World mental health day / Nat’l coming out day

I never before realized that these days are consecutive!  Oh hey, these are the two most frequent topics of this blog!

In the past, I haven’t observed either through writing here, but I currently have a lot to say about both; this’ll probably end up being one of my more personal posts, at least as of lately.

First just real quick – a little bit of background / information about both:

World Mental Health Day (Oct. 10th) was first celebrated in 1992 at the initiative of the World Federation for Mental Health, a global mental health organization with members and contacts in more than 150 countries.  This year’s theme is “psychological first aid.”  My first thought was that it refers to how to handle someone who is in a mental health crisis, but it actually refers to being a support to someone who just witnessed or experienced a terrible tragedy.  There is a world of difference between the two, even though there’s also overlap; of course, learning about both types of situations is going to be important.

Nat’l Coming Out Day (Oct. 11th) was founded in 1988 by Robert Eichberg and Jean O’Leary.  Oct. 11th was chosen to commemorate the anniversary of the 1987 Nat’l March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights.  It is observed in the spirit of the personal being political and the idea that homophobia cannot thrive once people know someone personally who is LGBT+.

(Information is coming from the World Health Organization website and wikipedia.)

Last night, I saw an amazing documentary called Strike A Pose, which just came out last year.  It’s about the seven young male dancers from the NYC underground (the origins of voguing) who were personally selected by Madonna for her tour.  They also ended up starring in a behind-the-scenes documentary at the time, called Truth or Dare.  Madonna was very outspoken about AIDS, gay rights, safe sex, and of course, Expressing Yourself!  [Spoiler Alert:]  What was most interesting though, was that at the same time these young men were embodying those messages on her behalf, they were not all on board or comfortable with it.  Three of the men had been diagnosed with HIV prior to the start of the tour, and they all were silent about it to the extreme, not even telling friends or loved ones.  Also, one of the men sued Madonna after the tour, for forced outing, partially spurred by a coerced kiss with one of the other dancers in the Truth or Dare doc.  He was not ready or willing to be that person, to be making that statement.

So, I guess what I’m saying with all that is that Nat’l Coming Out Day is great and celebratory and everything, but in order to actually be empowering, it has to be on each individuals’ own terms.  Once I outed a friend (about something totally unrelated to being LGBT) as part of a joke, and then I felt really crummy about it.  I just let time wash over that one, but it’s still a prominent memory.

So where am I at?  I still have a fair share of coming out to do.  I’m not doing any of it today.  It does feel imminent though – I’d say within the next 6 months.  I look forward to the day that my driver’s license, signature, little plastic rectangle on the custodial office, Facebook page, the words out of teachers’ and co-workers’ mouths, and everything else, all say the same thing!  As of now, I have 5 different names going on in different places, and none of them are the full name I actually want to go by!

Here’s something I wrote that really captures this feeling (I wrote it almost exactly 2 years ago.  Dang, that is a long time!):  Fractured identity and fragmented feelings

Moving on to mental health:

My mental health has improved by leaps and bounds within the past 9 months, and I have not written about it.  Actually, the most recent thing I did write was 9 months ago, here:  A full year later / Making major changes.  I was hopeful but tentative.  I had had 23 good days in a row (an anomaly), due to starting yet another drug.  I am still on that drug, and I am still having good day after good day after good day (other than not so great days due to a cold, a handful of really bad days during the stress of surgery).

Overall, I am more stable and happy than I ever have been before, BY FAR.  And I feel certain that I can attribute that to a drug, something I never would have thought possible before (I’ve been on lots of drugs over a span of many years, and did not have a good experience with any of them.  I had gone off medications completely for 10 years because I thought it was hopeless.  I always downplayed the usefulness of psychotropic drugs.  When I was younger, I thought I was the only one who had this reaction; now I know it’s fairly common to have to go through a trial and error period, searching for something that will actually be a good match.

During those 10 years I was not taking medications, I focused on other things to improve my well-being.  Most of that was social in nature – focusing on not isolating, focusing on positive connections with people, focusing on emotional intimacy.  It worked.  To an extent.  I started to think that getting back into therapy would probably help.  That worked too.  It felt miraculous for a while at first, actually.  But as the years went by, kinda only to an extent.  I found myself in a situation where I HAD to get back on medications, and I was not happy about that at all.  In fact, I recall thinking a lot about when I’d be able to get off of them (maybe 6 months? I was thinking…)

In the end, it has worked out better than I ever could have imagined.  I am neither pro-med nor anti-med.  It’s way too personal, and different for each individual, to have a general feeling about it.  But I can say that I used to be anti-med, and now I feel that, for some people, it can be that one game changer that makes all the difference.