Thanks T

Just lost, late at night...early in the morning. I have a big, bold print out on 8 1/2 by 11 on my wall, the one on the far right, fourth row up, written in a fit of positive thinking: I LOVE MY LIFE, ALL OF IT. EVEN THE PAIN. THERE LIES LOVE. I don't look at it very often. My 9 year old grandson read the first line out loud a few days ago while we stopped in at my apartment. I didn't look up, until I came back much later. Maybe its right after all. Maybe its real. I'm trying to be real. I really don't know how. When I look back on the things I do and say, so often they're just not real. I was just going with the flow, or trying to impress, or please. Yep, people pleaser. Of course, the real me, if I could ever find me, wouldn't be good enough... for... what?... who?... I don't know, I just wouldn't be good enough if I were really me. So I'm often someone else. Who? I don't know that either but it has to be better than me. That's why I like you. You seem to be you. To be real. I remember being me sometimes, being real. I remember it felt good. I could just never keep it up very long. I always lost myself. You see, this illness, which I've probably had all my life, it just didn't hit big time 'til I was 30, separates you from reality sometimes, but you're never exactly sure when it happens. You think you're cruising along just fine annd then things start falling apart and all of a sudden with a horrific, gut renching realization, you realize you have been living in a delusion for... hours, days, even years. And everything crashes. Your whole life falls apart. And maybe you just cry for a while, or maybe you cry and pace the floor all night or maybe you cry and pace the floor all night and then pack some things by noon the next day and walk down to the emergency ward and say I need to go to the...closest Funny Farm, Nut House, Loony Bin, Insane Asylum...no, where I live right now we call it 5C, the mental ward of a hospital in a town 32 miles away. But if you can't get it together to check yourself in, you'll probably either end up in jail for nothing other than being crazy or they'll come and get you with big beefs and choke you out and put you in that funny shirt with eight foot long arms, Straight Jacket, and put you in a metal room (padded cells are for rich people) on the top floor of the county hospital in what's called 5 point restraints (somebody told me this, I didn't count) where you have to call the beef for a bed pan to go pee. and hopefully they drug you enough so you sleep for a long time and hopefully somebody shows up and vouches for you and they let you out into the "population". On the top floor. Where the more advanced "patients" stay. Where they let you out a few times a day for fresh air or smokes on the roof with 9 feet high fences with barbed wire on the top.
But that was nearly twenty years ago, I live a pretty good life now, reasonably stable, I work, part time. receive SSD. Had a real good marriage for about 6 years and a not so good one for six years and separated for a year and divorced over two years ago. This illness is mostly to blame. I'm one of the lucky ones. I really am quite stable most of the time. I don't "look mentally ill" And you really can't tell by looking...
OK folks, I'm really tired, this isn't good for me, been awake for 21 hours now, I'll pay for this. I just had to tell the truth, be real, even if nobody ever reads this stuff.
Thanks T.