Living in Recovery

The past two weeks I have been attending a Peer Support Specialist Training.  A Peer Support Specialist is someone who is recoverying from a mental illness and who has been trained to support others to find their own paths to recovery.  We had class from 8:30 until 4:45 each day, homework each night, and a midterm test over the weekend.  The final consisted of a role-playing exercise and a written test. 

I saw friends from across Louisiana whom I'd met in October in Shreveport at the WRAP training class, as well as people from Lake Charles.  I'd met some of the Lake Charles folks before, but there were others that I met for the first time.  All of the Peer Support Specialists from Lake Charles were at the graduation, and it was good to see them and to be able to tell them how much they have helped me.

Something happened to me during the process.  It's something that is hard to define, but today I feel whole.  I fully feel like me.  I'm not saying that I won't have any challenges or setbacks, but I have this sense of myself that I didn't have before.  Even as I had gotten better, I had the sense that a part of me was missing, as though I wasn't fully present in my body or my mind wasn't fully functional.  There was a sense of unease, an anxiousness, a feeling that I wasn't fully present or that I needed to do something.  I'm not sure any of these accurately describe how I felt, but it's the best I can do to describe it.

I had begun to regain a sense of myself before the training, but I could tell I still had a ways to go.  At graduation, we had an oppportunity to speak to the guests, to tell them our stories.  As I thought about what I wanted to say, I realized just how complete I felt.  I tried to remember the last time I had felt this way, and I realized that I had never felt like this before.  I always had a sense that something was missing.