- 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
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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.
