Self-hate and progress

I'm a failure in mental health campaigning. It doesn't matter. I can
keep fighting. I can keep fighting for something I believed in and I will.

Mental health as a definition has changed and evolved. It will continue
to change and evolve. I hope the input of the Bhutanese will be part of
that change.

It can mean social control. It can mean political control. It can mean
forcing norms of behaviour on people. It can be a sort of pre-crime
system where the innocent are made out as guilty.

The important change is the change to understand mental illness as
distress rather than disorder. It is to understand that it is human
beings that are being judged, and that human beings are fallible and
complex.

Sadly or thankfully I rarely take this mentality on board myself.
Internally I am highly self-stigmatic and I need to be because without
it I would be more of a failure.

In the last 6 months I have totally failed in what and who I am.

I can accept my failure rationally or I can take the self-criticism on
board. I can do better. I will do better. It may take some self-hate to
do it.

If someone else lived my life they might, perhaps, be ecstatically
happy. That's probably another bad thing about me.

Some might say that's because my standards are different. Others might
say that my values and measures are different. Still others would say I
have complex depression that they'd like to unpick.

The high standards drive me like they drive my siblings. We are unhappy
because of it but it doesn't matter to us. I have a cousin my age. She's
Oxford educated. When she graduated she turned down a £75,000 graduate
job to be a doctor. She has a posh flat in a nice area. She has a
private pilot's license which, I assume, she uses to get away from the
world the same way I do through my....'flying'. Ask her if she's happy
and she'll tell most people that she is. She has the burden of the
hedonic treadmill to cope with as well as the burden of the high
expectations (98% - what the hell happened to the other 2%). It's why
I'm lucky to have been through crisis so severe as to be called a
psychiatric crisis. It's why I'm luck to be mentally ill.

Anyway, I have lost my way in my path over the last six months. I have
been weak and a pitiful husk of the man I was. It wasn't much before but
it was more than I am now.

I sold out and in too many ways. No longer will my failure stand. I'll
fix this. Failure is a human thing just as self-criticism is.