J’s Message:“I’m relentless about living, relentless about healing, and learning what it means to do this thing that we’re all doing. I want to know about it. I’m passionate about knowing. One professor once said “He’s poised between learning and knowing more.” The most brilliant statement I think I’ve ever heard because isn’t that true about all of us. I know a lot, I am poised between learning more, and I couldn’t be more excited about doing it. I am passionate about both my history and my future, because I think it’s going to be—I hope it’s going to be a bright one.”

J Peters was born in the Bronx and raised in Westchester, New York, a wealthy neighborhood that he remembers stood apart from his middle-class family. He grew up in a loving and supportive family where both of his parents worked hard at both their jobs and their family commitments:

J Peters: My mom was a teacher in New York City, in the Bronx, and my dad worked in the Westchester area. Drove around with a truck taking instrument measures for the Department of Environmental Conservation. He had time on his hands, because he worked very independently to be around me growing up, when my mom maybe wasn’t available nine to five. Then my mom would come home and take over and they’d switch. They did a great job of it, you know. So, I felt very much supported by my parents and loved, and I think it probably reflected in my demeanor. I was very chipper and social, an upbeat sort of engaged student in elementary school. I worked hard at it.

Coming from such a supportive and nurturing environment, J found the transition to school difficult at times. Particularly in his early years of education, J was confronted with a number of negative experiences with teachers, such as his first-grade teacher’s concern about his reading abilities – something he can look back at with irony now, as a published author and longtime teacher. When J reached the fourth grade, he found a teacher that turned things around with the passion she brought to her teaching:

J Peters: Fourth grade, things sort of turned around a little bit. I had a teacher who was more enlivened, more friendly, more warm, more like nurturing-feeling. . . And whenever I felt like someone cared or was passionate, it reflected in how much rigor I invested into the work.

In middle school, J remembers that his social growth and desire for attention led him down a path of bullying as he became student council president and continued to have a rocky relationship with academics. He started taking school more seriously in light of the social withdraw he faced as friends realized his bullying was a problem and started drifting away from him. He worked his way into honors level classes and got the opportunity to be a part of a dementia research project that he came to be deeply involved in and passionate about. This experience in particular came to mean a great deal to him, both through the work itself and the thoughts about life and aging he was able to explore through it.

While all of these things were positives in J’s life, they came with the stress that pairs with anything one puts effort into, as you can hear him talk about below:

Following his erratic behavior and moods, J’s parents grew worried and made the call to take him to the hospital. He was taken in as an inpatient and met with a passionate and “fabulous doctor” – J’s own words to describe her – who he clicked with, despite his reluctance to be in the hospital. His first hospitalization was also where he first encountered social work, something he would later take on himself in an attempt to understand and control his own mental wellbeing. Through a battery of psychological testing and medications, the doctors eventually landed on a schizophrenia spectrum diagnosis, which you can listen to J discuss below:

 

J was hospitalized for a second time in high school when he attempted to take his own life amid feelings of isolation in the face of his diagnosis. His depression left him feeling sad and disconnected from his feelings in general. After work to connect with his family and emotions once again, and finding mood stabilizers that worked for him, he began to come out of the darker parts of his depression towards the end of high school. After high school, J applied to college and found work in the meantime. Upon being accepted to Binghamton University he moved into the dorms and connected with his roommate, despite coming in a term later in the spring. He found various activities on campus to connect with, such as his radio show, County Speak, writing for the school newspaper, and horseback riding. College was also a time where he found that he could open up more about what was going on with himself:
J Peters: Anyway, to make a long story short, I connected with my roommate very well. We were sort of like-minded in a lot of ways. I sort of casually disclosed I had some mental health stuff one night. I remember I did it, I had fun with it. It was like one of those nights you’re up talking with your roommate real late, and then like at 4:00 a.m. right before he falls asleep, I was like, “You know, I’ve been a psychiatric hospital. I have a major mental health disorder.” And he says, “What?” And then he falls asleep. He wakes up the next day. “Uh… So, what you said to me last night….” I had fun with it, you know, and no one really cared. .
During college, the stability J had begun to build took a hit when he fell in love with another student and ended up in the emergency room after trying to “invoke some sort of feeling in her” by attempting to take his life for the second time. Shortly after, she and many of his friends graduated, leaving J with one or two friends and a crisis of figuring out his next steps. In an effort to graduate with the remainder of his friends, J dove into school work, tackling classes left and right with great success. It was around this time he became immersed in language and applied to graduate school for English:
J Peters: I ramped up. I was doing a full summer session, right? I kicked some butt after that: back to all A’s, I was feeling it, I was on new meds, right? I was on some stimulants which really helped me focus again, given that I was back on the other meds and had to do all this stuff. And I was really kicking butt, and I got really, really excited academically again. Like, “This stuff’s interesting. I really like English. I really, really like it. Not really squared, big and exponential.” When the time fall came around, oh my God, was I ever into it. I was like, “I’m Mr. English. I’m Mr. Language.” And that like abstraction of the language, what language means, and my relationship with it got totally out of hand. That’s the best way I can put it. Totally out of hand. I thought by the end of fall semester, I was connected to language. The idea of it, what it was and how it worked. My role in the course of history and time, the evolution of language itself and what it means for history and rhetoric. .
To make this dream of graduate school a reality, J and his advisors went around the limitations of the school policies and signed him up for an enormous class schedule over the winter. Taking so many accelerated classes through the winter term was already very stressful, but it was during this time that he also learned that he had not been accepted into graduate school for English – the very reason he was taking all of these classes to begin with. This, J remembers, is where things started to go downhill. He began to have ideas of persecution from the English department, became isolated once again as his behavior concerned his friends, and was eventually hospitalized again when he began to lose his grasp on language and hearing voices in the house he was living in. In the hospital, J struggled with delusions surrounding medication, but eventually found medications and therapy that helped him become stable once again. After a year out of the state hospital, J began to have a mindset that he deserved more than he was doing and decided to go back to school, this time for social work.
J Peters: [B]etter health for me would mean going into social work and getting this degree. I also figured I might learn a little bit about my illness. Right? I never really liked being told what to do, or you know I hadn’t been an authority in my life, ever ever ever. I really liked being in control of myself, and those days when I was more in control of myself, and what that meant. So, I think for me going into social work meant learning about myself enough where I wouldn’t be—my life wouldn’t—my future wouldn’t mean being dictated to by doctors, listening to them, going from doctor to doctor, and how to get better. I would learn enough about how to self-care that I could do it on my own or autonomously. And that was very important for me because I knew I had a lifelong illness ahead of me.
This time around, J reflects on having to become a more serious person – staying on top of his treatments and medication alongside graduate school necessitated it but has also helped him to maximize his moments of joy. He also made the decision to be less open about his diagnosis, so as to avoid some of the stigma he would face. After graduating with a masters in social work, J started doing peer work, which inspired him to write journal articles on stigma, peer work, and the peer process. He later opened up about his diagnosis in the field:

 

Unfortunately, J eventually left his clinical work when others’ reactions to his diagnosis made him feel uncomfortable. He then started supervising students and newly-licensed clinicians, learned about other fields and specializations in psychology. After a few years there, he left when he faced accusations from a supposed friend that he was getting sick again, and started teaching, which you can hear him talk about below:

 

Shortly after, COVID-19 sent everyone into isolation. J, rather than become completely isolated, found his “COVID relationship”, which gave him someone to share the experience with, especially as his parents had moved out of his childhood home.

Now, J believes he has truly become an adult and is absorbed in his writing and his newfound appreciation for setting down roots and building his life:

J Peters: Things are picking up in so many domains, you know, that I can’t keep up with all of them most of the time. But isn’t that what life is supposed to be? With or without a diagnosis or a problem like it’s… my life is full. It couldn’t be more full. But if it was, I’ll take it. I can do that too. because you know what? We grow, we mature and I’m ready for it.

J’s days are filled with his writing work, connecting with friends and family, and his recently discovered drone hobby. He is an editor in chief for his blog, had a private practice, and is working on rebuilding connections after the pandemic, through discussions such as this:

J Peters: I think that’s so wonderful and so important for people like me and others that have experienced similar situations, to be able to think about things in this larger grand narrative about who they are, because that is so powerful. When they start to see everything that they’ve done, all that they’ve achieved and all that they’re about, well there’s a lot to love there. I think people should love themselves, love themselves unconditionally, because that’s the best sort of self-care you could give.