Becoming Humble

I am 100% sure that God is trying to teach me humility. Do you want proof? I am in an adult day treatment program. I wasn't forced to, but chose to go on my own. I now will be surrounded every day by people that I have put down or made jokes about before.

See, before I lost my marbles, I used to think that adults that were in and out of the hospital or attending any form of day programming were incapable of taking care of themselves due to very difficult mental illnesses like schizophrenia, on drugs, or just plain stupid. I had never wanted to work with adults with issues because they tended to piss me off. Well, now I'm one of them, and I am feeling the sting of my own habit to judge. So far, after my first day, I am sure that at least 70% of my fellow day residents are there because they want to get better. I fall into the 70%, thankfully.

The humility is coming because I realise that no matter the individual diagnoses I have a lot in common with these people. The first thing I think of is that I have found my life to be unmanageable. I see that there are a lot of reasons for me to be depressed, but I am my biggest reason for being as bad as I am right now because I did not cope the ways I could have. This is not to say that I think my depression is my fault; it's the chemicals in my brain deciding they don't want to do what they should. What I do see is that my depression is something that I can manage a lot better than I have been.

The sort of funny thing is that, having worked in behavioral health, I keep wanting to dole out advice to the others in my group. I know how to handle certain situations, I'm just not very good at motivating to do so. At the same time, I've already learned certain things from the other patients in the program. And they're the people I wouldn't have expected to have any advice I could use in my life. That's when I begin to feel humble.

So instead of judging people or trying to figure out what's wrong with them, I'll try this humble loving thing. I'll keep an open mind and remember that everyone is working on themselves just as I am.

I will, however, be relating funny stories of things that happen. No real names or anything personal of course...damn HIPPA.