Good Enough


I spend so much time not confident in who I am. I often think others are judging me by my appearance or because they don’t like the person I am. I have started to try to remember the times that I did feel good about myself fully and I try to remember what I felt like in that instance so that I can start to crave feeling like that so often that I can begin to make a habit of it.

Not good enough for my grade school friend

I have been told before that confidence comes from within, however my inside voice tells me I am inherently bad. Let me explain, when I was in grade school I was taught by my best friend I wasn’t good enough to be her friend at school in front of other kids because I was over-weight and poor not to mention I was annoying and considered a cry baby. She made me believe the thought that I was not good enough for anything. Not even common friendship. Now about 6th grade she finally grew up some and told the other girls that I was her friend and they were wrong for thinking I was not good enough to be friends with because of the way I looked but by then the damage was already done.

Not good enough for the guys to date in school

In junior high and high school boys didn’t date me. I was the “fat, ugly friend”, by age 12 everyone at my school knew I was considered ugly and fat and even if their opinion of me differed they would have never had considered dating me because that would mean going against what their friends had made them believe. I wasn’t good enough to date.

According to a PE teacher in my high school I would never be good enough to parent a child

A lot happened in high school. I had a teacher who told me that she hoped I never had children because I was a poor excuse for a human and any child, I would have wouldn’t have a chance in life. Yes, a teacher said this to me. It felt crappy and that PE teacher did get a phone call down to the dean’s office after my mother called the school to discuss the topic, but the damage was done. I was bad. I wasn’t good enough.

Not good enough for my own father

Then in high school my father left my mother and I for another woman and her children leaving us behind. He then raised another woman’s children and left me, and we hardly spoke because she wanted it that way. In fact, on one instance because of this other child that he ended up raising he hit me numerous times and security was called at a hotel because of it. He explained it away to my mother as I had gotten out of hand. What was out of hand was his and his wife’s expectation that I and my step-sister could handle the other step-sister with-out their interaction that day and they would not help get her to cooperate. He got mad and I got beaten and I don’t mean spanked, I was beaten. I had welts left on my arm for well over a week. Again, I was taught I was a bad person. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but facts are facts. This did happen and it is a part of my teenage years.

Still not good enough for that grade school friend as an adult even after 30 years of friendship

As an adult I handled things fairly well with my confidence level for quite sometime but I was having coffee with the same friend who taught me in grade school that I wasn’t enough and she looked at me and said “I can only handle so much Tosha at one time” I know it seems like such a simple sentence. It doesn’t seem like it should stick with someone for the next 15 years. However, as a young adult trying to make my way in the world it hurt me, and it stuck with me that this same girl felt that I still wasn’t good enough after almost 30 years of friendship. I was her maid of honor, her mine and yet I wasn’t good enough to be her friend most of the time around her other friends. I mean, when she got married the last time, I met her husband only one time. Sadly, he passed away not too long ago.  I am sure it isn’t easy on her and I do care about her very deeply as she is my oldest friend. I also don’t believe she understood the damage she was doing when she did these things to me. I don’t think she understood that what she was saying to me or how she was acting could do so much damage to someone’s self-image that it truly changed the person they became.

Ran away from the job due to other ignorance of bipolar and their belief I was not good enough to be around their children

I then as an adult let it be found out I was bipolar while working in a small town. ( As a bus monitor. I ended up having the whole school district of parents calling the superintendent of the school and the school principal. The parents were making so much of a fuss about me being with their children that I finally gave up and quit my job because I was already battling depression so badly I had no fight in me to battle the storm that was happening around me and my public lashing with being bipolar. I again was taught I was inherently bad just by simply being who I was.

Through out my life I have had message after message that has told me from others that I am not enough and bad. Why? I am not. I am smart, I am compassionate, I am empathetic, I am generous and caring. I am kind and a hard-worker, and I give a whole lot of myself to others. It is now though, that I am finally realizing that all of these situations really had nothing to do with me, or the person I was. These situations all had to do with the individual that was at the root of the problem. It was because my friend wasn’t confident enough in who she was to say, she wanted to be my friend as a child. It was the teacher who should be ashamed of the way she spoke to a child in her classroom and obviously did not have the emotional intelligence to be teaching young kids who were being shaped into the individuals they would become as an adult and should be encouraged and nurtured not degraded and taught they are bad and not worthy of the life they are living, my father, well, he was just a jerk, and the people in my former community, well, they just weren’t educated enough to know that bipolar didn’t mean bad, and there is always going to be that ignorance and that stigma in the world. As much as I wish there wouldn’t be as long as we have people blaming mass shootings on the mentally ill, we are going to have stigma. It’s a fact. BIPOLAR PEOPLE ARE NOT VIOLENT! There I said it! I’ll leave that soap box alone.

My confidence level has been shot a long time. I however, for the first time in a long time no longer think I am a bad person or think that people automatically don’t like me. I am actually kinda cool. Maybe we should be friends!

“Positive Vibes”


“Smile and the world smiles with you if you frown you frown alone” a simple saying that I was told my whole life. I had no clue what this saying truly meant when I was a freshman writing it on the board for the quote of the day because the teacher had forgotten to write a quote yet I felt the board needed her daily quote and since I wasn’t particularly smart that was the only thing I could come up with. It was a saying my mom would say to me when I would walk around the house saying, “I’m bored” and whine and cry because I wanted something to do. Not so different than I do now, meaning I still have ADHD and bipolar disorder and I still get really bored and whine and cry about it, only I am a grown up now. Today someone told me the same quote as I laughed about the fact that my smile is authentic, and I often keep a smile on my face these days even when facing depression.

It was about two years ago that I realized the need to cut people out of my social circle when they had a negative influence on my positive vibe due to the fact that the effect my moods because of me having bipolar disorder. Bipolar Disorder is a brain disorder that causes unusual shifts in mood, energy, activity levels, and the ability to carry out day to day activities. I had made a good friend within a group of friends my husband and I had begun hanging around. She and I had started to go shopping on weekdays and go to lunch, sometimes her boyfriend would join us and it was fun at first.

I then started to notice she would get lost in thoughts about her relationship with him and that she would often time be lost wondering if he loved her or often times if he even liked her. On one occasion her and her boyfriend and my husband and I went to dinner and somehow I was very upset by the end of the dinner about another person within our social circle because of her boyfriend as we say “stirring the shit pot” purposely to cause trouble. On another couple occasions I started to notice how he complained about the service everywhere we went to eat or where he stayed if it was a hotel in order to get something for free or at a discount, nothing was ever done right or good enough for him and I finally separated myself from their friendship due to the negativity that came out of their mouths and the influence they had on my moods.

Everyone has a bad day. Everyone is entitled to a bad day. I am more than willing to give everyone the benefit of a bad day or a bad week. However, this was obviously his personality and she was a part of him and she was wanting to be with him and I knew I couldn’t handle him and his negative personality without it affecting me and my moods. I had a choice to make. My choice was clear.

I had to choose to not have that negative influence in my life. I can only have him in my life in small doses. I was sad to have to cut out my friend but I knew that it was better for my state of mind not to have the negativity in my life. Even having someone who is mostly depressed all the time as she was is difficult for me. If they have more good days then bad I can handle it but otherwise, I will find myself struggling to be their friend because it begins to bring my mood into a downside as well.

Last year I was given the opportunity to become a Certified Recovery Support Specialist which is something I thought I wanted more than anything. I have always wanted to teach others how to find their way into recovery. I still do. However, what I learned is there is a lot of times I would be given a client who was still not ready to be in recovery. They were still in the depression phase of the illness and they weren’t willing to do the work to get better. I struggled every day as I listened to them tell their stories and poured out their hearts and I would many times cry with them. I would leave my position every day feeling drained and overwhelmed. I quickly decided that wasn’t a job I could do. I could not handle that job. I wanted something that left me feeling good every day not leaving me feeling sad. Crisis intervention was not for me.

Again I learned that I needed to be around positivity in order to keep my self in a good mood. I have to keep my environment happy. Otherwise, I have a mess on my hands. What about you do you make sure to cut toxic people out of your life when you meet them? Do you protect your mind from the negative things that threaten it? How do you make sure to keep your mind safe from negative influences in this world?

Interview with Tim Blue


In this interview with Tim Blue listen as we discuss everything from over spending when manic my largest total being $37,000, to hypersexuality and how it is possible to lose your license for something as simple as taking a bipolar medications. Having bipolar disorder is no joke. It is a serious illness with serious consequences and if you don’t recognize the illness and stand up and become mindful of the symptoms, it will take you for everything you have.

Many of you have read my life experiences with bipolar disorder, now listen as Tim and I discuss many of the things you have only been able to read about and now can hear it from me, myself as Tim and I talk very candidly about my life.

Feeding the Homeless


I saw a post on facebook about how the pizza chain Little Ceasers put a sign in the window of their store for a homeless person to stop going through their trash. It starts off where you think you are going to get mad but as you finish reading the sign, you are overcome with joy as you realize the sign is telling them that they are a human being and to please come inside and they will offer them a couple of slices of hot pizza and a glass of water no questions asked. That no person should have to go through the trash for food. As I read the sign I was so moved that I found myself placing my hand over my heart and letting out a large sigh.

I then proceeded to read the comments

I then proceeded to read the comments. I didn’t, however, read them for very long, because I was so upset by the ignorance that I was blindsided by. I cannot believe that in this day in age that so many people are so ignorant to the fact that there is so much more to the issue of just homelessness than just “get a job”.

To look at me you would think I am very capable of holding down a job. It seems like a very reasonable thing. I am high functioning and very smart, coherent most of the time. I am a good worker when I do work. I have many skills and when I go to work I am on time and I do what I am told to do. I am normally placed in management positions shortly after I become an employee. I excel fast and I move at a fast pace and can multi-task and I do wonderful normally for about a year to a year and a half at most jobs. Then the delusions set in.

My workplace delusions will be of other co-workers or my boss being out to get me. They all want me fired. I just know it. That will lead to me keeping a scorecard and to a lot of undue stress. Eventually, I start being careless and missing steps in my position. The write-ups begin and before I know it my work life as well as my personal life starts to unravel.

This isn’t just a scenario that has played out once

This isn’t just a scenario that has played out once, but a scenario that has played out several times over many years over and over and over again and I am a high functioning person with a severe type of mental illness. Take a person who has a severe type of mental illness and may not be high functioning. Maybe they hear voices all day long when my delusions are raging like they have been recently there is no way I could try to work as well. I can not imagine it.

For someone to claim “maybe they should just get a job” is the most heartless thing a person can say. They have obviously never sat with someone while they were experiencing delusional thoughts or experienced delusions themselves. Mental illness is so much more than just feeling sad. Bipolar Disorder is so much more than just mood swings or being moody. There is so much more to it than “just get a job”.  This country needs to wake up and help those of us in need. People are homeless because they don’t have the support system at home that is needed to survive so they only have the streets and if as a fellow human being they can’t turn to you who can they turn too!

It’s a choice

This Little Ceaser’s made a choice to do something good for a fellow human being. A good thing for someone in need. If every fast food chain, the ones that were in the green and making a good profit did the same and tried to give even two meals away because we know you throw at least that many away a day. If they could just give two meals away a day. It could end hunger in this country among the homeless. Instead, we have greed.