The Greatest Life Lesson #Write31Days

Welcome to day eleven in #Write31Days. Today, I picked a prompt from 100 Self-Help Journal Prompts by Francie Brunswick. It asks us about the greatest lesson we’ve learned in life and what makes this lesson so important.

Here I’m going to be a bit repetitive, as I covered this topic already in my letter to my younger self. The greatest lesson I’ve learend in life is that you need to stay true to yourself.

I have some codependent tendencies. In other words, I tend to be a people-pleaser. For years, I thought that to make up for the burden that I was due to my blindness and other disabilities, I’d need to let other people make everyday decisions for me. In that sense, at age seventeen or eighteen, I definitely would’ve met the criteria for dependent personality disorder. Not because I wanted others to do stuff for me or because I claimed support I didn’t really need, but rather because I allowed others to take responsibility for my life. Conversely though, practically, I thought I had to be extremely independent, never asking for help, for fear of losing other people’s approval.

Until my mental crisis of 2007, I let my parents rule my life. That may be normal’ish for someone at that age, but it wasn’t healthy. Then when I went into the mental hospital, I let my social worker make decisions for me. She was a very authoritarian person, threatening me with forced discharge from the hospital or guardianship if I didn’t do as she wanted.

Then, of course, I let my psyhcologist on the long-term care unit make decisions for me. Ironically, when she diagnosed me with dependent personality disorder in 2016, she used as one of the reasons the fact that I wouldn’t openly disagree with her. I told her half-jokingly that I assumed she’d remove my diangosis again if I fought her hard enough on it. She wouldn’t. Her diagnosing me as dependent was based on her screwed beliefs about disability and mental health.

I am now 32. I have the most supportive care team I could wish for. However, if I ever get to deal with less supportive staff in my life again, I know I can and must stick up for myself. I cherish Leonie, my fights-like-a-lioness insider, who emerged when I most needed her, when fighting my psychologist on the DPD diagnosis. I have a right to be myself. I am not dependent on anyone for making my decisions.