T is for "To This Day"

This TEDTalks video says it all.




For more information about the 2013 Blogging from A to Z Challenge see the website of the same name.

S is for Save the Date

Directly from the NAMI Austin NAMIWalks Website:

SAVE THE DATE for the 2013 NAMI Austin Walk:

Saturday, September 28, 2013

The Austin Walk is part of a nationwide program sponsored by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) that has two primary goals:

1. To increase public awareness about mental illness and the devastating effects that it has on the lives of millions of Americans – one in five families – every year.
2. To raise much needed dollars to help fund the wide array of NAMI support, education, and advocacy programs here in our community.

2012′s Austin Walk was a huge success with more than 2,000 walkers participating and a record-setting $258,000 raised for NAMI’s programs. Get ready for 2013 to:

• Recruit your family and friends.
• Rally your co-workers.
• Call on your communities.
• We can all help raise community awareness … one step at a time.

---

For more information about NAMIWalks Austin, please contact:
NAMI Austin Office: 512-420-9810
Email: namiwalks@namiaustin.org

To make a donation to NAMI Austin through me, go to the following website ...

http://namiwalks.nami.org/Jennifer

Let's made stigma disappear!

Lines for a Fortune Cookie for NaPoWriMo Day 21

The next time you feel down, someone will tell you to pick yourself back up and get over it.

You will "like" a Facebook page dedicated to mental illness advocacy and education.

Choose your words carefully. Stigma bites and it might come back and bite you.

An important message is waiting for you at http://www.bringchange2mind.org/

Someone close to you has a mental illness. They're just not saying so.

Stress is wearing you down. Slow down before you hurt yourself.

Talk to someone. You need to share and they need to hear.

Are you really OCD? Or do you just like saying that?

You will soon meet someone with depression.

Participate in your local NAMIWalk.

Sing. It's good for you.

Recovery is possible.

Are you crazy?

Meditate.

Just breathe.

Take one step at a time.

Your insurance will cover it.

Imagine your world if she wasn't sick.

Try listening to understand rather than to respond.

Good things will come to you if you follow this blog. ;)

You are the 1 in the 1 in 10 that will experience depression.

Your bad attitude is the reason people with mental illnesses don't seek help.

Every criminal is not mentally ill and every mentally ill person is not a criminal.

Suicide is not funny. Tell that to the next person you hear make a joke about it.

Remember to tell them you love them. Every day.

R is for Reflection

These are few of the images some high school students created as part of an artsy lesson on symmetry. Every picture is different as each one is made from the letters of that person's name. They used the letters in their name to form a kind of code that told them where to graph and where to dray the lines. In choosing colors, they only had to make sure that each sections' neighbors were of a different color.

What does this have to do with mental illness? Well, much like we experience mental illness, these pictures are all expressions of symmetry. Yet each person's experience with mental illness is unique, just as these small works of art are unique.

Artwork created by my students (c)1913

Many of the kids got part way into the activity and started complaining that their picture was ugly, that they wished their name made something pretty like that person's over there. Mine's too simple, it's boring. Mine's too complicated. I don't know how to color it.

I had to do some poking and prodding to get them to move on, to keep working to the finished product. They are beautiful, aren't they?

The activity got me thinking about how often we wish our lives were different. What if our lives were more like that person's life over there. How often we think our own lives are not pretty or are not worth working on. My life is so boring. My life is so complicated.

We can only work with what we're given, just like these kids did. At the risk of sounding cliche, I think we can create something beautiful, balanced, and worth sharing with others if just keep taking that next step.

L is for Love those Pets

I can't help myself. The pets that walked with us in last year's NAMIWalk were fantastic. Besides, it's a good excuse for me to work on my tech-savvy skills.

J is for Jams

Photos taken by my cousin Amy (c) 2012

Before the NAMIWalk started last year, NAMI Austin pulled together a lot of wonderful things to entertain us in the morning while everyone was checking in and getting ready.

The morning was amazing! In addition to live music, we had a warm-up station where an instructor was leading people through stretches in preparation for the walk.

The 4-H Club put together a little pet place with water bowls arranged in a circle for all the furry walkers. They placed it too close to the stage, though. The loud volume scared some of the pets. I'm guessing they will put the pet station in a different location this year.

Scattered across the gathering place were beverage stations - coffee, orange juice, water. Other stations were providing small snacks, like granola bars, and bottled water. People were even doing face painting! NAMI Austin knows what it's doing.

Me? Not so much. It was my first year as team captain and I fumbled quite a few things. My team, for example, didn't have matching shirts like most of the other teams. The team captain before me provided everyone with bright, colorful leis and I forgot to do that. My team members asked for them, expecting them, and I didn't have any. Getting leis is on my to do list this year. Matching t-shirts is on my list, too.

I'm really excited about this. Can you tell?

Gift

Sweet breath, sweet air, I lift up hope on you.
Convey my love across the stormy skies.

Deliver hope to heart and heart renew.

You must relieve such hurt and pain and cries.

Soft wind, take gentle care as you imbue

In tender soul, new life before it dies.

We have not long; you must be swift.

Bear my hope and make of hope a gift.

by Jennifer Clark (c)April 2013

For more information about the 2013 Blogging from A to Z Challenge see the website of the same name.
For more information about National Poetry Writing Month go to the NaPoWriMo website.

Reminders from a Tarot Card

10 of Cups; Spiral Tarot by Kay Steventon

I enjoy tarot cards. Whatever card I randomly pull from a deck gives me something to think about, something for my mind to focus on. It's been a strategy for slowing my thoughts for many years. The scenes and symbols on the cards have often been a reminder that amazing and wonderful things are around me and I find that I need those reminders because I so easily loose sight of that beauty and love in the messy challenges of life.

Today I needed to step out of my normal life and escape for a moment into myself. The picture to the left is the card that came out of the deck I shuffling. The following is what I saw and what I felt as I mulled over the imagery.

A woman, half solid and half ethereal, directs your attention to golden chalices emerging from a large vase. The chalices and other material from the vase remind me of a fire-works display, the vase looks like clay, and the entire scene looks beautiful, loving, and joyful.

What does this mean for me? It reminds me to take a look around. The universe is offering up many things to be joyful for. Love is falling all around me and all I need to do is look where the spirit, whatever you believe it to be, is pointing. The tens mark the end of a cycle, though; the ace is inevitable. This time of wishes granted and dreams come true will only last for so long. The woman will fade away and she will cease to pull gifts from the earth for me until the next cycle come around.

I hope you find the picture and my impression of it as helpful and hopeful as I have.

How do you define hope?

Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent. 

~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

I love that quote. It tells a truth of hope in a nice, neat, little package and it’s wholly appropriate for a blog dedicated to mental illness. Of course, like any sound-bite, it’s not a complete description.

Personally, I think hope is a kind of coping mechanism. Facing fears and sorrows is easier when I have this thing we call hope. It doesn’t make the hurt or difficulty go away, but it allows me to look forward to a future in which I have successfully passed beyond my current challenges. Will I actually make it? Who knows? Hope does not guarantee that I’ll get what I want or where I want but it lets me believe that it is possible.

He that lives upon hope will die fasting. 

~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death. 

~Pearl S. Buck

Those quotes seemed so pessimistic at first but they go together quite optimistically. They tell me that action and hope are companions. Hoping for bread without doing anything to get it? Or a house or a job or a significant other or .... ad nauseam. Hope alone won't do the trick. Doing something without a sense of purpose or meaning? That's not going to work out well either. Without both, hope and action, my world and my life will surely seem pointless and valueless. I will wither and die.

As far as action is concerned, sometimes it comes from within and I act on my own behalf. Those days are easy. I am competent and confident. My life is my own and I have control of my fate.

When I am weak, though, hope doesn't move me to act. It can't. It gives me just enough energy to breathe from one terrible moment to the next and to believe that maybe the next moment will be better. In those desperate days, I hope I can I put my hope in someone else, someone who will be strong in my place until I have grounded myself in my own power again.

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so. 

~Eric Bentley

I find it reassuring to know that I can safely trust people around me to be hopeful when the world I experience is black. It's humbling to know that sometimes I must be the one to hold hope, like a torch, high above my head and yell into the dark, "It's not lost!"