Living Proof / by padhia hutton

This moment feels surreal. I am living inside my own dream. A dream that I buried in secret dark recesses of my heart, as so many have tried to pry it out of me. I had all my brain chemicals tested last week. I was just going over the results with my coach. She said, “You have the cleanest neurotransmitter profile I have ever seen on anyone.”

Flash back to that scared little teenage kid alone in the doctor’s office for the very first time being told they have a chemical imbalance. A brain that can’t regulate itself, it just doesn’t work the way it is supposed to. I inherited my mother’s defective genetics. Being told to think of it like a person who has a heart condition, they just have to take medication. Flash back to having my Hope taken away. It’s not about healing, it’s about coping they said. Being told I have a handicap, a mental illness. Flash back to the final moment of letting go of my God- who sent me to this earth with a brain that just wouldn’t work no matter how much work I put into it fixing it, no matter how much goodness was in my heart, no matter how much I dreamed of a brighter day… who mercilessly doomed me to a life sentence of suffering. Flash back to my best friend of 20 years telling me to accept I have a handicap and to just do less, dream less, want less, accept my fate. My dreams were the cause of all my problems. FUCK YOU. Flash back to my other best friend forwarding me an article about a new surgery where you can have part of your brain removed. Flash back to all the abusive relationships I engaged in because I felt so broken and undeserving of more. Flash back to 10 years later, fabric of my soul worn so thin that I could no longer sew any patches on it, sitting in front of a new psychiatrist. My dying seedling of hope his placed fully hands- trusting he would be the one to finally help it grow. He seemed really excited. He had good news, he said. “You’ve been misdiagnosed. Depression is only part of your problem”, he said. “You also suffer from a rare form of bipolar. Instead of cycling from high to low, you cycle from low to lower. Right now, you feel a little better because you are on an upswing towards down.” Flash back to filling the new prescription for anti-psychotics and collapsing in the parking lot. Deciding to die instead. Kicking them high into the sky and watching them fall into a dumpster along with my attachment to being alive. Flash back to getting off all the “non-addictive” meds which cost me almost a year of my life. The physical sickness, the extreme emotional dysregulation, I’ll never understand how I survived that. Flash back to finally working through my story, understanding how I had been shaped, awakening the rage within and letting it burn until it was released, grieving, healing, working, moving forward for the first time. Flash back to becoming alive. Becoming visible to myself and showing up in my life. Building a new fucking life. Flash back to changing my brain chemistry by healing, by growing. By kicking down the walls of that shitty existence, ditching that old operating system, and conquering the worst kinds of terror. Flash back to that little whisper in my fucking heart all of those years telling me there has to be more to existence, there just has to be. I never have any science to support that. All I had was Hope.

Sometimes when you believe in something and you don’t have any proof, you have to become it.