What skills or lessons have you learned recently?
With my bipolar disorder I have learned in the past couple of years to take it easy.
I used to be a perfectionist in the past. I was always achieving something. If it wasn’t for work, then it would be for sport. At some point in life I would run early in the morning, go to my job as a financial analyst of banks and portfolio manager in a cool financial consultancy in Amsterdam, then to the gym, and later at home, study the Dutch language. I felt I had always to do something!
All that should have changed after my first psychosis, but it didn’t. While I stopped my frequent visits to the gym, I didn’t stop trying to learn something new, and my bipolar disorder (with which I was diagnosed after my second psychosis) pushed me, if anything, to do more.
Ha, I thought, if you inflict such a label on me, and tell me that it is chronic, then I will just show you that you are wrong. No one should be told that they are chronically sick.
And so, I out-performed. After I got my diagnosis (which would vary, depending on the doctor in charge), I moved countries three times, learned another language, obtained a PhD in England, gave birth to my son, and became an expert in subjects in which I had no diplomas.
Year after year I would prove to my doctors and myself that there is nothing wrong with me, and that I was capable of leading a life, which is considered as success by our society’s standards.
But I had to change this attitude after I had moved back to the Netherlands and became unwell again and again, until a nice psychiatrist put stop on all that. I am now on the medication which allows me to lead a ‘normal’ life, where I have a good job, great friends around, my son doing well, and being healthy.
My perfectionism had to go. I had to start paying attention to my vulnerable mental health. I won’t learn a new language (how may languages is one supposed to know, in any case?), or a totally new subject. I am not interested in climbing up in terms of my career. I don’t need to run every morning, or just run in general, and I don’t have to be constantly busy with something.
Nowadays I relax. I learned to appreciate the beauty of simple things, such as nice coffee in the morning, enjoying my lunch, having friends for dinner, cooking from scratch, having a nap at weekends, walking instead of running, and not trying to appear to the rest of the world as if I am perfect.
I live day by day where I am no longer perfect.
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