Over the past month or so of understanding of what I need to do to take care of my mental health, I am beginning to understand and learn what tools and coping strategies I need to deploy to have a successful life. Does it provide a perfect life? No, but it makes life much easier to live and provides more opportunities to work on other things  that have never been attainable in a healthy way before,  like eating healthy and losing weight.

Being able to better take care of myself has helped me be more of the person that I know that I need to be and not someone that I am trying to fit in and be. There is no longer any pressure on me to fit into a standard that I know that I either do not want or is unhealthy for me. I have accepted the reality of what the side effects of my medications are and while they give me some deficits, the benefits outweigh what the deficits allowed me to do, and I was unwell. I have fully understood that medication is a necessity in my life and the benefits it provides outweigh what are now deficits in my life.

If I am willing to accept the hand that I am dealt, that is all that matters. It is learning how to build up boundaries around all avenues of temptation that cross my path and not give  into what could lead to the risky behavior that occurred over the past few years. It is also knowing that I am capable of more things that are not as I wanted to believe was an affect of the medication itself, and if it was, then I learned to manage life with it by not letting the trigger of wanting the negative behavior to rear its head back up and have the cycle repeat itself again.

Now that I have my mental health under control, I can work on the other dimensions of wellness that go beyond just medication itself. Sometimes it can be hard to be honest to go through what is being experienced. It may give you some anxiety or discomfort but knowing that you can do it and not giving in by overreacting out of fear and just waiting things out can provide more relief and understanding that you can indeed accomplish what you have been longing to accomplish by not letting your anxiety get in the way of overcoming the challenges that you have to face in the process.

Life is never easy, but it is also realizing that sometimes you must experience something in case you need to do it sometime in the future. Living in a cycle of dependency of others or ignoring issues that need to be taken care of before more consequences happen or not having the opportunity to learn how things happen will make life so much easier and I too have learned that I cannot let my fear of doing things that I need to do override what I already know can be done, the fear is just something that is natural and I need to work at combatting my fears by coping with them instead of fighting with it.