January 1, 2023

This year I have completely and absolutely lowered the bar. The only resolution I am setting for myself is to get through 2023, and I am going to hope and pray that there are a few more fun times than there were in 2022. Not that last year was all bad, but it was really, really hard.

Our family has been getting crushed by the mental health system. Public mental health, or Community Mental Health, has been particularly terrible, but the private mental health system has been pretty awful too.

We have been turned away from hospital programs and fired by a psychiatrist, left to find someone new a week away from needing a medication refill.

Do you know how hard it is to find a psychiatrist? They are booked out for months, sometimes years. Many of them require that you pay out of pocket and fight with your insurance company for reimbursement. Who has time for all of this added paperwork, the phone calls, and the endless follow up when literally every single day you are trying to prevent the next round of crisis?

This psychiatrist that fired us referred us back to Community Mental Health who was undeniably screwing things up and making things worse for our family. “They are designed to handle the most intensive cases because all the care is consolidated to one system,” we were told. I did not know if I should fill the world with laughter or flood the earth with my tears.

As someone living in the Community Mental Health system and S-T-R-U-G-G-E-L-I-N-G to get help for our teenager, I am here to tell you, I do not care what Community Mental Health was designed to do. They can’t do shit.

The quality of care that we have received is so comprehensively terrible that even when our family was in absolute crisis, we were still better off pulling away from Lifeways Community Mental Health and doing whatever we could do on our own with as little contact with them as humanly possible.

That’s really sad. The best quality of care we got from Community Mental Health was the relief we got when we stopped talking to them.

We are still struggling. There is no question about that. We live in crisis and several times a week my husband and I say to each other that we wish there was someone to help us. We need crisis response, the very kind that Community Mental Health was designed to provide, and we would still rather struggle on our own instead of calling them for “help” because we know they will only, once again, make things so much worse.

I have so much to process in 2023. I am not going to worry about goals or raising the bar. I am going to focus on breathing, loving, taking good care of myself, and creating in whatever ways I can. 

What I know is that my heart is full when I create, and my soul feels interconnected to all of the beauty and divinity in the world when I create, so tapping into this creativity is taking good care of me. 

Merely by reading the small snippets of my story above, I am sure you can agree that creativity is not exactly an easy undertaking right now. Sometimes the only thing I will be able to create is a piece of writing that I proof read only 1 time despite my hatred of typos. But I am going to trust that something is enough, and even when the something is not possible, that is enough too.   

If you want to follow along on my lopsided, heartbreaking, and also at the same time absolutely amazing adventure in not enough photography, hopes to be more creative, radical and highly unusual attempts for self care, and mental health advocacy for my kid and for the children of Michigan, I would love to have you join me. 

For now, I am going to post these stories and reflections to my photography blog even though they are only tangentially related. Maybe they will move to a new home at some point, maybe they will stay. Figuring that out now feels too much like a goal, and I am leaving my low bar laying right there on the ground.

Happy new year, friends. May this year be filled with love and light, even in the hardest of times.