what's in a name?

Mental challenge or not, when you reach a certain age you start to wonder what your life would be like had you made different choices. At least that is the age I have reached. I wonder what my life would be like if I had said yes to marriage or chosen not to further my education or if I had chosen to stay in my hometown. As a Catholic I wonder what kind of choices I would have made if I had been raised in the church instead of taking a very winding road to Catholicism.

I wonder quite a bit about my health. What if I had known that my paternal grandmother struggled with paranoid schizophrenia like I knew my maternal great aunt had gone blind? Would I have sought out treatment when I began to hear things that others couldn’t hear? Would I have questioned my dark days as depression instead of chalking it up to being a moody cancer? Would I have denied myself the support of the clinical and peer communities for so long?

Technically, I think I’m considered to be over the hill and these are things I wonder about. There are no regrets in my wondering, just curiosity. Everything I have done up to this point has led me to this life. I love this life. I love being a peer specialist. It’s like being a teacher of sorts. I get to teach people from diverse backgrounds how to take stock of themselves to work with what they’ve got to get to where they want to be. I get to meet them wherever they are in their journey; discover with them where they want to move forward to and help them see what they already have inside them that will get them there.

It is an act of service that inspires me to move forward in my own journey. To be honest, it’s not always sunshine and lollipops though. Sometimes it’s really difficult. It’s not difficult because of the individuals I work with. They move at their own pace, at their own rhythm and get there-wherever there is for them-in their own time. It’s difficult sometimes because of the many movements occurring simultaneously.

I have my feet in so many worlds, all striving for the same thing-social justice. All of these movements want to see individuals of all walks of life get a fair shake. They want to see institutionalized “isms” eradicated and they want all people to have opportunities to live a life of their choosing. The challenge is in the language. There is no common language and the terminology we are throwing around seems to change like the seasons. It’s hard to keep up.

One group asserts that if a person is struggling with an altered perception of themselves or the world then they have a mental illness. Another group says, no, there’s no such thing as mental illness; there is only mental differences. And everyone is do touchy about how we refer to ourselves and others. Am I a peer, a patient, a person, a client, an individual, a consumer, and so on.  I have personally observed individuals from different groups who have fundamentally the same agendas walk away from discussions over a lack of a common language. It’s as if we have been traumatized by the words traditionally used to describe us and our extraordinary experiences. But what we fail to remember is that language only limits us if we allow it to. It’s a personal decision to remain within the boundaries of a label.

So, someone like me, who doesn’t care about language as long as it is coming from a place of mutual respect gets relegated to the kids table. I say let individuals decide what language works for them. I’m not offended when my psych doctor refers to me as a client or patient or consumer because that’s how he sees me. That’s not how I see myself. His language doesn’t begin to describe all that I am, all that I’ve overcome or all that I will accomplish. I really think we all just need to take a step back and get over ourselves. Why not spend that energy on what’s important, namely, the overall treatment of people struggling to get or regain control over their lives.

After all, most individuals are probably asking themselves the same questions I’m asking. “What if I had done things differently?” “What can I do now to effect change in my life?” “What do I need to do to get where I want to be?” Let’s be radical and focus on helping them find those answers instead of alienating one another with language. Let’s not get so invested in our camp that we miss the mark. How about we try to avoid the mistakes that have been made in the past by our “do-gooder” ancestors and maintain a curious mind. Let’s assume the best of one another regardless of the language we use and be about the business of empowering one another to live our best possible lives.