Gary Rhule - Sailing on Broken Pieces: Essential Survival Skills for Recovery from Mental Illness

SAILING ON BROKEN PIECES

Essential Survival Skills for Recovery from Mental Illness

2014 Gary Rhule

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other,except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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The poem, Different, is used with permission of the poet, Donna Wilkinson Maxwell.

ISBN 978-1-61448-942-9 paperback

ISBN 978-1-61448-943-6 eBook

ISBN 978-1-61448-945-0 hardcover

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013948910

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Rachel Lopez www.r2cdesign.com

Interior Design by:

Bonnie Bushman bonnie@caboodlegraphics.com

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This work is creative non-fiction and based on real-life events. However, names, characters, places, and incidents are changed to protect personal privacy. Some characters, places, and incidents are solely the creation of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The anecdotes from the emergency room are used to illustrate common issues and problems encountered in the emergency room setting, and in the practice of medicine, and do not necessarily portray specific people, events, or places. Any similarity is merely coincidental, and all names are fictitious.

As with all books, this one contains opinions and ideas of the author. It is intended to provide helpful and informative material. It is sold with the understanding that the author and publisher are not engaged in giving medical, health, psychological, or any other kind of personal professional services, medical advice, or therapy in this book. The reader should consult his or her medical, health, psychological, or other competent professional before adopting any of the concepts in this book, or drawing any references from it. The content of this book, by its very nature, is general, whereas each readers situation is unique. Therefore, as with all books of this nature, the purpose is to provide general information rather than to address the individual situations, which books by their very nature cannot do.

The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility from any liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book.

For my brother

I am deeply thankful to my mother, father, and sisters for their unwavering support. Without their encouragement, this book would not have been possible.

In memory of my grandparents who lifted me up, and allowed me to stand on their shoulders, so that I could see farther than I could while alone.

I am grateful to the friends who loudly cheered me on while writing, who told me it was possible, and kept me focused so that it could be completed. They include Deborah M. Grogan, Ian Hinds, Steven A. Smith, Donna Wilkinson Maxwell, Jeffrey A. Stewart, Maxcine C. Howell, Troy Stewart, Annette Sanderson, Sharon Walker, Roya Rezai, and Wayne Fuller.

A special thanks to Pat Miller for timely inspiration and words of wisdom for the books title. To Lenny Thompson who showed me the power of positive thought. I must also give special thanks to Barbara Strong Wiggins and Francesca Borges Gordon for their encouragement to keep on writing when I was facing a roadblock. They helped me to appreciate the power of kindness in every spoken word and to return it to others.

For the individuals, clinicians, and health care providers, for the random acts of kindness that they bestowed on my brother, we are deeply thankful.

I also wish to thank the many family caregivers of persons with mental illness, who work in silence and help their loved ones to mental health recovery, and who in their everyday lives work to remove the stigma of mental illness.

And the rest, some on boards,

and some on broken pieces of the ship.

And so it came to pass,

that they escaped all safe to land.

Acts 27:44.

I only wanted to be free.

I desperately wanted to be released from this life that was not my own.

I knew that was not possible so I stifled the primal scream that was bubbling up from my inner core. That scream had been simmering and building up pressure for quite some time now. I wanted to go to the tiptop of a mountain, any mountain, any high building, or even to the nearest high point that I could see. I needed to yell and yell, scream and scream, do something, just anything, to release the tension and pressure. Every fiber of my body needed that release. I needed to let it all out so that I could simply breathe and simply be free.

Despite the adrenaline that flooded my body I consciously tried to slow down my heartbeat. I was trying to suppress something that was completely subconscious and that was controlled by my mind. Nevertheless, I had to stop this feeling because if there were no release or no suppression of the tension, I did not know what would happen. But, I had to do something; otherwise soon I would be trembling and sweating. I felt like I would succumb to the pressure and explode. If I got to that point, would I too lose control of my own mind and my body?

I clenched my fists and took deep gulps of fresh air into my lungs and breathed. I felt like the first time that I had gone swimming and put my face in the water. I had held my breath too long because I was scared to start to breathe while under the water. However, I had held my breath for too long. When I was forced to stand up to catch my breath, the loud gasp for air was cacophonous and it expelled from my mouth with such force that all the other swimmers in and out of the pool looked around to see if I were drowning. I was drowning. But when I exhaled and sucked deeply on that vital need for oxygen, my hearts beat was calmed, and that helped to nourish my brain so that my entire body would calm down just a little bit for me to stop trembling. I became a little calmer.