Let's throw this into this thread...let's take a different focus...we all feel, at times, silent, as that happens, and we feel scared..for me for so long I had a scare of reality, it was so cold, and empty. So let's take that, at our starting point, for those of us that are diagnosed with a mental health issue, that is how we feel, act, and emulate...we are...silent and scared...

And that is a visual, that we feel, when we are silent and scared, that we have the idea of needing and/or wanting help....help...help...

The words, silent and scared.....if one examines this thread...they will find someone with the screen name, Silentandscared

So this goes out to all of us, you most of all Silentandscared, for the things you wrote, and I extend, an invitation for everyone reading this who has ever felt silent and scared, to join in this coffee table discussion, here in a cyberspace coffee shop, let's examine what silentandscared wrote, she wrote about the thought of recovery being far away, that she just gets through each day, and in her signature, there is a fairy, a quotation about taking the world in your hands, and the statement about never telling a child their dreams are outlandish....

Silentandscared offered great insight to me, and I am obviously still struggling, struggling a great deal, and silentandscared helped me realize, things will be ADDED to my past in the form of the present, my past is a tragic tale, period. End of story- no adding. That is how I feel. I have been asking less mentally ill friends, looking into their eyes, stating, do you, Jodi, think, you could go, be a nurse, if _you_ had been through, and I mean through, in the ugliness form of the word through, what I have been _through_...all the while looking my friend Jodi, deep into her hazel eyes, until she pulls a back a little, from the sheer pain in my brown eyes....

I want to end the tragic tale, period. Adding? Cannot comprehend the act of adding to the tragic tale..when I showed a previous thread I had written about discarding my old self, my friend Denise, looked at me, stated you have discarded your old self...she is gone.....forever...no longer living......

But there is adding..tragic tales get sequels made sometimes with more quality than the original..sometimes the silent, the scared, meet you in cyberspace...and add on, to the tale, only to find Junerain is just as silent and scared, crying on the inside, not knowing what exactly to add, where to put the addition, where, in her heart of all hearts, is there room, to add anything, do tragic tales have happy endings, or, by defintion, are they tragic, sad, and thus illustrating the tragedy as just that, a tragedy..

The nursing school social worker approached me...the first two weeks of class....saying I had just ceased to participate in class discussions, that my professors expected _more_ of me....

I told them I had trouble sitting still...that I could for a period of time...then it became hard....

I was encouraged to move to the back of the classroom, in a classmate's desk who had left the program, that they were sensing things from, where I was sitting at the front, that made it hard to teach...

So I moved to the back...took on a new outlook..

Then, the social worker said..we understand, from what you told your teacher, you are bipolar...

( They had been questioning what had been going on at home, at home, at home until I felt I had to mutter something, anything..)

The social worker asked all kinds of questions about where I lived, who I lived with, informed me "because we have people who live in their cars.."

I do not live in my car, Theresa...

She then asked if I could afford new shoes..mine were old ones I had thrown on because I left pair at my boyfriend's....

Yes, i can afford new shoes, Theresa..

This time, this most recent time..I called HER out her being the social worker named Theresa..I stated, ASSERTIVELY..

Theresa I have had and will have to live with stigma my whole lifespan...I do not expect it from a social worker, not someone who studied stigma in their studies to become a social worker...

Next I informed her I wanted to steer clear of the hospital where I was in the psychiatric wing, not be a nurse _there_................._there_ I was nursed myself, a role reversal would feel weird and inappropriate..

Next I told her that she, like all the employers who fired me, was focusing on the physical...that there was something different about me, and very different about me, yet, this difference was an emotional one..

No one can quite put a finger on what exactly is different about me, just that I am.....

I am and I think it is something in a category other than illness- people have strange reactions to me, this have to come to expect...

The social worker admitted she had stigma, a touch of it..

_I_ am silent and scared, more scared then even silent...scared that i will not and cannot be a nurse with a tragic tale that needs adding on, but seems to be ending in a period. Jodi this is my tragic tale PERIOD then Jodi what would you do if you had been through what i had been THROUGH.

I am terrified of donning my scrubs, showing up at the hospital more of a drive away than the one I had inhabited..

Terrified of the respect required, the trust, for at times, _I_ have not trusted myself.......

I look at the pink fairy that is Silentandscared's signature...it is beautiful yet mysterious and unique...it is doing just what silentandscared stated, taking the world by your hands..

The meek shall inherit the Earth...according to the Bible...I have been meek so long...now I am a force to be reckoned with...

As silent andscared writes.....recovery...the R word....seems so far away, so very far away..

Yet I must not be silent with my patients, whether they be psychiatric patients, opthamology patients, dermatology patients...

I must create a less sensitive shell......to deal....with patients of all kinds..

I have my pink highlighter in my hand, ready to get back to my drug cards due tomorrow, it is late, and nursing school awaits..

It has come to me the title of my autobiography, without a doubt, the cover will have a picture of me, in my scrubs, with the statement, "This Nurse Has a Story"....

My pink highlighter is fading..into..the kind of pink..that is in silentandscared's signature, the color of the fairy...

Pink slowly fades to purple..........