Reflecting on the Self-Stigma Series

Two Years Later

It’s been two years since I published a three-part series, Overcoming the Self-Stigma of Mental Illness:

• Part 1 – From Gifted Child to Chronic Mental Patient

• Part 2 – Surviving Disintegration and Forging a New Path

• Part 3 – The Value of a Non-Pathologizing Framework

At the time, I wasn’t sure how people would respond. What I discovered is that telling the truth about stigma and internalized ableism resonated far beyond anything I expected. Today, I want to look back on that series, reflect on what has unfolded since, and honor the ripple effects it continues to create.

I’ve also gone back and improved the audio quality of the recordings for all three posts in the series. If you prefer listening, you’ll now find clearer versions of those recordings alongside the text.

When I published the series in August and September 2023, I was nervous. But in the lead-up to creating these posts, I realized they were a necessary part of my journey.

The Courage to Share

Publishing was much more than simply disclosure. It was a reframe. In those same journals, I wrote:

“This material needs to be shared. This is a huge breakthrough for me. I’m finally overcoming my self-stigma and internalized ableism. It’s a process, but this feels like a turning point.”

That intuition proved correct. The series became a bridge between my private healing and my public mission. I had already been studying my life through autoethnography, creating distance and naming patterns. Publishing that work transformed it. It stopped being only my medicine and became something others could use.

Photo by Sonny Baccam on Unsplash

More Than Memoir

Two years on, I see that the series became more than a personal story. It demonstrated a method. It showed that anyone can examine their life through a non-pathologizing lens, reclaim their agency, and treat their story as valuable data.

Autoethnography, once tucked away in academia, moved into lived practice. The series democratized it. It invited others to become researchers of their own experience, to see their lives as both personal struggle and part of a larger map of human neurodiversity.

The emails I’ve received from grateful readers who’ve discovered my work over the past two years directly fueled the work I’ve done since to produce a paper about my methods. I will continue sharing about autoethnography on Substack and beyond.

The Ongoing Process

I knew, even in 2023, that this was only a beginning. My journals from that summer show me wrestling with definitions of stigma and ableism, exploring disability justice, and realizing that I could finally stop seeing myself as "characterologically flawed." I wrote of how progress had been made—that it was easier to talk about mental illness now than in my youth—but also of how deeply I still carried the weight of internalized narratives.

That tension, the sense of ongoing work, has proven true. What started as three posts has since expanded into a thriving community of people reframing their lives through Dąbrowski's theory.

A Testament to Transformation

Perhaps the deepest legacy of the series is that it shows transformation without erasure. My story doesn't pretend away the teenage journals, the hospitalizations, the years of medication, or the cycles of addiction. Instead, it reframes them within the larger arc of disintegration and integration.

I moved from "chronic mental patient" to scholar, from self-stigma to self-acceptance, from isolation to community. But the past remains part of the story—it isn't denied; it's integrated.

Looking Forward

As I've written since: "My job now is to carry this message to others and let them know they're not broken." The self-stigma series marked the moment when that personal healing became inseparable from a public calling.

Two years later, its impact is still unfolding. Each time someone finds those posts, recognizes themselves, and begins to loosen the grip of internalized ableism, I see the ripple widen.

The series remains what it was always meant to be: a bridge away from the medical model toward a richer understanding of human complexity. It's a testament to the power of reframing, of refusing deficit-based narratives, and of discovering the gifts hidden inside struggle.

And so, two years later, I'm grateful—for the courage it took to share, for everyone who has joined me in this work, and for the community that continues to grow around a simple but radical truth: we're not broken.

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