Do not waste time thinking about what you could have done differently. Keep your eyes on the road ahead and do it differently now. - Karen Salmansohn
I can’t change the fact that I went off my medication twice, which led to two of my psychotic breaks. I had my reasons, including an intrusive side effect and a lack of initial evidence if I needed the medication. Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like without my psychotic breaks. I would have never had to be cognitively damaged and heal. I would have never had to go through terrifying delusions complete with auditory and visual hallucinations that made them a hundred times worse. I think about all the pain I went through but also how it impacted those around me. I think about all the embarrassment I went through too, where I wasn’t even sure what my future would look like, and I felt utterly hopeless.
However, I did learn from my mistakes and have decided to use medication for life.
Emotional and cognitive recovery are gradual processes that take infinite patience, and while I have reached where I think I always wanted to go in life, I haven’t forgotten my life lessons based on mistakes. Every night when I take my medicine, it is an affirmation that I don’t have to suffer like I did ever again. It feels like an act of empowerment.
I don’t have to focus on the past because I love where I currently am. It’s much easier to focus on the present and not dwell in what-ifs if you embrace your current life. While my life would have been so much easier and less painful had I never gone off my antipsychotic, I have to realize that had not everything happened, exactly how it happened down to the day, I wouldn’t be where I am right now. And where I am right now, I dare say, makes everything I went through start to make sense somehow.
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