Thanks emmy. Wow I was beginning to wonder if I was invisible here! LOL. This board doesn't get a lot of traffic on some parts I noticed.

This is all TOTALLY new turf for me. I'm fairly well educated and intelligent and read things on my own, but to be perfectly honest, all these years I've been skeptical and suspicious of the field of mental health as some sort of conspiracy to enforce societal "norms" and "conformity" by oppressing people who are different and gifted (hence "dangerous" to the "herd" or rather, to those with a vested interest in keeping the "herd" a "herd"!) -- and thus could only regard these creative and colorful descriptions of "Us" as something of a bad joke -- along the lines of, "this is how They categorize Us because they are threatened by Us and must try to force Us to become like Them." And of COURSE "They" are going to likewise categorize THAT kind of thinking as disturbed/psychotic because it sabotages their game!!

But after 20+ years of being like this, I have come to a place where my thinking on that is changing drastically. I'm not entirely sure why, but it is. Maybe the prospect of being swallowed whole by my "other world" or my "madness", and subsequently finding myself unable to be self-sufficient in a practical, mundane sense (and the consequences that go with that, like homelessness, etc.) is driving me to find some answers. Of course there are other things too, personal things that happened to me and kind of "broke" me to the point where I just basically feel I have lost all objectivity and all ability to parse reality on my own ... the bottom line is, I'm at a place where I believe I need help, and that this route is the one I need to pursue at this time.

Thanks for listening -- and thanks again for responding.
~Mal