New provider, new status

Things have been so good. Solidly good. The set backs just feel like normal life now and don't dump adrenaline in my system in high doses. Instead, it's more like fender benders. A little awareness, tending the details, checking the things off the list, but no one's hurt and no one's bleeding out. Ahhh.

N has needed to come home from school a couple of times and we're just resigned that until we have a better adjustment on his medication and rhythm, that it'll just be like this. We're not sweating his advancement to 9th. We're not sweating his GPA, or his attendance record. He's alive, he's happy, his self-esteem is ridiculously awesome, he is practicing brilliant self-care and is very self-motivated. He's alive, and happy to be so.

Today he met with S, his new psychiatric ARNP. Apparently he's great (I wasn't there), and as they reviewed N's symptoms, N reported that he 'no longer feels the major depression disorder diagnosis'. He's not identifying as depressed. That's enormous.

Enormous.

I cried when I heard that, because wow... I'm learning that mental health is a rhythm of its own. I've certainly felt depressed and then recovered, I've certainly felt inclined to self-harm and recovered, or a desire to run away and abandon everything, and then recovered. The trick isn't that he never feels depression again, it's that he's survived the experience and recovered brilliantly, and now has a knowing that if (and when) this happens again, he can bounce back. He'll know he can, because he did bounce back. And we know it too, now, that this isn't some kind of death sentence, keep him alive as long as we can squeeze out, be grateful for every second, like we thought. Who knows what it is. We shouldn't try to prescribe it- it just is what it is right now. And right now, it's freaking amazing. :)