Personal Narrative: My Relationship With Mental Illness

This paper comes at an incredibly fortuitous time because it is a time of reflection due to self growth and unfortunate events. At this point, I am starting up a new journey because I am starting to realize that I may have misspent my time and energy focusing upon the wrong problem. In retrospect, I have come to realize that I was working on learning how to forgive my boyfriend for inflicting vast emotional wounds upon me during the course of our five year relationship. Presently, my relationship has transformed into a significantly healthier oneand is continuously evolving into a healthier one. Although it is much better, I cannot help but wonder what I am doing and why. Until recently I was sound in my resolution that I deserved to feel the

I am learning that the more I forgive and try to let go of the past, the better our relationship becomes. I think that this is because we both have started to let our guard down and truly try instead of being defensive and distant in order to protect ourselves. I am now working on forgiving myself for making the decision to stay in the relationship. I need to own mychoices and stop acting like the victim and take charge of my life. I do know that this relationship has both hurt me and made be a better yet different person than I may have been without it. It is this realization that gives me hope for the future, because for the first time in my life I have direction and a plan. The hardest part in forgiving myself is coming to terms with my feelings of unworthiness and the hurt and pain of having them validated by the one person I trusted most to treat me with love and respect. Additionally, these feelings of unworthiness helped to color other important and superficial relationships with skepticism and judgment. Now that I am becoming a healthier and stronger person, I am starting to look within myself in order to ask the difficult questions. Questions that at one point I was unable to even think about let alone truthfully answer. It is these answers that have allowed me to journey down a new path of

I think that we are each trying to utilize each opportunity bestowed upon us to show grace and faith towards one another. I am also trying to trust that people, especially Andy, are trying to act out of kindness rather than malice. Essentially, I am trying to be a better person everyday while trusting that others are truthful and their actions are genuinely kind and compassionate. Whereas forgiveness does entail moving through the hurt and into a better place, I do not believe that it means forgetting past transgressions. With this is mind, I am working on setting and keeping boundaries in my relationships. Healthy boundaries will help me to ensure that I am working on living a life that I value while holding others to the same standards that I hold myself. It is important to me that others treat me with the same respect that I treat them, and if they cannot do this then I need to reevaluate the relationship and its importance to me.I am not sure what life will look like in the future, but I do know that it will include forgiving both Andy and myself because a life without forgiveness is not a life that I want to live. I want to live a life with purpose and value that enables me to grow as a person. I do not want to continue living a life consumed with hate and anger for others and myself. It is for these reasons that I have decided to forgive and move through the