Follow your bliss

[Sheila]

"Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it."
-- Buddha


Here at the IAWP, we believe that many things are needed to help a person recover fully from psych meds and psych med withdrawal, but perhaps the most powerful thing is to discover and pursue your true passions.

We encourage you to start a thread on whatever makes you want to get up in the morning. It could be something you *know* you want to do, or something you’re just experimenting with. It could *seem* like merely a hobby, but you never know, it could turn into an income-producing career.

So, whenever you feel up to it, please start a thread on your passion, your love, your magnificent obsession – frog rescue, making a video about w/d, solar power, stocks & bonds, nursing, painting, publishing a w/d survival guide, bike-riding, shamanism, affordable housing, etc., etc., etc.

Feel free to discuss the general concept of passions-healing-w/d here on this thread, or just go ahead and start a thread on your passion. If there is sufficient interest from several people, we can create a separate forum for that particular interest in order to better facilitate networking and project development.

[Sheila]

J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books --

Wiki -- During this period [ca 1997, after mother died, marriage began and ended, gave birth, moved, unemployed] Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, and contemplated suicide. It was the feeling of her illness which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book.

Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as "the biggest failure I knew." Her marriage had failed, she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating:

“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

– J. K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address, 2008.

[stan]

J.K. Rowling

[Sheila]

Thanks for the illustrations, Stan!

<< this is sort of like a photographer snapping a picture

[Sheila]

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

-- Howard Thurman

[Claudius]

Very interesting, I read this thread only today following a link on anther thread.
I ws also a huge fan of Harry Potter and have read all 7 books and seen all movies. And already earlier, somewhere last year, I thought back of the Dementors who play a role in the books and the stunning parallel of the dark blanket of Paxil w/d. The Dementors are described as creatures who rob the victim of all free will and all positivity until only their darkest memories remain. And they manifest themselves to the victim as the thing they fear the most. And the only way to get rid of them is the Patronus spell were the victim must chant the "Expecto Patronum". meaning something as "I expect a protector".
For me was the descent in WD exactly like this, all my good memories (even of the great holiday I had just after my last dose in the 6 weeks before WD hit) vanished to make place for my very worst memory, my bully from 20 years earlier. Unfortuantely, I had no spell to chant or wand to wave with... But I am still under the living just as anybody here although it was close. And I leared also s lot from the books of Harry Potter who was also bullied in the book. And who remembers Severus Snape who's character was formed by his bullying past and had become nasty and cynical person, although he still remained good from the inside.
I have deep respect for J.K. Rowling and she is such a stunning beautiul woman.

[Luc]

I don't have to go into the details of what WD is, and how indescribably hard it is to simply "keep surviving it", as Everyone of you, Brave Folks, knows it all too well. The question is, though, "how to, despite the lack of any positive thought for long stretches of time, try to find the Meaning in it all? Is it possible to somehow mitigate the emptiness and the feeling of hopelesness that accompanies WD, to find the ways of seeing the Light again?"

Yes, it is possible, at least partially. Of course, in the early WD, doing even the tiniest of things may not be possible, when all energy is used to simply survive the onslautght of the most hellish symptoms a human mind can imagine, but, after the worst storm is over, it's worth at least trying. There always comes a moment when the possible becomes less impossible.

...we started this forum and a website from an absolute scratch, we added one piece, one sentence at a time (no exaggeration!). "At a time" sometimes meant writing one sentence every few days, and one single "added piece" was sometimes so minute that virtualy invisible. But we kept doing it. We, then, started our Youtube channel, and kept adding videos... eventually getting close to 50 of them. I can't imagine of anything more motivating and spiritually uplifting than getting an e-mail or reading a comment under the video saying "OMG, so that is why I have been living in hell for so long, and now I know there is a way out of it." The element of the life-creating Hope present in these words is unlike anything else.

Indeed, at some point, you start to realize that this unrelenting approach of building something better starts bearing more and more fruit, that it's so worthy, and that it also has its "collateral benefit" on a personal level, it helps to deal with the painful past, and turns the past trauma against those that caused it, calling them out by simply showing the truth and truth only. It helps to heal. You can do it too. Try it. By spreading the word, writing a comment that expresses your views and share your knowledge on the Big Pharma scam with others... It's all very empowering, on all possible levels. Use your painful experience to actively question the legitimacy of the present dysfunctional medical system, help others in need, and assist your own personal growth.

You can do this, and you can do other things. Whatever you are able to think of. Adding one small piece at a time.