For me, wellness is about being able to fulfill your purpose in life. It's not about the absence of illness or disability-certainly not in my case, as part of my purpose is to fight the stigma and discrimination surrounding illness and disability. To be well in my book is to be doing that which you are meant to be doing-not based on the judgments of yourself or the expectations of others, but based on the unique design and demands of your own singular soul. For me, that means creating art and pursuing justice-and doing it all, as much as possible, through love. In order to live well-that is, to be able to do that which I am meant to be doing-I need to take care of my body, mind and soul. This means eating largely real food with ingredients I can pronounce and exercising (which I admit I'm not that great at, but I try). It also means taking medication, attending weekly therapy, engaging in daily prayers, and spending quality time with the people I love most. Ultimately though, I don't think that we always need to be well in order to live well. A lot of living well-especially for those of us living with mental health conditions-is about learning how to manage when we're not necessarily feeling our best. As I see it, to be well is to experience the full range of human emotion and experience with grace and curiosity-to wonder what each experience and emotion has to teach us instead of immediately judging ourselves and the events in our lives as necessarily good or bad. Often, the same experiences that I felt were the worst things to ever happen to me (a pancreatic tumor and bipolar disorder, for example) at the time turned out to be the best things to ever happen to me, because they helped me the most along my journey to finding and following my true purpose in life. 

To learn more about Melody's journey to wellness, please read her memoir, Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life.