has been like for me
in the hopes of maybe helping you to feel less alone
if you experience these thoughts
and feelings about a part of your life as well.
(soothing music)
So in my mind, I think I kind of put a marker,
a time marker on the beginning
of the years that I lost to my mental illness
when I was in school, in university,
and I really started to struggle with my mental health.
There was a prolonged period of time
of several years, actually,
where I was seeing a therapist, a doctor
or a psychiatrist every single day.
And it felt like my life kind of was centered around
and was devoted to my mental illness.
This period was basically spent
trying to make sense of what was going on.
It wasn't even focused on trying to live
with the challenges I was experiencing
and trying to move forward with them.
It was really just spent trying to figure out
what was going on and trying to make sense
of the things that I was experiencing
and the difficulties that they posed in my life.
I was in a degree program
that was supposed to be a year-long after degree program.
And this ended up stretching out to three years for me.
And so that kind of feels like a sense of loss, too,
in terms of loss of productive time,
loss of literal money in terms of spending more
on a prolonged school time, loss of identity, too,
in terms of believing that I had the capacity
to succeed in this realm,
and then in a way failing at that.
This period, I feel, is kind of marked by that,
that sense of loss in lots of different realms of my life.
And so that's a really difficult thing to move through,
where you have a loss of self,
a loss of identity, a loss of capacity
and just an overwhelming feeling of loss in life.
That's a lot to deal with.
And that's kind of led to my feeling
of well, I lost those years of my life to my mental illness.
And all of this was going on in my mid twenties.
And, you know, to put this into perspective,
comparing what my peers were going through
and what I was seeing my peers go through
on social media and whatnot,
and just in my day-to-day interactions with them
was this is a period of high productivity.
You don't have kids, you don't have many responsibilities
other than to yourself,
and so you are finishing school,
working on building a career,
working on building more important relationships
in your life.
And it just kind of felt
like I was being left behind in all of that.
And I saw my peers and friends moving forward
in terms of these life milestones and life trajectory.
And it felt like I was being cut off from that trajectory
that I had in my mind
of what I was supposed to be doing as well.
Much of these few years were kind of spent
bouncing in and out of hospital,
bouncing in and out of mental health appointments.
And it didn't feel like I really had the opportunity
to engage in a meaningful way with life
and with life the way I wanted to.
And I wasn't able to succeed
in the way that I understood success to be.
And now this continued after my education, too.
I finally graduated three years later,
but then I was met with new challenges after school.
And I ended up hospitalized for over a month
shortly after I graduated.
And that was when I was diagnosed
with schizoaffective disorder.
Up to that point,
it was kind of like I had lost a huge chunk of time
to figuring out what was going on.
And then I finally got the diagnosis,
and then several more years after that
were kind of, sometimes I feel like, lost
to figuring out how to then readjust
to what I now had to deal with
for the rest of my life, essentially.
When I was hospitalized this time,
I had just before moved back to Alberta,
which is where my family was from, you know,
to be closer to family and friend supports
'cause I had gone to school in a different province.
That alone was hard for me to wrap my head around.
I moved back in with my mom,
and that felt like a tremendous failure
in terms of regressing in my life trajectory
and needing to fall back on that.
I felt very, very lost for several years.
And, you know, I would try to get back into the workforce.
I would try to, you know, be a productive member of society,
but it never really panned out,
and it always kind of crumbled out of my grasp.
And that was really, really hard to accept
and to figure out how to move forward from.
All of the ways that I had learned throughout my life
to define success and to, you know, goals to aspire to
were all of a sudden no longer possible for me,
or so it seemed.
That was a huge sense of loss again.
And it took a very, very long time.
And, you know, I'm still trying to figure out
what it means to readjust goals
and life purpose based on my realistic current capacities.
And I think maybe the process of learning that
is kind of where I cap off the years
that I feel I lost to my mental illness
because I think that that was kind of a turning point.
I realized that I could still lead a meaningful
and successful life.
I just had to kind of redefine for myself
what exactly that entailed and what exactly that means.
Now, that being my understanding,
I still fall back every now and then, you know.
I went back to school to pursue a master's degree,
and that crumbled in my hands, too,
because I don't think I was completely honest with myself
about what my realistic capacities were.
And I didn't take that into account,
setting myself up for success in that instance.
And so it's definitely an ongoing learning experience,
learning how to reassess, reframe, redefine
what it means to move through my life
in a meaningful and successful way.
I think another big part of why I would put a cap
on the period of time that I lost there
is that I started to focus
on developing relationships more in my life.
And I generated a renewed sense of purpose
from being a good friend, being a good sister,
engaging in society and engaging in life
with the people in my life in meaningful ways,
I think, was instrumental in terms of redefining
what it meant to lead a full and meaningful life.
I met Rob around that time, too,
and, you know, learned more about what love
and engaging in meaningful relationships was.
He had two kids.
I became a mother, and that really rounded out my life
in a really beautiful way, too.
I think that focusing on the capacity that you have
to engage with people and with things
and, you know, goals, too, around you
is really, really important.
You know, moving forward from my failure
at going back to graduate school,
I'm now going to try again in a different graduate program
I've applied to for the fall.
And I'm hoping that I'm not just trying
to like continually beat my head against the same wall
with, you know, trying to reach the same goals
that I had before this all started.
I hope that I have a more realistic framework
to approach this from, and that I understand
that I really do need to take into account my capacities
and operate within those.
We'll see. We'll see what comes of that.
But I think an important thing to communicate here,
what I'm trying to get at
is that it's okay, and it's important, actually,
to have goals still.
Where the nuance comes in, I guess,
is where these goals might need to change.
Whether that's completely changing,
you know, when I started out on my journey through academia,
I had this end goal vision of being a researcher
and a professor teaching university students
about the research that I was doing
around mental health and social work and all that stuff.
And that was my passion,
and that was really where I wanted to end up.
And I still kind of hold those desires,
you know, of goals to work toward,
but I'm kind of understanding
that that specific trajectory
that I would've had to take to get there
might not be within my capacities anymore.
And that's okay.
I'm kind of pivoting, and I'm, I guess,
providing lectures to the internet now.
I'm teaching the internet
about my experiences with mental health
and, you know, kind of reworking what it means
to contribute to society in a similar way
of what I originally envisioned,
but maybe just a little bit different
and maybe tweaked more to respond to where I'm at in life.
And the other thing to kinda touch on
is that I think that I lost time in years of my life
mourning the time I lost to my mental illness.
And I think it's very easy to get stuck in that mindset
of mourning and feeling sorry about the years
that were difficult and that it sometimes feels
like you lost to your mental illness.
And I think that it's important,
and I really want to provide encouragement
to try to reframe how you view that period of your life
and try to reframe it in the sense of I learned a lot
during that period.
I learned a lot about myself.
I learned a lot about what I need
in order to look after myself.
I learned about how to advocate for myself
going through the mental healthcare system.
And, you know, I'm a fuller person
on the other side of that.
And so, you know, I lost more time to mourning that period,
but I think it's really important
to kind of recognize this and shift your mindset
because you don't wanna keep losing time to this.
You don't wanna keep losing mental space and energy
to feeling sad and down about things you've lost
due to your mental illness,
reframing it more as a learning experience
and equipping yourself with that learned experience,
moving forward in life
and, you know, still making goals and whatnot for yourself,
but with that learned experience in mind.
So if you can relate to this at all
and you feel that you have also lost a period of your life
or years of your life to your mental illness,
I just want to hopefully provide some comfort
that you are not alone in that sentiment
and that it's okay.
If you didn't follow the same trajectory
as people around you, your peers, your friends, that's okay.
If you didn't follow the same linear trajectory
that you had set out in your mind
before all of this came about
with your mental illness, that's okay.
That's life, you know, life isn't supposed
to go exactly as planned.
And if we hold ourselves to that standard,
we're kind of always going to be left disappointed.
Having a little bit more malleability of thought
and flexible thinking around what it means
to move through life and what means to learn
and gain experiences
while we're moving back and forth through life.
So thanks so much for watching this video.
If you wanna see more videos like this one,
make sure to subscribe to our channel.
And also if you want to help support us
in creating these videos,
please check out the link to our Patreon page
in the description below.
Thank you so much for watching,
and as always, wishing you and your loved one's good health.
I'll see you the next video. Bye.