My volunteer career with NAMI Sacramento has begun, and I am already participating in the expansion of my organization’s goals. I represented a living success story when I manned our NAMI Sacramento booth at the Disability Fair on the campus of Sacramento City College last Thursday. It felt great to be working, or more accurately, sponsoring awareness and proactively engaging the community. As time goes on, my hours will steadily increase, and I believe I have made it clear to my Executive Director that I have a lot to offer. The future looks bright.

There is this part of me that keeps going back to the past to poke around in the ashes for an ember of some form. I don’t know why I indulge this activity, as my last encounter with this resulted in me being cursed and berated. Chances are, the same fate ultimately awaits me in the past. The past is a place I have utterly ruined, and I should not expect anything to grow there ever again. Looking forward, this seems to be a good incentive for isolation and an avoidance of the path that led to all that mess. The whole sector is now an irradiated wasteland with an unfriendly fence around it.

I don’t know what new things I will discover in this career direction, but the work is bound to be more rewarding, more meaningful. It is having a purpose and making a difference that are of concern to me. I don’t want to be forgotten or useless. We have a cat: there’s already someone in this house who’s primary occupation is being useless. No room for two of us, it would seem. So here I am living my life, being proactive and helping a nonprofit spread the word about erasing the stigma of mental illness.