Hope Has WingsLet Yours Take Flight

Ruby remembered all of the feelings that accompanied the onset of her illness. Desperation floated to the top. She was desperate to stay inside of reality each day, to know how to make friends, to think about anybody other than herself, to be accepted by others in the condition that she was in, to be able to focus on anything while battling the constant sedation of medication. She was desperate to have her mind back. Somewhere in there, thirteen years into the battle, she found ways to feed her hunger and heal her heart. Ruby has traded her life of desperation into one of fulfillment.

Ruby could talk about her medications for days. It was one of the first slaps in the face that accompanied her diagnosis, and it was a big one. Being expected to navigate a litany of psychiatric medications seemed like a joke. She wasn’t a doctor. She was simply an ill person fighting to make it through her day. Everything was a mess: side effects galore, landing on the right medication in the midst of seemingly twenty different problems, the frustration of not sleeping enough vs sleeping too much, endless blood work to be done, and constantly trying to figure out the dosages of nine medications that wouldn’t stay put. As quoted in her book: “I felt like my meds bullied me.” Over time, amazingly, Ruby’s resolve turned her bully into one of her closest friends. Thankfully, Ruby’s childlike frustrations gave way to maturity as she partnered with her doctor to overcome her illness, one medication at a time.

For any normal person looking into the unfamiliar world of mental illness, it seems like people with bipolar disorder just lose their minds. Ruby knows better than that. After being plunged deep into manic depression and then rocketed out into psychosis, Ruby suffered loss after loss. The most obvious losses were a sense of reality, the inability to get anything resembling decent sleep, and the strength to manage a disorderly life. Flip the coin over, though, and take a closer look. In so doing, a person will find that Ruby lost more than two decades of her life, her confidence, her self-worth, her talents, her drive, her autonomy, and her potential. In her own words, Ruby felt like “she had lost her own spirit.”

After years of suffering, Ruby’s life was thrown upside down when she discovered the source of love that heals all wounds. Today, Ruby feels compelled to share the good news.

Ruby remembers the days of bad medical treatment. At a certain point, it almost cost her her life. From being in facilities that would only give her minimal scraps of meds to being treated by a nurse practitioner who ultimately told her to stop taking all of her meds, Ruby needed an overhaul. She started shopping for a doctor and it wasn’t easy at a time when people were not aware of mental health issues. After intense searching, Ruby eventually found a doctor whose expertise, over time, stabilized her and gave her much of her life back. Ruby’s advice for others is to persevere in the battle of finding the right doctor- it pays off in more ways than one.

Each time that Ruby has been in an alternate reality, she was clearly there all alone. How could anyone join her in her journey through delusions and beyond? It’s been two decades since her first episode and ten years since she has been able to stabilize, but that loneliness has still stuck. It seemed like everyone just walked away from her, but that was not true. They were simply moving on with their lives. To this day, Ruby has no one to share her wounded life with and she considers it to be the hardest part of living with mental illness.