Hello. I’ve been diagnosed with several things in the past but now my therapist and psychiatrist seem to have no doubts regarding my suffering from a disorder on the schizophrenic spectrum which has been identified on their behalf as schizoaffective disorder.
I’m taking medication and have been doing therapy now for a long time. As many people on this forum I am vulnerable to delusions and hallucinations which have made my life undoubtedly interesting, albeit undoubtedly exhausting.
I often feel that I’ve reached the point where I can’t take it anymore, but then I remind myself that I’ve been feeling that way every day since I don’t know how many years now. At the same time, curiously, even when I see that I have nothing left, that my mind is broken, that my heart is dead, that my eyes are blind, that my ears are screaming, that my body is weak, I wouldn’t trade my life with anybody else’s.
Irrelevant details in my presentation could include that I’m a girl, in my twenties, not from an english-speaking country(so forgive me if I make mistakes or don’t get everything you write).
And now, the reason I chose my username. I’ve chosen my username after Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”. For those of you who are not familiar with it, and are not interested in seeing or hearing it, but are interested in understanding where I’m going with this(in brief: spoiler alert), it’s an amazingly beautiful opera about a Japanese woman(well, she’s only 15 in the story) who marries an American, Pinkerton, and vows eternal love to him, perceiving their wedlock as something so sacred it trascends even sacredness.
What she could never have conceived though is that his perception of their marriage is completely different; he marries her just to have company while in Japan, then goes back to America, leaving her pregnant and poverty-stricken. She waits and waits for his return, fed only by the fantasy of their glorious love, fed only by faith in its beautiful truthfulness.
She would have waited till the end of her days. But in the end she waits for three years, because Pinkerton finally comes back. Why does he come back? Because he found out he had a son, and wants to take him to America. With who does he come back? With his “proper” wife, an american wife.
Madama Butterfly, or Cio-Cio San, decides to give them her son, as her last act of love towards Pinkerton. But the only way to part from the last and only one that loved her - her son - is to kill herself. And so she does. I’ve chosen this username because, during an erotomanic delusion, I felt exactly the same way she felt towards the one she loved, the delusion of being loved back, then the realization, then the desperation of having wasted so many years in being faithful to a deception, and being deceived precisely by what gave meaning to her own heart.
But in my case it lasted more. It lasted four years. And I don’t have a son. And I don’t sing divinely. And I’m not Japanese. And I haven’t killed myself.
Instead, I’m here writing these things to you and probably other things will follow. I wish I could have written inspiring, uplifting things that would have tried to bring a little hope in lives that obviously need it.
But the truth is I don’t feel much hope anymore, and so all that’s left is honesty, for what I’m concerned.
Thank you for reading, if you have.