What sparked your WANT

I’ve been thinking about how I’m getting through my days and how I have two brothers who are struggling now. I’ve been so frustrated with the youngest one because he was JUST in rehab. But he was involuntarily committed and now I hear he’s still in a bit of his anger phase.

I’m trying to remember that nothing will turn him around until he WANTS to turn around. He won’t change until he WANTS to change.

My WANT came in two parts.

My first wave of WANT came after I got out of hospital when I tried to leave this life. I was sitting at my parents home, my kid sis was in arms reach of me for the entire day. I do remember when I got up to go pee. I shut the door, peed, pulled myself together and took a moment to just stand and catch my breath. But my sis was pounding on the door like there was fire. She was frantic. When I opened the door she was almost in tears. She thought I was trying to leave this life again. I’m just having a pee and thinking. But she was freaked. I wasn’t allowed out of her sight for a while. She was even skipping school to sit and watch me read in my trailer. Seeing her so scared for so long made me wish I’d never done it and made me WANT to get better to never get to that depressed self destruction again.
So, I fought the drug cravings, I fought the alcohol cravings and I took my meds like I was told to.

My second wave of WANT came when my sis got her drivers license. It was around Christmas and I was sitting in bed, most likely in my head and she wrote me a note saying that she was going to go downtown to walk around and look at all the Christmas windows.

When she got home I found out it she went alone. Just her, walking around, drinking hot coco. I was thinking, I could have done that. I could have gone too. I wish I was healthier, I WANTED to go see the Christmas Windows. That word hit my brain again… WANT. I WANTED to get better and go do things. I just felt like life was passing me by. I did not WANT to become Kafka’s Cockroach.

So I stopped telling myself that I wasn’t able to help myself. I sort of put a scale in my journal of how I was feeling. I used to skip therapy for any little discomfort. But I had WANT now, so if my panic scale was 1-4 I still forced myself to go. If it was 5+ I really had to stay home. My scale grew and so did my stay home number. My scale goes to 11 and my stay home number is around 7 or 8. (unless it’s to my personal therapist, then I go no matter what the number.)

I will always admit, I have a LOT of help to get through my day. But I didn’t get my own place or my job or where I am now… without that first spark of WANT.

What sparked YOU’RE sense of WANT?

7 Likes

My sense of “want” in terms of being mentally ill was to make it all stop. The voices, the delusions, the agitation, the insomnia, the paranoia and distrust, everyone being an enemy, I just wanted it to stop. The diagnosis is a life sentence, and I wasn’t getting any better. I just wanted to wake up from a nightmare that, as far as I knew, would never end. I did get relief by the end of the same year I was diagnosed, I found the right medication cocktail, three meds, two of them taken twice a day. It took trial and error and hope.

Hopes and dreams should be realistic. Fully recovering on medication is a stroke of luck; only 1 in 5 people diagnosed with schizophrenia fully recover. Another 1/5 of people are improved significantly. Either one is realistic, its about a 40% chance at significant/virtually complete recovery. Just be fortunate you arent the 1/3 who actually get worse. Schizophrenia is not fair. It’s the closest thing to a curse to be insane and know that you’re insane, I’ve been there, it’s just unfair and hard to describe. I remember when I simply didnt know what was real or not and just stayed home and drank as much as I could, as often as I could. At least you aren’t still there.

Count your blessings, so to speak. I’m not religious but that’s the best advice I think I can give.

3 Likes

I think my WANT came a few years ago. I was in a 4 year relationship and was functioning very poorly. I was actively psychotic 90% of the day. I was completely dependent on my partner for almost everything.

It got to be too much for him to take. So he ended our relationship. I had to move out on my own for the first time in my life.

That experience made me WANT to get better ASAP. I vowed that I would never be that dependent on anyone again.

I started pushing myself. And I actually started to get better.

Now my ex partner is my friend, and part of my support network. Along with a few other friends, they’ve motivated me to keep fighting to improve.

And I keep them in mind every day as I try to improve. It definitely gives me a continuous sense of WANT :slight_smile:

Blessings,

Anthony

6 Likes

seeing how much i affected my wife;
when i would sit in a corner and ask for the same reassurance and repeating my self. ( ocd )
the fear i saw in her eyes when i was angry.
the sadness in her eyes because she thought she was not helping me.
take care

2 Likes

Excellent thread.

I had a different path coming out of the swamp. I was shocked when I realized I did have the terrible illness and might need the help of antipsychotics the rest of my life. It is a sentence or a curse. I was depressed for about one year, feeling very fragile and frustrated. But I had to stand up again mostly because I wanted to show a good example of striving to my children. I think my child could have a lot of adversity in his life and I am going to show him how I would overcome those challenges with my courage, patience and resilience. I can’t leave him a example of giving up. I know I would have been still positive in attitude even if I didn’t have a child, because being upbeat is much, much better than being depressed and sorrowful…you have no other choice but to stand up to face the challenge.

Greenlife

3 Likes