Never, Ever Give Up!

You can find many inspirational stories about never giving up hope. Just search for perseverance among entrepreneurs, inventors (such as Thomas Alva Edison for one,) and artists in any medium. Such a biographical précis of your choice can inspire you to hang in there. A better day will come. No matter what your present circumstances. Only death obviates hope.

I suggest that every therapist put emphasis on collecting songs, or if the patient is interested, poems, on not giving up. My favorite is Edgar A Guest’s “It Couldn’t Be Done.” It’s followed me from bulletin board to board these many decades, tacked up as flag of hope.

Whether or not you have a therapist, you can help yourself immensely by collecting stories of positive thinking. I found something similar to the following in a fortune cookie once:

If you are not satisfied because you didn’t get what you wanted, think of all the things that you did not want that you did not get!

Never giving up is key to recovery, because a return to yourself as you were before your illness became severe—better! actually, due to having matured—can take many years and sometimes a number of decades. Nobody else will constantly be present to nudge you to mental health, so you must manufacture by yourself reminders that will always be there. Motivation has to be within you.

And the only way that I’ve found to persevere through all the normal trials of life, let alone the extra slings and arrows of mental illness, is to have reminders in front of you always. Maybe on your smart phone, maybe written down and posted wherever you go—bathroom mirror, laptop computer, bicycle handlebars….