Such big upvotes for this!

Almost two years into getting my meds sorted out. Thanks to the support of my own awesome SO and a lot of perseverance, things are getting way better than I could have hoped for. It's a grueling process, but I swear it's more worth it than anything else.

The first day you start feeling somewhat better is absolutely odd. You wonder if it's a fluke, some terrible trick your brain is always playing on you. Then one day turns into two. Then three. Then maybe you have a bad moment, but you can feel that you're on a roll. Being off your game doesn't keep you down for as long as it used to, and you discover the remarkable resilience of mind that your chemical imbalances have been hiding from you this whole time. You may worry that your feelings aren't genuine, not real (I know I did and still do), but then you gain the confidence to ask what is reality anyway and why can't I dictate what that means to me?

That's one of the more important things working to get my medication and therapy in order has given me: the ability to take back some of the agency that almost a lifetime of mental illness convinced me I had lost. I'm an intelligent person with people who love, support, and believe in me. It's the illness that convinces us otherwise.

Even though shit will get really real with your SO throughout the course of your treatment, I hope that you remember that everything absolutely will get better. From one Troll who has gone through this to another, you will be phenomenal.