Relationships

Warning…this is a post about mental illness and suicide. It is also a very real post about where I am right now.

I cannot help but wonder if in this stage of my life, if guilt has any real purpose. I carry guilt over what kind of mother I am, I carry guilt about what kind of daughter I was and now tonight I am carrying a very new kind of guilt. You see, my mom lied to me my whole life. Not just about who my dad was but who my siblings were. I missed out on having a relationship with any of them because of her.

After spending years looking for him, I finally found my brother. The last time I had seen him was at our dad’s funeral. Unfortunately, Chris struggled with some demons. We would spend time on the phone with him telling me that he had been searching for me and that I was his “savior.” However, I allowed his actions and his words to keep me away from him. I allowed the manipulation of his mother to shut him out of my life. Now it all makes sense. My brother and I were clearly cut from the same cloth. We both battled demons known as mental illness. Being mentally unwell is not anything to joke around about or talk about flippantly. It is a very real and very dark place to be. I have spent many nights as of late curled up in a fetal position thinking about how much life would be better for everyone if I was not here and feeling like I had no more fight in me.

Unfortunately after I ended any kind of relationship I was trying to have with him, my brother walked into his shed at his home and took his life. Clearly, he had no fight left in him and sadly, he did not feel like he had a safe place to land. I have been in that shed, metaphorically a million times. That place where the voices won’t stop and where the pain is so real you can feel it physically.

Now I sit here with this new guilt. What if a relationship with me could have been what he needed. What we both needed. What if God had plans to use me to show him who his real Savior was? I failed at both of those tests. I know that I cannot be all things for all people but if I can’t even show up for the people that need me the most, how do I live guilt free?

Thankfully, I have professionals I can talk to, I have medication I take several times a day and I have a whole slew of friends that I have allowed myself to be very vulnerable with. I wish that Chris had had those things.

If you or someone you know is heading to that shed, please reach out or grab their hand and show them they have a safe place

Hi, my name is Gail95. I'm here because my brother is dealing with severe depression and anxiety. I am worried about him and am not always sure when to step back. He is also dealing with a relationship where his ex is in distress and constantly asking my brother for help. I see my brother try to listen to his ex, but my brother is too depressed, he then gets overwhelmed by fear that since he can't help his ex will die. My brother can't stop taking calls from his ex. I want to take my brother's phone, but don't know the best way to help him avoid this person.

#MightyTogether

In relationships, I’ve been told many times that I check off all the boxes (kind, compassionate, family-oriented, loyal, and so on). But the one box they never wanted in their life was chronic illness.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I feel like the world we live in needs to understand that literally anyone can develop a chronic illness at any point in their life.

For me, my chronic illnesses started showing up in childhood. So, in some ways, I’ve had a lot of time to learn how to cope, adapt, and figure out what life looks like for me and of course I’m still working on it.

But I don’t think people always understand that chronic illness isn’t something that only happens to certain people. Mental health conditions can appear at any point in someone’s life. Accidents happen. Injuries happen. Illnesses happen. Bodies change. Life changes. Someone can wake up one day and suddenly find themselves navigating a reality they never imagined for themselves.

Not all chronic illnesses are the same, but the emotions that come with receiving a diagnosis and knowing it’s lifelong can be surprisingly similar: grief, fear, anger, uncertainty, loneliness, and the feeling that you have somehow become a burden to the people around you.

But you are not a burden.

You and your chronic illness are not baggage.

Your chronic illness is a bouquet you get to carry every day. Sometimes we carry it gracefully. Sometimes our flowers are blooming. Sometimes they’re wilting, and we’re just trying to make it through the day.

And when they wilt, we don’t throw the bouquet away. We refresh the water. We tend to the flowers. We give ourselves the care we need and try again tomorrow.

Your chronic illness does not make you less worthy of love. It does not make you less deserving of a relationship, a career, friendships, adventures, or a beautiful life.

It is a part of your story, but it is not the entirety of who you are.

And maybe, with time, we can stop seeing chronic illness as baggage someone else has to carry and start seeing it for what it really is: a bouquet we’ve learned how to carry.

Sometimes with grace. Sometimes with both hands. Sometimes with a little help from a friend.

But we carry it.

#MentalHealth #Depression #Fibromyalgia #Lupus #Uveitis #Blindness #Glaucoma #ChronicPain #Anxiety #AnkylosingSpondylitis #Arthritis #HypothyroidismUnderactiveThyroidDisease #HashimotosThyroiditis

Knowledge is power. Those who are depressed feel powerless and therefore have no need for memory or perception (don't want to be here / have no need to remember anything). This is the emotional mechanics of depression and elation or wanting to be here and learn or not.

Reality doesn't care if you like how it works or not. It will only work for you if you understand how it works and obey its rules. Put your hand in a mincing machine and it will be reduced to grated bone and gristle, no matter who you are or think you are.

Sound and motion destroys your ability to think and always has and always will because it stops you turning within and examining your experience, by turning your attention outwards instead. In the same way silence and stillness allows you to do the opposite. These have always been the methods for achieving these states and always will remain so because that is reality.

You can either stay and build upon your presence or cut all links, destroy all relationships and move on elsewhere. This applies to the mind as well as body (mental and physical resources - problem fixing). ‘Only connect’ as C S Forester said, in order to fix things together in physical reality and make sense of them, mentally.

Disbelief frees you to move on as faith keeps you where you are. You stay and accumulate or move and abandon your possession(s), jettisoning everything to move on, mentally and physically (the faster you go, the more you jettison; the slower you go, the more you accumulate).

Disintegrated personalities, that is those in dispersed mental states are like nervous birds, never settling anywhere for long. Integrated (concentrated) personalities on the other hand are like elephants, who are fully grounded in reality.

Failure exists from the point you give up effort – success comes from persevering until you achieve your aims (finding out where your curiosity will lead).

A rigid mind pursues the facts and insists on them. A more relaxed mind plays with the facts, creatively (down the rabbit hole and the collapse of ego / intellect). In Zen these are known as the diamond mind, which cuts through everything to get to the truth and the butterfly mind, which flits from subject to subject, without gaining much detail because it doesn’t stay long enough to gain depth (pick and mix versus concrete, certain, unchanging, defined reality).

I've spent almost a decade as a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, most of it as a Clinical Director overseeing programs for autistic kids and their families. For years, I watched something happen over and over, and it never stopped bothering me.

A family would come in when their child was six, or eight, or eleven. We'd build a whole team around that kid — speech therapy, social skills groups, behavior support, school accommodations, a plan for almost everything. Then the child would turn 18, and almost all of it would disappear. Not because the need went away. Because the entire system, from funding to staffing to the way services are even categorized, was built around childhood.

Nobody warns families about this part. I didn't fully understand it myself until I watched it happen to clients I'd known for years — capable, funny, thoughtful young adults who suddenly had nowhere to go for the things they actually needed help with next: how to navigate a first date, how to tell if someone crossed a boundary, how to say no, what consent actually looks like outside of a textbook definition.

We spend years teaching kids on the spectrum how to function in a classroom. We spend almost none teaching adults how to navigate a relationship. I don't think that's a small oversight. I think it's a sign that the system quietly stops caring the moment someone turns 18 — not out of malice, just because nobody built the next chapter.

So I built it myself. I started Capable Hearts, an app for autistic and neurodivergent adults to build friendships and dating relationships, with a coaching line I run personally where I work through the exact things traditional services skip: consent, boundaries, reading social cues — not as abstract concepts, but as skills you can actually practice and get better at, the same way you'd practice anything else.

I want to be honest about something: building this hasn't been some triumphant startup story. Most days it's just me, sending emails that don't get answered, posting content that ten people see, wondering if I'm reaching anyone at all. I've had a regional center tell me flatly they "don't do dating apps," without ever asking what the coaching side actually does. I've had outreach go to the wrong inbox, sit unread for weeks, get politely declined by people who couldn't quite place what to make of what I was offering. It's been slower and lonelier than I expected, and there are days I've wondered if it was worth it.

But then I think about the client who once asked me, almost apologetically, how you're supposed to know if someone actually likes you back — because nobody had ever explained it to him in a way that made sense — and I remember why I'm doing this. That's not a niche question. That's a question every person deserves an honest answer to, and for a lot of autistic adults, there was simply nobody whose job it was to answer it.

I don't think this is a small problem hiding in a corner of disability services. I think it's a system that draws an arbitrary line at 18 and calls it done. If you're a parent watching your kid approach that birthday, or a self-advocate who's already lived through it, or another clinician who's seen this same pattern in your own practice — I don't think I'm the only one who's noticed. I'd like to hear if I'm wrong.

capablehearts.com