Life before diagnosis was rather chaotic, whether it was because of my mental illness or because of my own actions. I grew up in a very small community and felt very oppressed, as a result of my view of things, meaning, the inability to be like others; involved in after-school activities, going over to friend's houses either to play or spend the night and not allowed to have anyone over to my house. As a young teen I was required to share a bed with my younger and an older brother. One night my older brother decided he wanted to play a game of "Name the body parts". During this time I already knew I was gay and welcomed the game, which served to confirm my sexual orientation. He made a comment, one night, that I was to keep quiet about this and not tell anyone, and that I had better not turn out to be gay or he would kill me. I did not know how to respond to those words. I held onto those words and never let them out of my head, until I was much older, as an adult. While in therapy, is when I actually learned that even though I was gay, it was still sexual abuse, which I fought so hard to deny despite him being about ten years older than I was.

As I grew older and tried to deal with the issue, he was confronted and denied all activities, stating it was all my fault since I was the one who initiated it, denying any activity or part in the whole event. I never felt the need to further address the issue and never told anyone else of the events. When I was in High School (11th Grade), we were required to write a weekly journal and turn it in for review, (I.e., spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.) Well as it would play out, one week I turned in a journal in which I had written a suicide plan and had no recall of ever having written that journal for the week. The journal was mine. The handwriting was mine. IT WAS MINE. There was no getting around that fact, however, at the time, I did not recognize the words as mine, but they were. After that I was called to the Guidance Office had to meet with my teacher and the school's psychologist, my mother was called and asked to come in for a meeting, (oh, and did I mention that this all occurred on a Friday afternoon, where I had to go home for the entire weekend and try to explain the reasoning for this meeting.) Despite all the drama through school, I still managed to graduate with honors. Anyway, I was diagnosed with depression, then clinical depression, then situational depression and back to just depression, and that diagnosis was carried on with me since that time until the age of 39 in 2010. I have had three voluntary CSU admissions, and multiple attempts at "Therapy" and "Medical Interventions" but to no avail nothing seemed to be working, beneficial or even motivating enough to want to make any changes in my life. There were "Mommy issues", "Daddy issues", "Family issues", "Sexual Abuse issues", "Sexual Orientation issues" and "work and life issues".

I would work long hours and sometimes as much as 80 hours a week, just to keep myself occupied and feeling like life had some kind of meaning for me. I felt I had to be the perfect one, so that I could save the world, make my parents love me and be proud of me, regardless of the risk of loosing myself and who I was. I would cycle up and down in my employment working outrageous numbers of hours and then have issues relating to attendance. I would have very difficult times of focusing and completing one task before starting another one. My life was just a mess. As I got older, I wanted to have friends that were totally opposite of me and wound up getting involved with the wrong crowds, I had even worse problems relating to the focusing, attendance, reliability, financially, etc., all because of my "episodic periods" of drug use/experimentation. It had even gotten to the point of affecting my jobs, housing, interpersonal relationships and living with what I currently refer to as my "Partial Diagnosis". Even after moving to Tallahassee and having a really good job and loosing it as a result of my "SELF-MEDICATING" a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder, things again began to spiral downward to a life of being extremely sick (physically) and not caring about anything in my life, whether I lived or died. I have tried to justify my feelings of having to be perfect for so many years, by saying "I'm just striving for excellence. That is all. Nothing else." I did this as a rope to hold onto - trying to give some sort of meaning to my life.

The worst time in my life would have to be when I lived in Miami, had been laid off of my job (twice) with the University of Miami, School of Medicine, I got involved with the wrong crowds and started using substances to escape and feel like I belonged. I quickly cycled from having my own place to live to having no place to live and sleeping under bridges, eating at "Soup Kitchens" once every other day, to sleeping on the floor of a friend's rented room (which of course was bug infested) to finally moving back to Jacksonville, where the rest of my family was.

The changes began to take place once I was placed on Medicaid and began to see a psychiatrist at Appalachee Center and getting placed on medication that seemed to fit my true diagnosis of Bi-polar disorder and being able to see life for what it really was "WONDERFUL", being able to look at my life as a whole and identifying the ups and downs that occurred in my life, things began to make sense. This was all finally taking place in just the past year. I realized that my work history was just working to keep from dealing with what was really going on in my life as it related to my mental illness. A big part of the process for helping me to see the things that were going on, was the effect that everything had began to have on my life and the dwindling away of my physical health with the diagnosis of AIDS and complications associated with it. Things such as Neuropathy, shingles, weight loss and a look of death starting to creep up on me. I used to believe that my life would be so much easier, if everyone would just feel sorry for me and have sympathy and pity for me.

Now I realize that I don't want any of that any longer, so today I have come to expect or desire empathy. Someone to understand where I have been, where I am now, and where I am going. I have been able to learn as a result of my finding a good therapist who helped me deal with things on an emotional level and requiring me to take a look at myself and what was really going on, even without knowing all the details of my life, that there is a chance at life and living. I have found that attending support groups and becoming involved in the meetings and looking at my own life that I can and am in a process called recovery.

I believe that having a background in substance abuse and Mental Health Therapy, and being able to have the skills to look at things in a much broader sense has helped me to understand more and more about the things that I have been through and going through, is all a part of my mental illness whether it was diagnosed or not. I make it a point to discuss my treatment plans with all of my providers and take an active role in the development of those treatment plans. By being pro-active in this process, I get the opportunity to help decide what goals I want to work on as well as negotiate those that I don't really want to work on, even though I know they are needed for me. In this process of negotiation, I am able to reach compromises to all of my goals and can walk away knowing that what I set out to do, I agree with and will be challenging to me for my own personal growth.

Today I am proud to say that I am in recovery and accept all that goes with it. I still have my periods of up-times as well as down-times, where I get the depressive episodes and withdrawal from existence outside of my own mind and body, but with the help of friends and support networks, I usually do not stay in those slumps for very long. I can relate a lot of the slumps that I experience, to be corresponding to my highs and lows as expectations of myself and others. I continually have to remind myself that I am a man of equal rights and give myself the right to take a break and allow myself to step-down, to take a break, to relax, to take care of myself, just as much as any other person is allowed to do, realizing the world will not stop turning and evolving just because I stop for just one day, week or even a month.

But, I will not be available to help others if I don't take care of myself and stop judging myself so harshly, with higher expectations of my self than others tend to judge me. Failure to seize the day, for me, will most assuredly result in my untimely death. Today, I would have to place myself at a point of continual cycling through "Change is Possible", "Commitment to Change" and "Actions for Change". I believe that today I am in the later of taking actions to make my life the best it can be and living it to the fullest that is available for me. This is a major growth in my life, being that I can now see the patterns in my life and having a strong sense of support in my life, gives me that choice to say "LIFE IS WORTH LIVING AND I INTEND TO LIVE IT TO ITS FULLEST, WITHOUT SHAME, GUILT, REMORSE OR REGRETS"

I feel that I am looking for the opportunity to utilize my roles in life and past experiences to help myself and to help others to gain a stronger understanding of themselves, their current position in life, appreciating that there are possibilities and provide guidance to help them reach the lighthouse of hope, peace and prosperity that is so available in life that we take for granted so often and allow the swallows of depression and "woe is me" draining us of our life-force. "TODAY, I AM A LIGHTHOUSE FOR OTHERS TO SEE, THAT THEY MAY REACH THE SHORES AND BE RESCUED FROM THE SEA OF DROWNING SORROWS."