"An Army of Me "
I’m trying to come to terms with my schizophrenia. I’m not
sure how to place it or describe it because of the many experiences
I’ve based my story upon.
I was sixteen years old when I lost my mind according to the system. I
did it rather purposely. I was miserable, young, hopeless.
I hated life, longed for love, and felt abandoned by my
parents. The only thing I had were my delusions of a better life.
Except, the boarding school was haunted and my demons were too wild to
contain. My parents came to Ohio and we stayed in a hotel because we
were six hours from home. I was buzzing with sensations, and everything
was painful. I could see all the differences reflecting in my mirrored
existence. I went to bed and heard the woman who comforted me talking to
another sympathetic women, “and then he shot himself” she said and the
shot rang out in my eardrums. The boarding school was very old and it
was haunted. Every day was disconnection because there was no structure
at that school, and I was clearly descending into psychosis.
I was put into treatment almost as soon as I got home, and given a
diagnosis of psychosis NOS later to be paranoid schizophrenia. I was
isolated a lot because I refused treatment and thought they were trying
to condition and brainwash me. This upset them. Perhaps they were just
trying to help. Then I went to catholic school for a couple years, and
eventually stopped taking medications because of the deep seated hatred
of what they had done to break me down. One memory that resurfaced was
of the doctor who administered my EEG telling my parents that it was
abnormally high, that it was off the charts. I told my doctor I thought I
had been raped only to find “paranoid schizophrenia” circled on a piece
of paper when I left her office.
When I was seventeen I dropped out of catholic high school after
stopping my medication. The principle tried to get me to talk to a
counselor but I was frightened because she wanted to video tape me and
asked my parents for permission. Then I was stuck at home without a way
out. My parents would not teach me to drive until I took medications,
which left me isolated all day. This was mostly my dad’s influence as he
strongly believed that I was sick and fought with my mom over it. My
mom once told me that she felt neglected because of me. She had just
come home from her mission in the Middle East to teach peace and
conflict resolution to Palestinians, to her daughter raving mad. I
always ruined things for everyone. So instead of her fanatical fanfare
she was housed by the shame of my failures. I love my mom even when my
brother thinks activists are sad self absorbed fanatics or that spirit
was broken.
When I was first experiencing the symptoms, it was very overwhelming and
chaotic. I was depressed as well. I would go to sleep listening to
Elliot Smith and praying I was free from this sickness. I never really
heard voices until I was hospitalized, about three years after I became
ill. It was in the hospital where I had no one to talk to, and was
forced medications that I began hearing what I thought were voices in
response to trauma. I was so traumatized by the medication, isolation,
being singled out and my own paranoia of authority that I heard voices
who started yelling at the people around me to pay attention to me. I
heard voices say “stop hurting her” or “are you aware of what they’re
doing to you?” it was definitely a direct response to isolation, trauma,
and forced drugging. I heard voices object to my treatment during
discharge, with a blank stare I heard voices say
“not going to get followup treatment.”
They said things I wasn’t allowed to say because I was too frightened.
The nurses also kept throwing away these packets of writing that were
supposed to get me discharged if I filled them out. I was kept there for
over three weeks twice. The second time because I had a relapse on
Geodon and wasn’t able to express how it was making me paranoid. I even
told the doctor I wasn’t sure it would work and would rather stick to
the other medication that worked. I heard voices on Geodon within an
hour of my first 180mg dose. It was a bunch of whispers that started
guiding me, plus the repetition and everything was more inductive of my
suffering and mental collapse.
My mom used to argue with my dad about working for government
contractors. She protested a bunch of government people, and believed
she was being targeted. Whether or not she was actually the target of
something has yet to be revealed. She started a peace group that
protested the Iraq war in DC and dragged us to protests when over
400,000 people marched to protest the destruction of the Geneva
Convention and the illegal spying and torture that would ensue as a
result. It started out small, but over time more and more of her friends
and connections appeared to be dismantled from a distance. In her
journals from her last incarceration in which she refused to post bail,
she writes about how these women are suspected of terrorism.
My brother thinks activists are miserable ego-driven people as a
result of this. Over time the medication has made me quieter and
duller, while I might be more insightful about the hardships of reality,
Abilify slows down my thinking. I know side effects of Abilify can be
seizures, which might explain my seizure-like sleep paralysis I
experience every few months or depending on some factor I can’t explain
other than the weather. The sleep paralysis has stopped completely
lately. I haven’t had any out of body experiences. I still do have
premonitions, but not quite as frequently as before.
I’m on the cusp of understanding it, but I never quite reach that level
of awareness that could pull me up out of this depression. I’ve had a
lot of extraordinary experiences. None of them very earth shattering to
be honest. I just paid attention to them, and instead of blankly
dismissing my experiences every single time, I observed them. I got a
fortune cookie recently that said my dreams created my reality.
I wouldn’t be able to describe it very well, but if reality were learned
rather than true that might explain how we can change it. It’s like
everything falls into place, or natural order, eventually. Like the fact
that the “spirit world” warned me of recklessly moving to NYC and years
later my friend is trying to get me to come with him to NYC . Or the
repeated dreams of a bridge being rebuilt, or tsunamis in Japan. But my
dreams are more metaphorical and spiritual. My dreams are like
sophisticated enigmas full of wisdom. I just have had a lot of
paranormal experiences that I can’t dismiss the thought of an other
reality, or a spirit world. I am not inviting them. They come to me. I’m
not shutting it out either.
There is no doubt some kind of energetic resonance to this world that
many people do not attempt to acknowledge. My paranormal experiences
have been physical. Have any of you had physics defying experiences that
cause you to question your diagnosis? When the De Ja Vu hits it can be
intense. If I’ve dreamed of a path in the woods for several months
before I’m walking it…it could be a coincidence, but my dreams are so
intense it’s like they are calling to me. Trying to wake me up, make me
stronger, awaken my instinct and intuition. I just don’t understand why I
have so many repeating dreams lately.
I can’t explain a few instances where I “thought” perhaps in error, that
the laws of so called reality were suspended and only I could observe
it. That based on a person’s mindset they can be incapable of processing
it, or it’s not supposed to be revealed to them. Is this because so
many are on a path to ignorance? Or is it because reality is dictating
who she reveals herself to. But if you could even prove it, and still
you were ignored, then there is something fundamentally flawed with this
realm.
Knowledge taints experience. Why bother fitting in with the herd when
I’m a leader, and why lead anyone but yourself. When I take my
medication all it does is force me to bottle up my feelings until they
begin to warp, I become obsessive and more fitting to my new label of
Bipolar disorder. I am isolated, have no one to talk to about any of it.
No one believes me. Imagine if you were the only person with a key to
the otherside of the gate, but when you came back no one believed a
single word you said, because that key holds an ancient secret and
people have distracted themselves with something else. And there is a
force of nature which attempts to oppress insight. There are multiple
forces which come upon us in the night to tempt us to reveal our truths.
I used to think I could influence the weather because I’d look up into
the sky and feel everything pulsing through me, and the feeling would
just reflect out everywhere. I’d lay on my back and stare up into a spot
in the sky and everything would change. The clouds would part and it
would just be me and this endless blue space.
There are other experiences that just traumatized me. Doors locking me from outside
and no one’s outside. I suspected it was some vicious magician, but
some of the things I saw etc. were as autonomous intelligences that I
couldn’t control. But I’ve decided I know what caused that. To describe
it is difficult. It’s like falling into a wormhole. There is the trauma
related psychosis where can’t recognize faces or determine identities.
My psychosis had a supernatural element, one of bursting psychic energy
that made it both easier and harder to cope with. My psychosis was
majorly different from hers. I’m more equipped to handle it now, so I
guess schizophrenia sickness did make me stronger.
Everyone is at the mercy of their mind. Some people can manifest
beliefs, called mystics or miracle workers or prophets. Society has put
us into a box that doesn’t fit us. It’s a model of sickness with a very
effective cure, conditioning. While some of my psychosis was
distressing, psychiatric brainwashing is not the cure for a spiritual
disease. How many secrets lay awake, waiting to be heard? My mother with
her crystalline blue eyes as if she kept the worlds oceans from sinking
America.
It started getting really bad when I was six, but my parents
fought like normal couples do. They met at St. Vincent’s college in
Pennsylvania. I know very little about what they were like before they
married. Both my father and mother had been raised as Roman Catholics.
My dad comes from a six children family with an Italian mother and Irish
father. My moms dad is probably Irish but my grandma is from the west
coast and has French roots. And there’s a story is that we had a great
uncle who gambled away the family fortune.
My mom furthered her studies in politics at Duquesne university after
meeting my father and moving to Pittsburgh. She was studying to become a
lawyer and after she became pregnant focused more on political activism
than that. Both my parents were arrested and interrogated by the FBI
for being at a huge protest in Pittsburgh when mom was pregnant and she
spent a night in jail for “crossing the line” I believe a high form of
political dissent because it sends a powerful message of well meaning
and conviction. Mom never appeared crazy to me and she became depressed
after she was convinced to take Prozac, and had a manic episode where
she tried to kill herself, she also had fears that men were blackmailing
her with letters and threats. Moms best friend, Michelle, from that
period died mysteriously and that’s when I saw my mother start her
downward spiral to insanity.
She said that they weren’t forward about the cause of her death. Some
said it was anorexia and others said cancer. It spooked her so much that
she had a breakdown. This was also during the time I dropped out of
catholic school. I was forcibly hospitalized and the ignorance remains
to this day of the emotional and psychological result. Now both my
mother and I carry the label of schizophrenia or schizoaffective, but my
moms label was originally depression due to childbirth. My mom
accused my father of being linked to defense contractors and that his
companies were linked to mass intelligence networks, spying, the NSA,
haarp, SETI or what have you. I mean, he does work on electronic
healthcare records. He is linked to defense contractors and other
government institutions for small businesses used his accounting
software, and his coworker might just work for the FBI or something.
My moms dad owns a cabin on buffalo mountain with a clear view of the
national observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia. Mom taught peaceful
conflict resolution skills to innocent children in the Gaza Strip and
worked with amnesty international who funded her stay in the Middle East
and she felt bad she was never recognized for all her with including
hosting a website, helping fund and run a state group that has a history
of being anti war and anti-oppression. It is too difficult to describe
schizophrenia. One has to have walked those miles in someone’s shoes
before they can truly understand the depth of this illness. Modern
science has failed time and time again to describe the loss of contact,
the parallelization between thoughts, the language gaps, the identity
crisis that is schizophrenia. People are afraid of schizophrenia. I was
fourteen when the world lost all color. Inside the white machine, I lost
all formulation. I have been born into a place where dreams once had
the ability to become reality. Tortured by my flaws, the voice in my
head screams “you’ve been made into an animal.”
Voices that only came after endless seconds turned into torturous
infinities of isolation as I wait in my dark cell to be released for my
crimes. I waited for sanity. Sanity never arrived in the bottle of pills
I’ve been forever assigned. The secret fix to assail my broken mind. I
try to remember a life of sanity before schizophrenia. I was two years
old staring at a white frosted birthday cake with trains on it and the
number three. There were colorful balloons on the cake of red, green,
blue and yellow. I became a crack in the window, they tried to place me
in the picture. I was neither on the inside or the outside, but
somewhere between cut out eyes of paper-dolls. My mind’s prism showed an
array of possibilities, but this solitary hope had out-shown them all. I
became a student of my madness, diagnosed with chronic paranoid
schizophrenia. Young bones, bright lights, alone. Defiantly crazy.
I tried to run from myself, to flee my oppression. And then there were
my secret observations. I try to picture it, as often it’s easier for
me to see when shown what’s between the lines. She’s angry about
something. She’s digging her fingernails into the veins of history, an
obsession. The men in black. Their interrogation. The war. She has
journals stacked up in the cabinet. I want to open it, to know my
mother’s secrets. She’s flustered, I’m standing out of view but in
hearing distance. I’m at my dad’s workplace. Mom just wanted to talk to
him. “You’re paranoid, Maggie. Maggie listen…” a fearful defense.
“Did you look at the letters? Read it! Read it!” She compares the
letters addressed from the same sender, although they have different
handwriting. He never reads the letters, “I’m busy working,” He says.