I have been living on my own for over five and a half years now. Throughout most of that time, there has been a great deal of turmoil with caring for me. What made me realize that I needed to get back track was understanding what I need to do and not what I want to do to care for myself.

 When you move out on your own as an adult, especially if you have challenges, you want to have the power to do the things that you want to do. This for me came in the wanting to stay up all night and experience different things, of which some were that I felt needed to be felt, but I never felt comfortable enough to experience them in someone else’s house. I did not realize that while I did have such desires and feelings, there was no understanding that doing something to the extremes that society set forth was too sensitive for me. However, I was in a state where I was unwilling to realize that and as such it causes many conflicts with so many people.

There were so many instances where I was not acting in the way that was normal for me. Others took notice and called my therapist on it. Until my manic episode last year, after making a very destructive decision, I did not understand the severity of just how terrible things could be. While I did start the way towards making the right choices, after a while, the choices were not just setting into place to the point that they just did not make sense to me.

But there were many realities to the situation. While what I was experiencing was nice, it was often things that many kept behind closed doors and to themselves and there was a necessity for me to do things like work and go to day services, which in recent months required me to be my best as I had to share paratransit with others not within the confines of where I was going.

Throughout this time, I was seeing more of that unhealthy person because I was in very fluid situations that I could not always control, and it made me realize the necessity of caring for myself in the way that I needed to. I had also realized that I had never really set a routine for myself so that I could be able to thrive living independently and this is what I needed to have to care for myself in the way that I needed to.

While I am a few weeks in this process, it is gradually getting better within time. I have realized that because I have been off track for so long that it is going to take some time before it is going to be constant and finally, I am slowly seeing the fruits of doing what I need to do versus what I want to do come into fruition.

The understanding of the necessity of caring for myself is slowly becoming more concrete within time and I am seeing the fruits of my labor and cheering myself on increasingly by understanding that this is the way that it must be, and I had to accept this in my life.