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Letter: Finding Healing at the Center for Hope and Renewal

lettertotheeditor

To the Editor:

Dr. Alfred Adler, an Austrian medical doctor and psychologist once said, “the only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.”  In my experience, this has been entirely true.  By all accounts, I was not only normal, but somewhat exceptional. I grew up in Westchester County, where I was an all-state athlete, all-state choir, and beauty pageant finalist who went on to be an Ivy League grad.

For all intents, and purposes, I was winning at the game of life. Except I was also struggling with family dysfunction, constant anxiety and depression, and alcohol, which I used to cope with life’s problems. It wasn’t until I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in my late 20’s, at the peak of a very successful and lucrative career in marketing, that I knew I needed to address the internal demons that were now clearly affecting my carefully curated picture of external normalcy. In a way, the MS was a liberating diagnosis, which gave me permission to embrace the fact that I wasn’t ‘normal.’ I’m grateful for the catalyst that diagnosis provided for me to start a journey of true self-acceptance and improvement.

In the past decade, I’ve rekindled my love for God, gotten sober, married, bought a house, kept two dogs alive and well, and experienced joy and serenity for the first time. A huge and critical part of this journey has been therapy. My therapist at the Center for Greenwich Hope and Renewal, has helped me identify and articulate my feelings around life’s challenges like MS and infertility, set important boundaries with my family, and shown me God’s love at times when it was hard to love myself.  I cannot adequately put into words the healing I’ve experienced there.

I do understand people are afraid of what they don’t know or understand. I still struggle with anxiety at times. My neighbors a few houses down are moving, and I’m having some anxiety about that change, and who the new neighbors might be. Will they be quiet? Respectful? Serial killers? Thanks to therapy and friends who are on the same growth journey that I am, I now have the tools to assuage these fears and move through them in healthy ways. In life everyone has issues, no one is ‘normal’ because ‘normal’ is a unicorn – it doesn’t exist. I applaud the brave people who have the courage to look within and do the hard work it takes, not to be ‘normal’, but to be healthy.

Marian Schaly

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