The Awesome and Terrible Thing About Being High Functioning

A bit of wisdom…

From my other best friend, Laura Dempsay, who is also a social worker and who also deals with being high functioning and being a provider (with permission).

The awesome and terrible thing about being someone with high functioning mental illness?
Structure and routine makes you feel better and if you maintain it long enough its almost as if it went away. You have days that you forget. You have months where symptoms are so small as to be barely noticeable.
The terrible? It comes back, sometimes because of big and unavoidable life changes (RE: do you know how many people I know have died in the last year?) Sometimes for no reason at all the symptoms and thoughts and urges come back full force. But you’ve forgotten how to function with all that constant low-level background noise. And even though you’ve experienced remission before you start to wonder if you are gonna feel like this forever.

Laura Dempsay Facebook: March 19, 2019. With permission.

Show of hands. How many people out there relate to being high functioning? If so, you might want to check out my series on Executive Function: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and how it applies to raising children.

Also: How To Handle Any Problem

The awesome and terrible thing about being someone with high functioning mental illness?Structure and routine makes you feel better and if you maintain it long enough its almost as if it went away. You have days that you forget. You have months where symptoms are so small as to be barely noticeable.The terrible? It comes back, sometimes because of big and unavoidable life changes (RE: do you know how many people I know have died in the last year?) Sometimes for no reason at all the symptoms and thoughts and urges come back full force. But you've forgotten how to function with all that constant low-level background noise. And even though you've experienced remission before you start to wonder if you are gonna feel like this forever.

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