Luckily, this isn't a motivational blog.

Apparently, I am now considered ongoing paranoid-psychotic.  Which I do not actively feel in an uninterrupted way. Adaptation is, eh, great, I guess. 

Sometimes life is going along about 80% like it used to prior to my mental illness, never 100%, but I'm good with that now. I'm basically writing the script~as much as anyone ever can~ & then schizophrenia interjects 254 paragraphs with impunity.  Hate That, but luckily~over time~ it doesn't feel as bad as it should all of the time(just 1/3 to 1/2 of the time). Funny, too, what you can be thankful for. 

Like the IRS picking up with a live person 3 phone numbers & 1 hour of holding later, then actually nicely helping me to resolve a small issue.
But then I needed to call back, & they started asking questions about my 2015 return only for identification purposes.  Sure, I thought as I started to eat Smuckers peanut butter from the jar.  A highly appropriate coping-response I think. 

I happened to look up a favored Pulitzer prize winner only to be met with his mug shots from DUI's.  The Pulitzer came young & early, the mugs late, in senior age.  Then his life partner left him but kept esoterically dissing him in the press. Is there a preferred order for all of that? 

I'm a schizophrenic who never did anything amazing or brave in her life, but mug shots I do not have.  Should I be thankful for that? 

Because, it seems, unlike lots of  the challenged  I read about, I reflexively feel bitter or hurt by what my life is now much more easily than I can access my gratitude or talk about hope or positivity.  I start thinking I'm not thankful enough & then I wonder how I can ever be thankful for this sort of life. 

You have adapted to voices & sounds that hate you waking you in the morning to tell you to run, sit, slap yourself....how come? had enough? why? eat, go, waitsmilelaugh, see what you did? lie down, drink water(I hear this at least 50 times a day), come, it's over, pig, hahahaha, nails-chalkboard sound.... & then I cry when someone says job or a neighbor speaks, or a siren blares. And that's the way it is, sans the my illness does not define me unembraceable bs.  Because many days it does. But then it would appear I mostly gather myself again.  And Mr. Pulitzer?  He can't be having it easy, either. 

Origins Unkept

AIDS activized me in the late 80s.  A columnist in my town's newspaper wrote a commentary blaming AIDS on promiscuity, & less obviously, on gay men.  I wrote a letter to the editor rebutting it, believing it would not be published.  It was, & after a follow-up conversation with the owner/editor, I was invited to write an article about AIDS, its causes, & its toll on society.

My best friend wasn't interested in AIDS she said, so she didn't want to read the article.  She did, however, months later, want me to go with her for her HIV test results.  Negative.  The only time I ever got pissed at Gay Men's Health Crisis was when they ran:  Don't Take the Test.  It's Bad News. ads.  I still hate that(long-defunct) campaign.

I was a little surprised when the church secretary at my father's place of employ made a point of commenting on my letter to the editor so positively.  Years later, she & her husband, the deacon, raised their grandchildren after their daughter succumbed to AIDS.  She'd been exposed to it from a man she met at church.

When I first started reading blogs,  I blog-met two HIV+  bloggers, Nelishia & Mark, whom I grew to like & admire,

This post was going somewhere else entirely a few minutes ago.  The second word of the post keeps tapping me on the shoulder.  3 charities are in my will, but the force has seeped away.

Nothing activizes me anymore, & I'd not fully realized that until now.  I could write that I don't have the mental strength for it - which sometimes is true- but really I no longer have the heart or the proper sustainable mind-set for it.  

Each time I've read  My disability does not define me  I've pushed down envy.  Perhaps I have not yet learned the proper way to calculate mine, because it seems to permeate me.  I'm going to try to recalculate.

I wrote that a few days ago.  I'm in a slightly better place now.  I've been pushing myself -sometimes gently, sometimes not-- to do rather than to think about what I can no longer do.