After months of me pining after a Kindle, my usually-party-pooping doctor finally let me buy one. Now I can read books all day, and not just during Phone Time. I had a few paper books previously, but I wasn’t allowed to accrue too many. So, my mood is up and everybody wants to know what…

I wrote this last night. Wish me luck!

I had a conversation with my doctor today that felt novel to me but he clearly remembered having been over everything he said a lot of times previously. I interpreted his demeanor as annoyed, but I’m hoping I was wrong. Anyway, he recommended some exercises to monitor my emotions. I attribute my rekindled motivation to…

I’ve been working really hard lately to rebuild my relationships with my sister and brother. It’s going better with the sister than the brother. I think motherhood and a kind husband have my sister on a path that is much more warm and gentle than the one my brother has taken. Brother thinks that if…

I was reading The Happiness Hypothesis and found out about Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology who wrote a positive version of the DSM. When I got my phone I googled him and found this: About 15 years ago, in the very early stages of positive psychology, I was on maternity leave and started…

I think that since the hospital now seems so familiar to me, I may be just assuming that everyone else knows what an average day is like in the psych hospital, when in fact it is rather enigmatic to most people. So this post is going to be about what we actually do. Daily Schedule…

A cousin who has been there for me through thick and thin commented yesterday that I had “come so far in the past two years.” This really meant a lot to me because I tend to have my 🤬-hole dad’s voice in my head characterizing my “entire adult life” as ” a steady decline.” On…

A strange thing happened today. I was going through old journal entries, looking for things written by me about religion, which was hard to find because I had to dig through near-infinite entries about pain and suicidality. And for some reason, something in me was genuinely moved by what I was going through in 2011….

I’m still reading The Happiness Hypothesis (I’m a slow reader) and to anyone who hasn’t read it, I cannot recommend it highly enough! Last night I read chapter 8, “The Felicity of Virtue,” and a point he made was that Western values were not as useful as they could be in part because we’ve striven…