Transcript

I'm 27 and I'm a native New Yorker from Queens. There's nobody really telling you you can live a normal life after you're diagnosed. You only see what you see on TV and hear about what crazy people are like.

They're in straight jackets. My family comes from a traditional African household. So I understood that like when I first got diagnosed, we were going to keep this under wraps. We try not to tell other people about it.

There are answers that I would want, you know, like how long am I going to be dealing with this? Why does this hurt so much? Like why me? Noah was my peer and he did music and I like to dabble with music. I knew Noah was somebody who helped others but I didn't explicitly know what his role was. So when I looked up what peer was, it was like somebody who shares their story to help others.

I felt like somebody connected with me on a deeper level. It wasn't just my family who, of course, they would try to help, but they never really understood. So somebody who was just down to be in my corner was like really cool.

"I felt like somebody connected with me on a deeper level. It wasn't just my family who, of course, they would try to help, but they never really understood. So somebody who was just down to be in my corner was like really cool."

I became a peer after I left OnTrack. I met all these people who you would never know had a mental illness by just looking at them. It made me realize that I could still live a life worthwhile and that I was a person of that kind who still mattered. The peer role doesn't necessarily mean that I have to have all the answers. How to understand rather than fix. To think that doctors would now take my opinion seriously just because I have lived experience.

And I love just having that. I was like the biggest FU to everybody who ever thought that I couldn't be a normal person after I went through this. And it's funny because in a traditional average, household, you don't leave the house until you get married. So the fact that I was already out doing this is just, I couldn't imagine what my journey would look like if I didn't have my family. I'm Drew first and then I'm like, whatever I have after, there's a lot more to a person than just what they're going through.

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