I feel like I am doing a lot of apologizing lately. I am sick of saying: "I am sorry", "Sorry, I did not mean it", "Please forgive me" or this one is creative: "Please, let me steam clean your carpets because I am oh so sorry I called you a choice word when we were fighting...Did you need to borrow any money? Like my new leather boots? Take them. Because, dammit, I am so sorry!"

When I think of mental illness--my journey sprinting through life alongside it-- I think of the image below. The famous Two Masks. I painted a picture of it, framed it, and gave it to my mother a couple of years ago. The irony was not lost on her. It hangs in the hallway; laughing at me. The masks represent bipolar disorder to me. They represent emotion on a whole--the entire spectrum. Like many people living with chronic mental illness, it's hard to find the parts that define the middle; the sort of happy bits that made us smile but were fleeting.

Once a person has been diagnosed with a mental illness--is being treated for it--and moving forward in their recovery, life is not suddenly peaches and cream. For many of us, myself included, we still often live with depression on a daily basis.

I think I talk about stress and the impact it can have on our mental health often in this blog. Hopefully, it's not exceedingly boring. This blog is a bit different in topic. Yes, it focuses of taking care of ourselves during periods of stress, but also on how we can take care of those we love if they become ill---while knowing when to pull back.

So is recovering from a physical injury. But in a different way. You know this and I know this. A broken leg--I've had one--left me in bed and hopping with one foot to the fridge. I was terribly bored. If I could have moved, I would have drawn pictures on the walls. Probably with a black sharpie. I was angry! My point? Recovering from mental illness can be boring---certainly when our lives used to be painted in manic colors--nice and neon but scary too. Sometimes, downright terrifying.

Managing money while recovering from a mental illness is a topic I have never written about before and this sort of surprises me. It's important. It's important for everyone with a heartbeat--save for those too young to understand the often frustrating impact of finances on our lives. When you have been diagnosed with a mental illness and are working to recover, money takes on an entirely different meaning. It can, unfortunately, negatively impact our recovery.

Earlier this week, I wrote a blog on the topic of self-care when you live with a mental illness. Within that blog I focused on the importance of exercise, nourishing our bodies properly and having a regular sleep pattern. This blog will focus less on what we need to do to stay well but what we might consider avoiding--external and internal negative influences-- in order to recover from mental illness effectively.

Let me stress that by "friends" I do not mean you should ask he or she out for coffee or maybe to a movie. Refrain from a discussion focused on the new recipes you thought up and the shoes you found half off on the weekend... My Experience With My Psychiatrist

I'm pretty sure I have never written on this topic before. In nearly one-and-a-half years, I have never written exclusively about mental illness and anger. That sort of makes me a bit angry at myself. Just a touch! I think, and perhaps you agree, that the journey we make from the diagnosis of mental illness to recovery is full of anger.

Oh...This is hard. I don't think I have ever slept this much in a very long time. I can sleep 20 hours a day. I can drag my ass out of bed to complete important articles, walk the dog and feed the cats and...fall back into bed. And by accident! I just cannot stay awake. My bed and I have become best friends. The books on my night-table keep me company and I try to eat. My life, pretty good just a month ago, has bloody well crumbled and I cannot even find the pieces to put it back together.