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I grew up in a time when little girls were supposed to wear nice little Rosebud dresses and play with dolls. But I just couldn't fit into that stereotype. I wanted to be active and run around playing with guns. I grown into a real tomboy and began wondering if that meant I was also a lesbian. The traditional thinking in the seventies was that lesbianism might be a phase you go through. But if you remained homosexual in your adulthood, you were [00:00:30] a very screwed up person, and that really scared me. My mental health issues started cropping up. When I was 18, I started getting deeply depressed, and then after a while I started developing highs as well. I had a whole lot of stresses. I was just leaving home. My grandmother had just died and I was sorting out my sexual identity. All of these things became entwined with my mental health problems. I went [00:01:00] to my doctor and said I'd lost my appetite and that I didn't feel very good emotionally. He referred me to a psychiatrist who told me I had depression. I went to see him twice a week for about six months. I only talked about the things that were easy to talk about. I was too terrified to tell him about the struggles I was having with my sexual orientation because of the fear of being judged, I thought he would try to label my feelings as a medical condition and [00:01:30] think I had a sick personality. Over the next couple of years, I continued going to these talk sessions as well as taking antidepressants. But nothing seemed to help, and so I ended up in hospital. As soon as I crossed the threshold of the hospital, I was labelled and identified as a psychiatric patient. Once you've been in hospital, you can't escape that label. I was a mad person, and to this day Mad has [00:02:00] become a key part of my personal identity. The lowest point for me was facing the prospect of becoming a chronic psychiatric patient. Nothing seemed to be working for me. I'd been in and out of hospital for several years, and I was losing all hope for the future. Then my older brother drowned. When Sean died. It jolted me out of my self pity. I thought, Gosh, here's this man of 28 [00:02:30] his life was going along fine and then suddenly he's dead. And then I thought I might have another 50 or 60 years to live. I suddenly felt that I was the lucky one. His death really helped change my whole outlook on life. My medication was changed and I began to stabilise. I saw several other psychiatrists, but I still didn't feel like I could talk to any of them about my sexuality. At the same time, [00:03:00] my own internal attitude towards lesbianism began to change, and I began mixing with people who thought it was OK. After I left hospital, I moved to Auckland and that's when I came out as a lesbian. I'd gone through similar experiences earlier, coming out as a mad person. I guess what really helped was that the politics of lesbian feminism in the 19 eighties had exact parallels with the mad movement. They were just a template of [00:03:30] each other. Lesbians and feminists were being subjugated by men or heterosexual society, and mad people were being subjugated by the mental health system. They were both liberation movements. They reinforced each other, so I fed off each of them. In my understanding sexual identity was one of the cluster of identities I had at 18 that fed into my mood swings. Would I have got depressed if I hadn't been confused about my sexuality, Been [00:04:00] confused about my abilities, confused about the meaning of life. And I hadn't felt lonely and isolated. I don't know. I do know now there's nothing to be afraid of. You just have to be who you are. Recovery is very much tied up with your identity. Going through mental health problems shapes the whole ground of your being. I felt that coming out as a lesbian was a resolution to part of my identity. It stabilised [00:04:30] me. Another part of recovery is about accumulating good experiences. If you've had instability that goes on for years, you end up with a deficit of good feelings about life. And even though coming out as a lesbian was traumatic and confusing and mind blowing in the end, it enabled me to have some good experiences. If you start succeeding in life or you start doing the things that make you feel good, then you gather a bit of [00:05:00] momentum and that tends to continue. In the early years of my recovery, it was about building up that store of good feelings, and coming out was definitely a part of that.
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