100%

I told my med-doc recently that my mental health is up at around a 90% these days. We agreed that my meds could be adjusted as I’d been stable enough long enough that I trusted it wasn’t the meds alone holding me upright. We said we’d touch base again if anything changed and I needed another adjustment, and went on our way.

Later that same day I told my therapist that my mental health was up at around a 90% these days. SHE then pushed me. And asked the hard question. “What does 100% look like?” I didn’t have an answer for her.

What does 100% look like, when it comes to my mental health? I decided to take some time and think about that question.

Well… it doesn’t mean that’s where I will be happy. I’m perfectly happy here at 90%. It doesn’t mean that’s when I become content. I’m perfectly content sitting here at 90%. It doesn’t mean I’m not still focused on my mental health and keeping myself on level ground. That’s why I am still taking my meds, working with my doctor to ensure the cocktail keeps working, and why I still talk to my therapist on a regular basis.

But what it doesn’t mean isn’t the answer to what it does mean. It doesn’t answer the question “what does 100% look like?”

Here is where I detour a bit.

So, I’ve got multiple posts in the queue, ready to be finished and posted. But things keep popping up in my life to derail my thoughts and distract me from writing.

I keep kicking myself. Telling myself that I’m letting myself down by not keeping up with my writing.

But… what has kept me distracted and derailed? I can recognize now the voice in my head that has kept telling me, “you can’t do this. You shouldn’t say that. You aren’t good enough. Your thoughts are not important.” It’s that same voice that has been with me through everything.

That’s when I realized what 100% looked like. (Like all other realizations, this is one that makes me kick myself in the butt for not having realized it before.)

100% will be when that voice in my head stops interfering with my life.

That voice has been telling me that I’m at 90% steady regarding my mental health. And that 90% was a solid number. It told me, “you don’t need to be at 100%. We’re good here.”

So I sat back, and decided that the voice was right. I have had a lot of things going on in my life. Good things. Writing and thinking about and processing and aiming for 100% wasn’t as important as those other things in my life and because I wasn’t working toward 100% I didn’t deserve to reach that number, anyway.

But if I ignore that voice, and let myself push for 100%, what would that look like?

I think 100% will look just as though I am looking in a mirror right now and saying, “I’m at 100%.”

Here I go.

“I’m at 100%.”

Fuck off, voice.