I’ve used this blog as a dream journal over the years, dating back to 2016. I created the blog in 2014 with the express desire to get back into art again. See my recent post Grieving what has been taken for background. I plan now to write a bit more about dreams, but right now I want to talk about creativity and my recovery.
As I mentioned before, it has generally been a grind to work on this blog, and I attribute it to my mental health and addiction history, including the trauma associated with hospitalizations, jail, and losing my sanity multiple times.
This year, I’ve now been admitted to inpatient psychiatric care (mental hospital) two times, for a total of 24 days. After the first stay I completed electroconvulsive treatments. I was doing much better for over a month as a result, but my meds needed to be adjusted and it did not happen in time. As a result I destabilized and needed to be hospitalized again. Part of my despair in the second round of this was the fact that it keeps happening even though I’ve maintained total sobriety for 12 years and have generally taken my meds without fail. I’ve been hospitalized 5 times in that span, and while bad decisions have sometimes played a part, it’s not always been my fault, or not my fault completely. Separating myself from the guilt and shame or having an illness has been a struggle all within itself.
The other component was despair over lack of success in romantic relationships since getting clean, and that prompted a pretty emo post I wrote on the day I got admitted to inpatient in October. I made it private after I got out because I do not, as a general rule, want to include anything that promotes giving up for good. But at that time I really felt defeated, and in clinical terms my mood was very unstable again, so back to the mental hospital!
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