Faithful

This morning I listened to the Corinne Bailey Rae CD The Sea on my iPod dock. She has a gorgeous voice and I would like to buy her other album.

Today I realized the new salon has yellow walls which pleased me because it is a joyous color. My haircut is new: a riff on Isabella Rossellini's and I bought the pomade to style it. Sophie told me I don't need a hair dryer to recreate the cut every day.

Tomorrow I will wash and set the hair in the new cut and wear my contact lenses to meet O. Miraculously I woke at 7:30 am and so had time to listen to the CD.

Last night I went to a new support group for the first time. I recommend peer support as an option for living a good life. You might have to search around to find one that is to your liking however I recommend you make the effort.

Sometimes it is too much to hear other people's woe so that is why you must have other outlets that give you joy. Like a beauty salon. A manicure. Treating yourself to a new CD. Next up I buy Pearl Jam's Backspacer with the song "Just Breathe" that is so beautiful. Shortly before my second two-week hospital stay I saw Pearl Jam at the Limelight. This concert scene made its way into my memoir too.

The psychic I went to early this year told me she saw Left of the Dial being published. I take this on faith even though it's hard for me to believe in anything that doesn't carry scientific proof. The word I would rather use to describe my hard work in writing the memoir is devotion: my unwavering commitment to doing what it takes to sell tons of copies of my book.

Devotion I can understand because it involves free will. With true faith you have to suspend your doubt and it's hard for me to do that. I prefer to see things in black-and-white and signed and sealed and written in stone and delivered on a tablet.

You've got to have faith even if it is as irrational as hope sometimes. I have faith that my memoir will be published because the woman who gave me the reading said it would be. So the next step is doing the hard work to revise and add scenes to the manuscript.

Did I have faith just starting out in my recovery that I would recover? In some ways my denial about the truth of having schizophrenia propelled me to take those early risks to live independently and get my first job. It was a coping mechanism because surely if I believed there was no hope for someone who had schizophrenia I would've been defeated.

The element of living in hiding was one I turned inside-out in order to succeed. Interesting: I don't consciously recognize that I keep the faith or have the hope that I can do other things in the future. Stepping out and doing those things is like drinking a glass of water. You drink a glass of water without realizing that water=life. It's just something you do to be healthy.

One thing I recommend you do is keep a grateful journal to record your tiny victories every day. I have recently begun writing them down in my Life's Little Reminders journal I bought in Starbuck's last year.

That is how you keep the faith: you boost your spirits by re-reading the things that cheer you about yourself and your life. It can be a beautiful life if you see the positive around you.

How you keep positive is to seek other people who willingly reinforce that you are a good person and can recover. A woman had this conversation with me: how I believed I would publish Left of the Dial because the psychic told me I would.

This is why an oncologist should not tell a patient she only has six months to live: it becomes a self-fulfilling outcome. Plenty of cancer patients live 12 years or more when given the option that this is possible.

So as I've said before I consider it unethical to tell someone diagnosed with schizophrenia that she can't recover and her prospects are limited because she will be bleached of hope.

It comes down to the Nelson Mandela quote I quote often in here:
"As we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same."

The way to do this is to lead by example.

My own quote is equally as inclusive:
"Here's the playing field. Please join in."

Today I hope you are having a good day. I hope this blog entry cheers you. I will go sign off now as I want to listen to some music.

Enjoy.