First of all, happy easter everyone. I hope you can enjoy a few days off and spend some time with your family. We just had a little gathering this morning, and after coming back, it just came to my mind that I haven't checked this place in quite some time, nor have I posted anything. Which is what I'm doing now. While I don't have a title in mind in the moment of writing this line, I still hope you get some value out of my post.

There have been times since I've been diagnosed, which was more than a decade ago, where the illness itself hasn't even been on my mind much. It ranged from having the delusion that I was cured, over just thinking about it when it's med time, to being obsessed about it in an unhealthy way, thinking about it all the time. Of course it's been on my mind whenever I was having symptoms, after I really understood what was going on and having insight finally.

At the moment I'm just enjoying a stable, symptom-free time in my life. I'm seeing my therapist every few months for a short visit, and last time he ended our conversation asking me, what do I want more. I couldn't answer that question at that point, and I'm still not sure if I can already. But it made me thinking about if there is something that helps you after you've learned to manage your illness well. To be fair, I'm still on the search for (further) answers. Still, I've found a rough direction already.

On a scale from -10 to 10, therapy brings you to 0. And there are talented therapists out there, who are doing a good job at that. But are they really motivated to try to push you further, after you've reached stability? Isn't it easier if they don't have much work to do with you anymore? I mean, wasn't it hard enough already to bring you from a negative 10 to zero? I mean, maybe you can even reach the positive points on the scale whilst in therapy, but that is outside the aim, also of your insurance, I guess.

I've asked myself, how do I get to a 10? Not saying all the time, but maybe a stable seven? Aside from this stupid number scale, what do I really want more out of life? I think to aim towards becoming the best version of myself that I can be. So now this sounds like I've read a few self-improvement books, and I did, I also went to some seminars and watched dozens of hours of YouTube videos about the topic. While it did help a bit, ironically the most powerful idea I got out of it was just that you can even try to improve your life at all.

Like knowing that depression ends at some point if you overcame multiple episodes, knowing that it can also get better from neutral to a more positive experience of life was honestly a pretty huge shift in my thinking. Of course I didn't have linear progress from there on, which isn't possible, still my life slowly improved. But what was even more important from me, was getting the help from other people. Because what's even more important than "the power from within" is the power of community. Other people can be your life insurance, and here is why:

I'll start with my most recent example. The difficulty of being stable is definitively taking enough of your antipsychotic medication to make sure to not experience psychotic symptoms, while not being too negatively affected by side effects. I have a friend to whom I talk to on the phone often, but when we meet each other, he can notice within seconds of talking to me whether I'm fully there, or else he'll ask me if I made any changes to my medication. Whilst this can seem annoying, which I can understand, there is a difference between situations like this and the old "didn't take your meds, huh?" in situations where you 

1. did take them and 

2. whatever made the person say this statement had nothing to do with your medication or illness.

The latter you obviously don't want. But what I'm describing is feedback you'll need at a certain stage. And I'm grateful to get this kind of feedback by a hypersensitive friend before other people start to notice it. Which is what I say thank you to him for. Other examples of people being your life insurance include a friend basically renting me his living room for a month so I could get a final paper done for school, which helped me with overcoming procrastination and limiting negative symptoms impacting me, as far as that was possible.

What else can you do? Well, it depends on your budget, but you can pay people directly to help you. Here you need to be careful, of course. But as with self-help books, take what helps you personally - I can't know what services will help you the most, and reject what doesn't. I've personally paid a trainer to help me on a bodily level, especially learning how to take pressure out of my body via little mobility exercises has reduced my stress levels a lot. I still go to physiotherapy once a month, which are probably the best 27 dollars I spend from my fixed costs.

Then I've done another thing, which is to continue working with a coach I knew from my former workplace. You may say that the concept of solving inner blockages is a little out there, and I do also think it is, but it worked wonders for me. Since this is very hard to describe what the coach is actually doing and how it's working, I just want to encourage you to keep doing whatever is really helping you. Even if it's a little woo-woo, if the results are actually there, keep doing it. My "results" were that I need a third less of my antipsychotic and that I need way less time to recover from smaller stressful events. Still, run away if someone promises you to be able to come off your meds with the help of their technique. I know it could be due to other effects that I was able to reduce my medication a little bit, which is why I'm careful with my claims. But as long as you can rule out that something is harming you, why not make use of the placebo effect.

Since my post has become pretty long already, I want to end it by first of all thanking you for reading it until here. Even though I'm not that optimistic about it gaining much attention on a selfie sunday - not that I care, I still want to ask you: What are your experiences "beyond therapy"? Have you found something that helps you go further, and move towards your goals that came to your mind after you reached a level of stability that you're happy with? For now, my passion is teaching, but since only explaining how to write computer code gets a little boring from time to time, I've decided to return to this subreddit again and write in my typical style. Hope you liked it, and I'm happy to hear from you in the comments, until Easter is over and I retreat once more from here, only to return in the future with new insights for you.