America by Heart

I do not like how the media polarizes people. How everyone is lumped into a stereotype. My prime beef with the book The Antidote is that I find it hard to believe every African American acts like the people chronicled in this Reverend’s book.

There’s no room in the media dialogue for differing viewpoints that challenge assumptions and stereotypes about how people act and believe and live. That’s what’s not right in the discourse in American society: if you don’t fit in this or any other box, you’re not written about and not given a say in the media.

I happen to favor Bernie Sanders if you must know. I think healthcare is a right not like Ted Cruz who says it’s a choice.

Try as I might to see how the right wing faction of our government makes sense (and how Conservative Christians make sense) I have a hard time buying what they’re selling.

I’ve been branded a liberal because I speak out in favor of open-mindedness. I was interviewed at Yahoo for an article on dating when you have a mental illness. I was positive and proactive in my quotes. Yet the majority of people who posted comments below the article stigmatized those of us with a diagnosis who just wanted to be loved and love others like everyone else.

I’ve always made the case for treating others with dignity. A friend who was a CEO–even he knew the trickle-down theory doesn’t work in practice. On the face of it evangelical arguments seem plausible yet when you analyze them they don’t make sense. Like Jeanine Pirro claiming on Sirius XM radio that because of waterboarding we’re keeping America safe. Months later there was a terrorist attack in San Bernardino.

Star Jones was quoted that if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything. I stand for giving every human being dignity. I stand for stopping these endless no-good wars. I stand for booting out stigma of any kind including racism and homophobia regardless of who’s doing it.

Now that it’s voting season in America I’m a voracious reader of the political news. I’m fascinated with the demographics of the people interviewed in exit polls.

This all leads me to think I’m right in claiming our government can’t fix what ails American society. People are disenfranchised. For decades we’ve been unable to influence the fate of Acts that become Laws.

Who knows: maybe now is the time for more of us to get involved like my political activist guy. I’ve changed my mind: we need to get active in speaking out even though at the end of the day it might not matter who gets elected.

Yet it does matter to me when Republicans co-opt Christianity as a political ploy and blunder what Love Thy Neighbor means.

Only now I feel it’s imperative more than ever that everyone uses our voices to talk about the things that matter to us.

I’ve written my congressperson and senators about the mental health Acts that should be voted into Law. In this way it’s true we’ve had to wrestle the government to the mat to do the right thing.

The right of everyone living in America to recover–the chance to have a full and robust life when you’re diagnosed with a mental illness–that’s what matters to me the most.

I say this because without mental health what does a person really have?

It might just be time to get involved as citizen activists.

Living Life in Balance

Life out of balance is no way to live.

I remember watching that 1982 movie Koyaanisqatsi or Life Out of Balance in college. The Madonna “Ray of Light” video looks eerily like the animation in Koyaanisqatsi.

How human beings ravage the natural world is out of balance. How institutions in society treat people is out of balance. I have read books written by Conservatives and while their arguments appear bulletproof on closer analysis they are shot through with Swiss cheese holes.

It might be that I’ll always be a Lefty. It might be that my focus on fitness as a lifestyle is not popular and won’t ever be popular. I turned 46 and decided to make fitness a priority. I’m 50 now and I’ll say this: it’s to our government’s benefit if you’re in ill health and unable to be strong enough to become a citizen activist.

The lack of faith in the U.S. government according to studies is at an all-time high. We’re so disgusted that we don’t think anything we could do would change things. I certainly don’t think my letter-writing to my congressperson about mental health reform will change things. So those in authority are quite happy that ordinary Americans have given up

It starts and ends with fitness in my view because first of all each of us has to take care of ourselves in order to have a healthy, prosperous life. I define “prosperity” not solely in monetary terms. I define being prosperous in terms of having a bounty of strength, optimism, and what’s commonly called “agency”: a sense of purpose in our lives and the ability to do what we’re passionate about.

It comes down to fitness then.

I absolutely value having a fit mind and a strong body. This isn’t a stigmatizing belief. Everyone living on earth is capable of having their own version of a healthy recovery. Not everyone is going to dead-lift 205 pounds and that’s okay. That’s not the point.

The point is that achieving our own version of “well” is a noble goal to strive for.

Living a balanced life–what I call living life Left of the Dial–is also a noble goal if you ask me.

That’s why I say: forget the government. Forget elected officials who have memorized the Ayn Rand playbook. That is no way to live your life: expecting that any other person has the power to give you things.

I say: it starts and ends with each of us taking action in our lives to create a better life for ourselves.

I’ll end here by saying that now is the time for everyone living in recovery to expect great things. Now is the time to support each other in setting goals and going after what we want.

The days are long gone when we should have to ask permission from any other human being in order to have a better life in recovery.

Recovery is our right. Health is our right.

Living life in balance is something to think about.

Food and Fitness:

You turn 50 and you don’t want life to pass you by. You think about what matters most now.

I met a guy who is a political activist. I’m so jaded that I don’t think our government can fix what ails society. I favor Gandhi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Michael Jackson sang in “Man in the Mirror” that if you want to change the world you first have to change yourself. That’s an apt message for those of us who are 50. There’s still time. Better to take action now than to not do it and turn 60 or 70 and regret that yes life has passed you by.

If not now, when? If not us, who?

I’m a food activist and environmental activist first of all. The substances we put in our bodies and in our earth can harm us more than anything.

This is something everyone has control over. In New York, you can use food stamps at Greenmarkets. Do this and use a food pantry–you won’t have to resort to buying cheap processed food.

Meat belongs in no one’s diet–so right there you lower your food costs.

In New York a pack of cigarettes is $12. A week of organic oranges is $11. This is simple home economics.

We can thus all have a better life regardless of what our government does. There’s the real chance a Republican will be our next president–so it’s important we take matters into our own hands in caring and providing for ourselves.

I didn’t want to have to rely on the government–I didn’t want to collect a disability check the rest of my life. My political activist guy thinks the arc of history will progress. I’m skeptical it will.

Now that anyone on SSI or SSDI can set up a tax-free ABLE account we can have the money to buy organic food. A container of Earthbound Farms organic kale is $5. Buy tomatoes, chickpeas, and olives to add to the health. Voila–you have at least four salads for lunch for each week.

For $6, you can buy Amy’s Organic frozen meals instead of Lean Cuisine. No one is getting lean on tiny portions of standard frozen meals.

Now: I don’t want Mr. Toupee to become our next president. Yet he might well become our president. Anyone who doesn’t get out and vote–when Americans do have this bare minimum way to participate in our democracy–has to accept the outcome.

That’s why I’m firm in saying that each of us is truly the best change agent in society when it comes to changing the world.

If we can barely take care of ourselves, we won’t be able to take care of the planet.

Which is why in my view success starts and ends with food and fitness.

Not with the political process.

A Long Life to You!

You’re supposed to use photos in your blog entries so that Google ranks them higher in search. This photo is a little too big if you ask me.

I just say no to fillers, Botox, and lip injections. It all looks plastic to me when a woman over 40 has no wrinkles.

This photo was taken after a haircut. I recommend you have your hairstylist shoot your photo after a good haircut.

At 50 a woman should let her face breath every so often. The war paint look is aging. If you’re afraid to look at yourself, there’s more going on in your head than meets the eye. If you don’t like yourself, that’s sad when most likely you’ll have more years to live.

A guy I know who’s taken schizophrenia meds since he was 13 is now 72. A shortened life span is not inevitable. It’s a myth that needs to be retired. People who stay in mental health treatment become well enough to monitor any co-occurring medical health risks. Thus we live longer as a result.

The start is to quit smoking. My 72-year old friend didn’t ever smoke. Nor do I. I’ve always detested cigarette smoking from the time I was a young kid. I was easily nine or 10 years old when I had a distaste for cigarette smoking.

Give up smoking–I implore you to quit smoking now if you’ve taken up this life-ending habit. It’s not ever too late to quit smoking. Three women I know who smoked two packs a day for 40 years now sleep and travel everywhere with oxygen tanks.

Guaranteed to give you emphysema, COPD, and a drawn and gaunt, wrinkled-early face.

Give up drinking colas and sodas and soft drinks as the other thing you do if you still imbibe sugary or fake-sugar sweet pop. Doing only these two things–quitting smoking and not drinking colas–are the two best things a person can do. The proof is in how I look..I refused to start cigarette smoking; I refused to drink Coke or Pepsi.

Vanity is a legitimate reason for not doing any of this if you ask me. Living a happier, healthier, longer life is also a good reason for not doing any of this.

Besides…I have a date at a gastro pub that plays cool music.

A long life to you too!

Thinking Positively

I’ve found an effective solution to dwelling in the past: focus on the positive instead of the negative. Yes: it is easier to do this

Think: what was good about your past life even though most of it wasn’t great? A New York Times article revealed that people who rewrote their history to frame it in a positive way healed better and had better health.

Anais Nin wrote in one of her diaries: “You have the right to select your perception of the world.”

I think of this after reading an interview with Ice Cube in Rolling Stone. He founded NWA and now stars in movies. If you ask me he has a poor attitude: He in effect told the reporter: “I’m black so of course no one likes me.”

I’m not going to attack and judge a person for believing what they do. It’s just that as I read the Ice Cube interview and thought about it I realize each of us has a specific worldview. In this way the truth is always elastic depending on who’s doing the stretching.

If that’s what a person believes, it’s true for them. It’s their truth regardless of whether something really happened or didn’t happen.

I’ve been thinking about this also as it relates to stigma and how a lot of consumers perceive that stigma is pervasive and having a diagnosis is shameful because other people think they’re crazy.

I say: get over it.The more pressing concern is that blaming stigma or blaming other people–regardless of who or what you’re hating or blaming and why you’re hating or blaming–is not a healthy way to live.

The fear of stigma will hold a person back even when there’s no actual stigma.

I do wish Ice Cube would get over himself. He’ll certainly get Rolling Stone to sell thousands of copies of the magazine.

My stroke of insight was that focusing on the positive is the way to go. I have long railed against the time I spent in the community mental health system. This week when I chose to focus on the positive everything changed for the better.

Focusing on the positive–choosing to think positively–is all too rare in a society where people like Ice Cube and others make polarizing statements.

I say: find the good in your life and in other people. Keep an open mind that good people exist in the world. Take back control by deciding to focus on the positive.

If you ask me, focusing on the positive is the best use of our time and of our mental energy. To this end I will focus on the good when I post blog entries here.

I’ll branch out in this blog to write things that no traditional publisher or mainstream Internet website is going to publish. No other outlet wants to publish what I write because there’s nothing shocking or sensational about what I propose.

I’ll start by writing about right here right now because today more than ever it’s a great time to be living in recovery.

Spring Cleaning in Winter

The first article I had published in a newspaper was titled Time to Spring Clean in January, 1990 in the Staten Island Advance.

It recommended doing spring cleaning now to beat the winter blues and blahs. The article talked about how the cobwebs of our minds and residual negative thoughts need to be cleaned out too.

More than this I recommend not accumulating clutter in cabinets and drawers and closets and on the visible surfaces in your apartment or house. I have not ever understood the attraction to displaying knickknacks on every inch of a coffee table or end table or dresser or elsewhere in a home.

Clearing out the old, the unwanted, the things that bring back painful memories should be done at the start of every season if you ask me. If you’re not currently using an item or won’t resume using it in the next season, you shouldn’t keep it on a closet shelf or anywhere in your apartment.

I make an exception for things you do love and do use not often yet every so often. Yet if something is broken, torn or otherwise unusable it shouldn’t be kept at all.

With clothes I’ve always recommended keeping on hand only the items that fit and flatter us. Go out and buy new clothes if you gain or lose weight. I kid you not I had to replace every pair of pants and all my skirts when I lost weight. This was no joke yet I did it rather than walk around in baggy clothes.

Living in our homes should be a celebration of our lives that we take joy in. Not a museum stuffed with artifacts or items from the past or shabby furniture. It’s true that the Salvation Army, Housing Works in New York City, and Goodwill all sell decent secondhand furniture if you can’t afford Raymour & Flanigan or Ashley Home Store.

Spring will return in two months. I say: start now to clean up and clear out and to think about the goals you want to achieve. Have a goal instead of setting a resolution.

Spring is the perfect time to start something new.

I find that clearing out an apartment and cleaning up in the winter is often the prelude to making other positive changes in our lives.

Try it: clear out and clean up and see if something magical happens.

Time Moves On

I was tasked with cleaning out an office. It was like I was an expert called on to intervene on an episode of Hoarders. I kid you not a neat freak wrangled nearly a decade of clutter.

Living in and living with a mess is no way to live. Most of all I think having a cluttered apartment can affect a person’s mental health.

I recommend reading the Marie Kondo book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Like this Japanese clutter-control expert with a mile long waiting list and no clients that ever rebound: doing it all at once is something to consider. Kondo’s method seems perfect to me.

It’s a way to live life Left of the Dial when your home is NOT a mess, is NOT cluttered and chaotic. Often: to live in hope and harmony the first step is to clear the clutter to make room for the new and better.

My mantra is: for every one thing you bring into your apartment one old thing has to be removed. I’ve had this ethic for over a decade now.

The absolute best and truly effective tidying method is a variant on Marie Kondo’s method. I’ll tell you how I found out how to do this via a Google search.

Place the sweater face down on the bed. Fold the left sleeve across the back and then fold the right sleeve across the back. Fold the hem up from the bottom about 1/3 up. Keeping rolling the hem another third or so up until you have a sweater like a loose jelly roll. (You might have to fold it in quarters.)

Store the sweaters in rolls sideways across the length of the drawer.

Voila: you can store more sweaters in less space.

Best of all when you’re able to easily see them to take out one sweater the sweater will not be wrinkled after you take it out. If it’s lightly wrinkled you can use a steamer to get the wrinkles out.

I’m all for making our lives simpler.

Why have to use up tons of storage space and drawers for sweaters that can compactly now fit into one drawer instead of two or three? Why have to struggle and take time to remove all the sweaters on the top to get to the one on the bottom?

Perfetto if you ask me.

Time moves on. One day our loved ones will not be here. Cleaning up and cleaning out should not only be done after a person is gone. We should do it while we’re alive so that we don’t saddle other people with cleaning up our messes in the event we’re not here.

Yet most of all we should be neat and tidy for ourselves: to have a clear mind and a fitter body and stop from being overwhelmed with the choices we have to make or want to make.

Neat is sweet.

Life Cycles

Christine DeLorey in her book Life Cycles: Your Emotional Journey to Freedom and Happiness states that an emotional imbalance is often the root of physical illness.

At the center of Left of the Dial was using your gifts to heal an imbalance and gain a sense of freedom from dis-ease.

I recommend this Christine DeLorey book. It uses the principles of numerology as a guide.

Numerology can be a practical tool to help a person. I have found it to be accurate.

The author suggests that a person loves all their feelings. And that self-expression springs from using our feelings.

I have written before that the goal is to feel what we feel, express it and deal with it in constructive and productive ways.

Not by drinking alcohol or using street drugs, or chowing down on comfort food to feel better.

At the end of the book DeLorey talks about the 2000s and the new female energy and what is going on with our earth. She talks about how we can heal ourselves and heal our planet.

The author makes the case that climate change is the earth’s response to how we are treating the world we live in.

I realize a lot of people are going to be skeptical about numerology. Take it with a grain of salt if you want. Yet even just reading the last chapter of the book might help.

I’ll report back in the future about other things DeLorey wrote in this book.

Recovery at 50

Fifty reminds me of the song “Freedom” from the 1980s.

I turned 50: And I could give a rat’s ass about what other people do and say.

Anyone who cares one minute for what other people think has too much time on their hands. That time is better put to using it to do your own thing in your own inimitable way.

So you want to wear polka dots and stripes at the same time? Go right ahead. Fifty is the time to declare a war on changing yourself to fit into a version of a person that other people will approve.

Anyone else who dares spend their whole life sitting in judgment of you or me isn’t worth worrying about. Forgive them. Pray they one day “see the light.” Then send them on their way.

Besides in reality most normal people are too obsessed with their own perceived faults that they have no time left over to worry about you or me. Capisce?

I make the case for getting to the point where you stop being paranoid about how other people act towards you. This is one of the benefits of being in remission or in having minimally intrusive symptoms–the paranoia doesn’t influence your thinking and in some cases the paranoia is totally gone.

Imagine that: getting to the point where you’re not paranoid.

I firmly believe that acts of discrimination (traditionally called “stigma”) should not be accepted or tolerated.

We need however to differentiate between when we’ve been discriminated against and when we’re merely “reading into” the actions or words of other people.

At 50 years old: I don’t care about so-called stigma. Our lives should not be focused on pleasing other people who can set the hoops higher and higher that we have to jump through.

I’ll be 51 soon–my how time flies. Our fifties if you ask me are the time to get things right: to once and for all throw off the shackles that make us fear “stigma.”

To live the full and robust life that we’re entitled to live.

Fifty is when we’re asked to do things we feel passionate about: buy a home, enter into a relationship, travel, take up a cause–whatever the most persistent and urgent thing it is that our souls demand take expression before we’re gone.

Each of us is going to turn 50 at some point. All hail those of us who are 50 now. Fifty is too late in the game of our lives to continue to sit on the sidelines and not dare to get into the ring to try to achieve a goal.

Read the Theodore Roosevelt quote that I posted here in the quotes section. It truly is not the critic that counts only the person who has gotten in the arena and fought to have a better life.

I’ll return here on Thursday with information about a life-changing book I’ve read that might just help others in recovery find the freedom to be ourselves and live our lives free of stigma.

Year-End Rear-End Review

I counted down to 1987 at the radio station where the disc jockeys played the top 120 or so songs from 1986 in a “Year-End Rear-End Review of 1986 Record Picks.”

To this day I still listen to music. You can listen to The Alternative Project radio station on the iHeartradio website. In New York City if you have an HD radio receiver you can listen to K-Rock at 92.3 FM HD2.

Over the years my brother has given me exorbitant gift cards for Christmas. One year I used one to buy an HD radio/iPod dock/alarm clock. You can set the alarm clock to wake you up to the radio or to music from your iPod.

I also used one of those gift cards to buy an iPod that holds something like 100,000 songs or something outrageous like that. Of course I doubt it contains anything near that amount of music.

My contention is that often what gave a person joy when they were younger can give them joy as an adult.

From the time I was a young kid I always listened to music on the radio. It’s a free source of happiness.

All you need is the money to buy a radio. And if you’re content to listen to Taylor Swift or any regular Top 40 music played on average stations you don’t need an HD radio receiver just any old cheap radio whose frequency comes in clearly.

At the time I was a disc jockey in the 1980s a listener had called in and told me he was miraculously able to tune into WSIA, Staten Island from all the way up in Boston. This cheered me.

I make the case for listening to music. Or reading books. Or cooking or baking from recipes. Or if it’s your thing watching TV. These simple pleasures can be enjoyed from your own apartment or house.

In the coming season with the encroaching arctic freeze of late I recommend staying inside and doing things like listening to music or cooking.

You really don’t need a lot of money to be happy.

I make the case for installing iTunes on a computer and listening to music to cheer up our spirits in the coming gloomy cold weather.

I’ll end here by saying that gratefulness goes a long way in feeling good when parts of your life are not so good.

And face it: when it’s cold outside baby who wants to trudge outdoors in the snow.

Music can be a companion to our days. It can lift us up. It can take us to a better place.

It’s said that “travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.”

I say: finding what gives you joy (whether music or something else) and going and doing that makes us richer too.