Heya Kat and welcome to beyond blue
What an eloquent beautifully written post that was. Are you a writer? If not, maybe you should consider writing more! There are even ways to self-publish your writings on amazon and other sites as ebooks!
You've certainly described the "journey" of life with a mental illness very accurately. but then also, you have really described life in general accurately. Are our lives with mental illness really so different from anyone elses? All humans suffer, all humans have flaws, we all have pain, have illnesses and disease, we have all "demons" that haunt us- demons we have to fight to live a stable and well life. The only difference i think between those of us with mental illness, and those that dont, is that a couple of our demons have names "depression", "anxiety" "ocd". Other people have terrible demons too with names that arent medical names.
I'm a massive fan of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. In that therapy we are very against putting labels on our feelings. Humans naturally feel all the facets of all possible emotions- happiness, sadness, anger, peace, fear, confidence... you name it, we feel it. Our problem is that we then choose to categorise them as "bad" or "good". When we categorise them as "bad" we become fearful of them and do everything we can to avoid them- its really quite unreasonable.
Where's this weird expectation that we should always be happy 24/7 all the timem? Its not even possible, and yet we act like being anything other than happy, peaceful, cheerful, energetic is somehow a bad thing. We say things like "cheer up", "whats WRONG with you today".. and in doing so we make ourselves feel like "failures, losers, hopeless" just because we feel one emotion rather than another.
Yes medical clinical depression is an illness that needs to be treated, but natural normal human emotions need to just be... accepted for what they are.
"yeah ok, i feel sad. and thats ok. right now i''m sad. let it be, it will pass in its own good time and then i will feel something else. thats ok, thats normal".
All things will pass when they're ready to do- though of course, if we need therapy and other things to help work through them so that they pass, thats perfectly wonderful.
words like "remission" "recovery" are so vague... what do they even mean? A doctor would say i'm in remission, but that doesnt mean i'm truly free of all symptoms- i probably never will be completely rid of them. but they dont bother me much at all