I have felt this way off and on since the beginning of my disease, 35 years ago. I have always felt that I didn’t have the tools to survive like everybody else had. I thought I would never make it to forty years old. I told my father this and his answer surprised me. He told me that’s how he felt too.
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Me, too, Nick. I don’t really know why, even. I just feel like I’m badly made and not geared for survival.
I read an article a few months ago about inner city kids (of which I am not one) believing on average that they won’t live to see 30. It has a profound impact on their decision making and life planning. What’s the point in saving, getting an education, making good choices if you won’t be around to see a payoff? I identified so strongly with it.
But I’m still here and life keeps on happening, huh.
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One black woman told me that a lot of black men work all their lives and don’t live long enough to collect their social security. I didn’t think I would either, but here I am, collecting social security.
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My father always had positive ambition for me to have a career and marriage and maybe children since my diagnosis.
He believes I could overcome schizophrenia more than I did.
He still wants me to marry and have a career.
No, I would never have survived on my own. I have been lucky to have family and others to help me - psychologically and monetarily. Especially with my meds.
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It helps me when people who know me think I can do something, whether it’s a job, school, driving, or going to a birthday party. Sometimes other people can see potential in a person where that person can’t see it in themselves. That’s how I got back to work just 9 months after I got out of the hospital. I wasn’t looking for a job at the time but the counselors at my vocational program I was going to thought I could do it and they were right. I ended up working there for four years. But we’re in different situations, and your father may have unrealistic expectations for you, I don’t know.
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I get overwhelmed easily by a lot of things. I’ve always had a very hard time coping, but I can scrape for a living if I have to.
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His expactations were also mine also I had ambitions to marry and have children and a career also.
My father did not want me to rely on disability and work and get married and support myself and he offered to help if I tried.
I had the same feelings also.
I need way more time than I have right now.
I hardly know you, but in some ways you seem very well put together with talents that might serve you well.
I enjoyed your report on experiencing the Democratic Caucus. I thought it was very well done.
Just from my view point and I need new glasses.
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I don’t know about “survive” but i definitely cant people like a normal person
Oh yeah. 1) I was born two months premature.
2) My mother’s body thought I was foreign during the entire ordeal and kept trying to reject me. She was out on four different medications and was on bed rest for six months to keep me alive.
3)Then, when I was born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck four times.
4) Then they found that my stomach walls weren’t closed and the acid was leaking over and trying to digest parts of body.
breaths Butttt I’m alive now.
So, yes, my mother and I both agree that either the universe never wanted me born or really needed me to be born. Up for interpretation.
I suffer that all the time, I was almost successful with my first suicide attempt for one thing, stuck a needle full of insulin into my arm, with about 10x the dose for someone my size. got lucky and my Grandma found me before I passed out.
But for another thing, when I was 12 I was hit by a car. that was doing 75 MPH…I suffered only a slice on my leg from the license plate, not toher injuries, not even bruises, despite being thrown almost fifty feet into the air.
But I read somewhere that SZ may actually be an old survival thing from our earliest ancestors. Theory is it helped them stay alert for predators!
I don’t think I would be alive today if it weren’t for my parents and the help I get from the state.
I always figure if I ever run out of options, I will just commit ridiculous non-violent crimes to stay in jail.
Every time I heard the story of my birth I thought I wasn’t meant to be here. I was two months premature. It was the Rh thing and my mom’s body saw me as an intruder. It was an emergency cesarean and apparently the ambilical cord was around my neck as well. I underwent seven blood transfusions and spent almost a month in an incubator at LA Children’s Hospital. I always thought that was a sign that I wasn’t supposed to exist, and just more recently I think of it as a survival story. I think my mom thought of me as weak and I always felt like I couldn’t do things. Often I couldn’t since I’ve always been uncoordinated. There was always something “off” about me and feeling like an alien amongst my peers started very early. I still don’t think I belong here, and I’m not only not as capable as others, I’m not as motivated as others. I’ve wasted a lot of time waiting to go home, but I don’t know how to think/be any other way.
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Well that just sounds like you were definitely meant to be here, then, if you survived all of that. My brother was born with a lot of problems and had to be put on an ECMO machine. The doctors said he probably wouldn’t live, and that even if he did, he would probably have severe brain damage. He is alive and well today at age 25, and with an IQ high enough to qualify for that pompous MENSA club. So I think you are simply like my brother, it was very important for you to be here.
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When I was younger I definitely felt like I wasn’t meant to make it
Everything was hard to do… I was caught in the loop and it felt like I had no way out.
These days… after everything that happened to me… and I’m still here…
Maybe I am meant to survive
You have a gift for encouragement, @Turnip. Thank you. I’m not all that bright, actually 
, but I’m very glad your brother has thrived! Life is such a puzzle.
Well you just never know, hard to see the grand scheme of things when you’re in the thick of it, and it’s not even finished yet. I wouldn’t be alive today if my brother hadn’t made it, I would have had no reason to exist anymore and would have probably committed suicide many years ago. But I had a reason, and I have helped a few people in my life, just like my brother. You may never know all the parts you played in various people’s lives, and how they went on to play parts in others’ lives because of it. It’s all sprawling outward, endlessly.
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