Autumn Generation

Isn’t it always like fall is the true start of the year?

I went back to school in fall 1997 to obtain my library degree. Ten years after I was diagnosed I went to Pratt Institute.

I recommend setting a goal to achieve in the fall. I also do recommend buying one or two new items of clothing if you can afford to. Coupon codes are widely available now on Internet retailer websites.

In my memoir: the energy of the book takes off and quickens starting with the chapter where I’m in school that first semester.

Thus I will post an excerpt from Left of the Dial here next Tuesday that is a scene from when I was in school.

Now the weather will get cooler for a lot of us so we can enjoy the fall. I always think it’s the perfect time to bumble about New York City.

Stay tuned for the memoir excerpt.

Living an Organic Life

One definition of organic is “denoting a relation between elements of something such that they fit together as parts of a whole.”

This is what I’m referring to in the Mission Statement link on my author website. Living an organic life is the true premise of Left of the Dial: where our thoughts and feelings, actions and values are aligned and in balance.

I’m interested in how elements fit together as part of a whole. The goal as I see it in recovery is to be whole and well. You can have a full and robust life.

In this regard I don’t discount that a lot of times a person’s life is changed forever after they’re diagnosed with bipolar schizophrenia or another mental illness. Yet here too life can be beautiful even though it’s hard.

The goal as I see it too is to find what gives you joy and satisfaction and go do that as long as it’s healthy.

One thing I firmly believe: it’s not the enormity or severity of a challenge that determines a person’s fate but how they respond to that challenge. It’s possible to find pockets of joy even though a person struggles or is in pain.

In this regard I have been famously assailed because of my love of fashion and makeup. Yet I can tell you without a doubt that my interest in fashion was one of the prime factors that helped me do better in my recovery.

For you it might be painting or sketching. For another person it might be hiking a mountain trail.

The point is it’s interesting to me how these elements come together in an organic way. And when our lives are out of balance it’s often because we’re caught up in busywork that is out of synch with who we are.

I will write in here about my theory on this next week.

Che Bella Figura

The Italian ethic of che bella figura is literally what beautiful figure a person makes in society.

It’s the often stylized theatrics of acting as if you’re successful long before you’ve arrived at the place you want to be. I alluded to this in a scene in Left of the Dial.

In one way I had certain expectations I was supposed to live up to: to go to college to better myself and go farther than my parents had. Though having owned their own business isn’t shabby.

I do think culture impacts a person in recovery. This has not been widely researched or reported on or at least I could not find a lot of information about it on the Internet.

I contributed a 10-page chapter “Recovery is Within Reach” to Benessere Psicologico: contemporary thought on Italian American mental health. That’s of course psychological well-being in Italian. You can buy this book on Amazon. It features three peer stories in the first-person recovery section of the book as well as interesting glimpses into research studies about ethnicity and counseling.

Yes: I’m proud to be Italian. I credit the love and support of my close-knit Italian American family as a prime factor in how far I was able to go in my recovery.

I remember dancing the tarantella at American Legion halls. I remember the parties hosted downstairs in my Nonna’s basement. Nonna’s food was sprinkled with garlic cloves as big as teeth. You could scare the devil with how hot the sauce was.

No: I don’t approve of the family-bashing that goes on in the consumer recovery movement. I don’t approve either of when family members call their loved ones “a schizophrenic.”

Above all my mother was quick to boot my ass to go out and get a job. She didn’t think I was a schizophrenic: she thought I could hold a job just like other people could.

In October I will talk about finding the career you love. October is Disability Employment Awareness Month.

Stay tuned.

Book Signing

I will be selling copies of Left of the Dial my memoir at the NAMI-New York State educational conference in November. The conference is November 13 to 15. On that Friday and Saturday I will be selling copies of my book for only $10.

Wherever I go I sell the book for only $10: a rock bottom price because there’s no tax and shipping involved.

The conference is at the Desmond Hotel in Albany, NY. I was a guest speaker on two panels at the conference in 2004 and 2005.

In the coming weeks I’ll write about giving and receiving support in our recovery and in our lives. I’ll feature glimpses into my Italian American experience and how this culture impacted my success in life as a person in recovery.

I’m going to keep this blog entry short and sign off now.

Untold Stories

If memory serves it was Zora Neale Hurston who is quoted that there’s no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you. If you listen closely to what my Uncle Joe is saying in the video you’ll see he makes this point too in his own words.

We have to honor our veterans. The statistic is that 22 veterans commit suicide each day.

You might think we had no business starting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (I do not think we should have started these wars.) Yet that is beside the point when Americans join our armed services to serve our country. We have to honor our veterans and regard them with the highest esteem.

You can watch the Joe Bruni documentary here on CNN.

Our veterans deserve better. They deserve better than to be cooked to death in prison like Jerome Murdough who had a mental illness and was homeless and was sent to jail.

The time is now to get real: our veterans deserve better.

Having a Full and Robust Life

I’m not a fan of labels like psychiatric survivor. To me a survivor is merely someone who survived an experience. I’d rather be a winner: a person who got in the ring and fought the illness and was the last one standing.

In recovery as in life there are no guarantees. We have to treasure what we have because it could be gone tomorrow. That’s what I would tell anyone who doesn’t have a mental illness too.

I want others to focus on the humanitarian work I do not on what I’ve achieved for myself. I use my experiences to uplift and inspire others–true–yet my goal was not to claim that everyone can do what I’ve done or has to do what I’ve done to be given credit in society.

Since I first started blogging years ago I’ve championed that each of us figures out what makes us happy and goes and does that. Your blueprint for living your life is going to be different from mine.

My ulterior motive was to show how I rose up against the stigma the mental health staff tried to reinforce when I dared tell them I wanted to get a job and live independently. My contention has always been that a person diagnosed with schizophrenia should not settle for less than full participation in society on equal footing with everyone else.

Most people covet having a “normal” life or covet being “normal.”

The book flap for Kelly Cutrone’s Normal Gets You Nowhere defines normal as:

“according with, constituting, or not deviating from a norm, rule, or principle / conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern / of, relating to, or characterized by average intelligence or development.”

That doesn’t sound like something I ever wanted to be though at one point I wanted to be “free from mental defect” another definition of normal.

Like I said I consider myself to be an ordinary person. I simply wanted to do great things. That’s the difference: each of us has gifts we were born with to use to better ourselves and others in the world.

Everyone has God-given gifts and talents. No one is better than anyone else because in this regard we’re all equals: we have gifts and talents. Daring to use these strengths to create a better life for ourselves and others is the secret to success in recovery.

I make the case for striving to have a full and robust life not just surviving hell and living a life of anger and resentment.

A trend has come on to champion having an ordinary, average life in recovery. Yet I don’t think a person is ordinary or average even if they have a “normal” life. I think greatness lies in each of us regardless of whether a person has a masters degree or is a JD or MD.

That’s why shortly I’m going to feature other peer stories in here. I promised this a couple of months ago and I should be able to start this in September.

A lot of people still cling to using a label like psychiatric survivor. My goal is to showcase peers who have real lives apart from their illness and apart from their diagnosis.

Having a normal life doesn’t appeal to me: having a full and robust life does.

That’s what I intend to do: feature peers who have full and robust lives. Stay tuned.

Stunned is the Word

Stunned is the word for what happened to me when I did a good deed this weekend.

I was entering a market and a woman sitting outside belted out: “Spare a couple dollars for a sandwich.”

“Come inside and pick something,” I quickly ushered her in. Luckily the vegetable pannini was only five dollars. “Can I get a soda?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said and she came back with a San Pellegrino.

“How much?” I queried the cashier. “Seven dollars,” she said. I paid and started my own shopping.

“Thank you, thank you.” The woman hurried outside to her perch in front of the store.

As I exited with my own provisions I thought the woman might have a mental illness. She might collect SSI and not have money this far along in the month to buy food. She was not skeletal like a heroin addict and did not wear long sleeves. Her hair was immaculate and she wore a tee shirt and pants.

I have a good nature so I didn’t think the woman had money and was too cheap to want to buy her own food. She might have been on the cusp of becoming homeless.

Kelly Cutrone in her book Normal Gets You Nowhere excoriates Christians and other shoppers who go in and out of stores buying $19.99 junk gifts and step around homeless people in front of the stores. No one gives these subway grate fixtures money or offers to buy them a slice of pizza.

Today I was tested: I bought a woman begging for change a meal. My intuition tells me she might have had a mental illness and couldn’t afford food this far along in the month.

I do not like to think she was an ordinary woman too cheap to buy her own meals. A song title claims the singer “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and this might have been talking about the scraps of love he wanted a woman to give him. Yet it would astound me if the woman had no pride and was too cheap to buy her own food.

This is a great mystery to me right now.

The trains were running late and it took me two hours to get home. By then my broccoli rabe was wilted. The delice soft cheese was melted.

It was another hot night in a cool city.

Zadie Smith on Writing and Writers

Thursday I was unable to write a blog entry so I’m going to post one today. I’ll focus on the writing life again and back track in the coming week to other topics.

Zadie Smith is famous for writing the first novel White Teeth. While I did not read that novel I read 50 pages of her novel The Autograph Man. The book bored me and I didn’t find it to be exceptional so I quit reading it. Also: the main character had no redeeming features that would’ve allowed me to like him even though he was repulsive in his behavior.

Though this has been my experience I can say that Zadie Smith redeems herself by talking about the craft of writing on the Internet and by giving readers her 10 rules of writing. She defines writers as Macro Planners or Micro Managers.

I’m in the macro planner camp. Yet more than this I can see the scenes of novels in my head like I’m a director filming a movie. I can visualize the action of a novel in my head clear as real events.

It also helps to cut out photos from magazines that can give you a visual cue as to how a character looks or what a room looks like or of other images in a book.

I have also gone to bed at night and in my sleep I’ve dreamed of the plots of novels. Ideas for plots of novels have come to me in my sleep. Like any macro manager I don’t write a book from beginning to middle to end: I write the scenes that resonate with me at that particular moment.

I also find that dialogue pops into my head at random moments during the day or night, on weekdays or on the weekend.

To be fair I most likely have to read White Teeth or NW to see if I can adjust my view of Zadie Smith’s writing.

Read Zadie Smith’s views on two types of writers.  Her style of crafting a novel might be different. Each style is rightfully useful on its own. One style is not any better than another.

Christina Bruni’s Future TED Talk

Giving an 18-minute TED Talk has become a phenomenon in recent years. I would talk about something specific if I had the opportunity to give a TED Talk.

Here goes:

What I write springs from my premise that people can recover from mental illnesses. So I write things as if recovery is possible. I’m confident my readers have the capability of trying to create a better life for themselves. This blueprint for living is going to be different for each of us.

I have strong views because I’m stubborn: I refused to believe I couldn’t achieve my goals. I knew that as long as I took action I would achieve what I set out to.

How come I was able to think I could do these things? I didn’t know whether I could: I decided I had to try, because as long as I tried my best, there would be no shame if I failed.

You have to fail: failure is often necessary in order to arrive at a better place in your life. A person should not be afraid to fail big and fail often.

Perfection isn’t the goal. Being certain you’ve done the right things all the time is a false security–and being certain at all times is not the goal either.

Taking action is the goal. Have you heard the 1980s term “paralysis by analysis?” Taking risks is the goal. The more risks you take, the more confidence you get.

You don’t get confident doing nothing. You don’t get confident watching TV all the time. You get confident by taking action even when you don’t have the faith that things will work out. The Zen saying tells us: “Leap, and the net will appear.”

A university professor told his class: “Everyone has an agenda.” Your purpose for being here on earth in this lifetime is your agenda. What is your vision for what you want to do in your life? What is it you want to champion for yourself and others?

Find that purpose–the spark that gives you energy to wake up in the morning. Go do and advance that and you won’t need to be certain of anything. You’ll take action regardless of the result because you believe in your vision.

You won’t always win. It might take you years and years to be successful. That’s okay.

Do what you believe in. Passion is the goal.

Beautiful Things Are Never Perfect

I bought an ocean-blue tee shirt with white letters that proclaim: Beautiful Things Are Never Perfect.

This seems to apply to life more than anything. Living your life and living in recovery is not ever perfect. You keep on walking even when the road is long.

A female singer titled her song “I’ll Take the Long Road.” Sometimes: the long road is the only road you have to go down to arrive at a better place in your life. The hardest-won victory is the sweetest.

This is ultimately why I champion getting the right help right away: as hard as life is living with schizophrenia for most people, it should not have to be exponentially harder because treatment was delayed or is non-existent.

At long last I found a therapist. In the 1990s I read that people who enter therapy go on to increase their income. I told a guy this back then. Two years later he saw me on a subway platform and told me: “You were right Chris. I had therapy sessions, and I got a higher-paying job.”

Entering therapy can help a person set and achieve goals. Talking to a therapist can help a person live through a hard time they’re experiencing.

Remember: Beautiful Things Are Never Perfect. Life isn’t perfect and neither are human beings.

It’s not a mark of shame to enter therapy. U2 titled a song: “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own.”

And hey, it’s true that you can increase your income by going into therapy.