Recovery: A Personal Narrative Of My Life

The time had finally come. After three weeks of pain, two weeks of testing, and a week of waiting. The results were in. I just had to wait a few more minutes for the doctor to come in and tell me what was wrong with me and how long it would take to fix it. The results will change my future.

Until I walked onto the stage to take a bow, I didn’t realize that I just danced, acted and sang a solo. It took me a long time to get to that fifth grade Christmas play where I wasn’t shy anymore. Due to the fact that I wasn’t Darth Vader anymore, so I didn’t need a mask strapped onto my face to breathe at night. Asthma, respirators and surgeries were what my childhood consisted of and I would have time to, at most, socialize with my family. Years after my final surgery, my currently bubbly-self erupted from within and many of my friends never knew how I was before.

Sometimes I ask myself how I overcame my disease. Many people with lupus experience fatigue, memory loss, loss of appetite. Usually younger African, white, and Asian men and woman develop that disease in their teens. It all started that night when I was laying in my mom bed. At that time I felt like it was my time to leave this earth. When I turn 15 years old I saw so many changes. . I experience so many symptoms while I was in my second semester. All the symptoms that I experience were hallucinations, fever, nausea, and nose bleeds. At that time I seen myself getting really sick. I caught strep throat and it was hard to focus in school because I missed so many days.

I feel a sense of calmness wash over me. My thoughts are peaceful and positive. I am confident and capable. I sleep a deep, healing sleep. I wake in the morning refreshed and renewed.

Contemporary mental health care is a changing and developing field. Traditional practices of understanding and caring for those with mental illness are being challenged (Trenoweth, 2017). Personal recovery is not a new concept. Although it is significantly different to the biomedical model, it has been well written about in literature, putting a significant influence on policies and the delivery of care within today’s practices. When people with a lived experience of mental illness started to challenge the biomedical model of care, recovery orientated health care began to grow (Barkway, 2013). Before further exploring both personal recovery and the biomedical approach, we will look at what recovery is. Slade (2009) outlines a two part definition

I believe in healing. I had always seen my pastor and my mom pray for people at church and talk about healing all the time. At church I always hear “prayer changes things” or “If you want to be healed you need you need to have faith” but I didn’t really listen because bad things happen all the time whether you have faith or not. I never really thought about people being healed it until a few weeks ago.

When I was 13 years old, my parents started to think about moving to United States because my dad was already working here for a company. We started all the immigration related process which took a while to end. When I was 14, one day I came back from school and my parents told me we were moving to US in 2-3 months. When I heard it first, I was happy, but later I started thinking about how I will be leaving everything behind. My family, friends and neighbors whom I have been with since I was little, I will be leaving all of them in a few months. As the date approached closer, we started to pack more and more things. There was

I've been fairly busy as of late. Notably, yesterday was a pretty interesting day. I'm not exactly feeling well, think I'm coming down with something. How often is it that a Jedi contracts a cold? Just not feeling as spry, I think. My stomach is churning as I type, something is missing, think I might have to take a reprieve sooner rather than later. Maybe I'll be gone for a cycle, maybe I'll be gone for a year. I don't know. I just know that I need to focus on other things. That's not the point of this entry, however.

My feet pound the track. I take deep breaths and pump my arms in rhythm with my steps. My muscles ache but my mind is focused, I am in the zone and I feel invincible, moving faster than ever before. Run, rest, repeat. The cycle of intervals in the workout let me just tune out and push myself. The only problem is, as I run each interval I feel a nagging pain in my leg. The pain slowly increases until I realize the worst: I might be injured.

I remember when I started my recovery I was discharged from the detox program into a six month transitional program. Transitional living that deal with people recovering from addiction are often referred to as recovery residences. The Transitional Living Center provided me a place where I could re-establish my own self-worth. When I was at the transitional housing I felt safe from the possibility of a relapse. My recovery plan was individualized according to the determination of my needs. They taught me what my triggers were and how deal with them in positive ways. I remember when my six months were up and I was getting ready to be transferred into the supportive housing program to be integrated back into the community. Supportive housing allowed

I have been in recovery now for about five years because of my drug and alcohol dependency. I started doing drugs in middle school and kept appearances up until my senior year of high school. My senior year of high school I stopped dancing and other positive activities. I believe that being a part of activities kept my drug use at bay until it took over my life. Some positive factors in my life that helped me not use every day were self-control and teacher monitoring. Also, I kept busy so I could stay on track for the most part. The risk factors for me using drugs and alcohol are having a hard time expressing emotions in a healthy way. I was unable to delay gratification and using drugs so young made it hard for me to mature like the rest of

My life seemed normal until my wife of less than one year told me that she married the wrong person, was moving out of our home, and that she was going to live with another man with whom she purchased a house with. I was not a Christian at this time, but this event played a significant role in both my conversion and recovery testimony. Everything in my life fell apart when my wife told me this news. She wanted nothing to do with me or our marriage. She left and never came back. My life completely fell apart and I did not know what I was going to do. I decided to move back to my hometown and try to put the pieces back together.

My grandfather is this bishop of his own church so I was raised in the church. Even though my personality is not on the shy side at all, whenever it came to worship, I always had this shyness about it, until my Pre-K graduation. At my Pre-K graduation we performed a dance to the song “The Storm Is Over Now” by Kirk Franklin and since I was the valedictorian, I danced the lead. Most of the pieces performed at my graduation were liturgical pieces. Liturgical dance is a type of dance incorporated with worship. That’s when my family saw the worship side of me that they’ve been waiting on but they wouldn’t see that side of me for a while. I then moved onto elementary school and participated in the dance program at the school, but it felt like something

There’s something about writing your raw emotions on a piece of paper that allows your spirit to run free and hold no boundaries of what you can think of and it's only the moments in life that can fuel the locked potential inside you. The epiphany of my life was actually closer to this present time than in the past, about last year my family moved from New haven to Branford. In New haven I was in a program which allowed me to go to Wallingford as a district school and I spent 6 years in this program making friends and going to school all I knew from my elementary to highschool period from then was Wallingford. While schooling in Wallingford district living in New haven I had developed a skill of poetry in the midst of 8th grade. I found that

Waking up my head is throbbing. I groan and gradually start to get up. Realizing I’m in my room, I become perplexed as to how I got here. The last thing I remember is going out to meet my friends. That was around 8 pm and now, glancing at the clock, it’s 9:16, meaning I don’t know what has happened for a little over 13 hours. My next inclination is to check my phone. Knowing myself, I would have probably talked to someone if anything serious happened. Looking towards the direction of my charger, I see my phone is there. Even my blackout self knows how to properly handle my phone.