Accepting That I'll Never Be Okay
To live with my madness, I must grieve my life.
by Beauty Dhlamini
Beauty Dhlamini is a global health writer and Tribune columnist. Her work focuses on health inequalities and co-hosts the podcast, Mind the Health Gap.
Often, when people talk about grief, they talk about it in relation to someone else. Many people connect over the irreparable loss of losing a loved one, they share stories about how it feels, what it means and how they’ve never ever really recovered from it.
For a long time now, I have been grieving myself. Not because I’m dying (lol, I mean we’re all slowly dying) but because I have been mentally ill for as long as I can remember, and it’s only in the last few years I have come to terms with knowing that would never change. And I’ve come to the realization that this grief will never go away. It will constantly change and shift, but it will always be there—determined, fresh, raw, waiting for me.
Many people think the process of having and living with a mental disorder is chronological: you get an assessment, then a diagnosis, then some treatment and finally you’re in recovery. If only it was this easy. It is messy and complex, and even though I am technically “in recovery,” I still receive treatment (if you ignore the long waiting lists, the arbitrary thresholds I am constantly expected to meet to prove I need the help I have gotten in the past and constantly fighting for access to my medication). With changes in symptoms as I’ve gotten older, I still find myself seeking new diagnoses and validating old ones, having to sit through the same assessments and answer the same routine questions. It’s not chronological, it’s not like a line, it’s more like a circle—never-ending, all-encompassing.