Creatively understanding schizophrenia

Creativity
1

dec 6th, 1 pm

These are some thoughts I remember from last night me and my guy friend stayed up talking about our theories and it helped me so much, I felt the most connected ever. Even though we’re no longer dating, I felt like I loved him even more without that pressure instead just loving someone for themselves.

The law of attraction. He said something very deep, but I can’t deny it. Even though I’d rather not believe it, my behaviors and attitudes and even circumstance attracted “schizophrenia” to manifest. When I reacted to my parents confusion with anger, resilience, and fear it only worsened the hole Id fallen into. My dad saw me in a helpless state, not realizing his very belief that I was helpless made me more-so, and the same with psychiatrists. 5 years later, and I am still me and I have not changed, only the situation. I took opportunities, went to college, proved them all wrong, and started working to improve more every day. Letting go of certain elements of my past has lifted a huge burden on my mind. I am no longer afraid.

Thoughts create reality. Law of attraction proves that what you desire you draw to you, or even just dwell upon. That’s why negative thoughts can become self-fulfilling. After a long night staying up with my friend, we talked about all our deepest theories of the universe. These are only bits and pieces of what I can remember. Haha, and we only drank some coffee to keep us up, but it was a good night.

When a negative meets a positive it generates a charge, that is the spark of thought or life. We are literally the composition of galaxies, what seems far away could be closer than you think. Perhaps this galaxy is the birth of two galaxies that collided, one was negative and the other was positive, male and female, God and Godess, yin and yang, in other words each galaxy was big enough to draw the other one, and through each other the birth of the Milky Way.

What are black holes? Are they pockets of space? Or are they tunnels into other universes? Is it cold inside a black hole or hot? Maybe black holes are actually doors to alternate dimensions. Maybe there’s something there that we just can’t see. There are so many possibilities.

God is a painter. Each careful dot onto the canvas of reality is one step towards ascension. Each color on the portrait of you creates a stairway for your soul to travel, a universe inside itself. Are we all just Gods in training? When we die does consciousness move on? Perhaps to an alternative reality, or one of our own making?

If we are all one consciousness, then the illusion is that we are disconnected. The ego is the mask, everyone wears a mask. Without illusions and magic, life would be boring. We are mere players or actors in a grand cinematic adventure. and even when you think it’s all over, there is always a bigger greater force which is pulling you out of the darkness. The story never ends, the movie never ends. Stars are reborn, gallaxies collapse. The puppet and the puppeteer are one soul, infinitely conversing with the innocent audience, sometime we are oblivious to one very special truth…that’s the freedom not to be bound to it. We don’t have to act to anyone’s standards. If we are the puppeteers, if God creates Christ in his own self like image then perhaps man does have the key to existence. If so, than more potential realities must exist or have existed always.

There is no one truth, no exact science, no actual proof of anything. We are inventors and we invented ourselves, but once your ankles and wrists are chained into being, there are new laws that apply. When you fall asleep, your mind is free from the ego and from your imposing irrationality of singularity. When you wake up in a dream, you may find a new world completely. There is no way of knowing whether or not what you see right now is proof that there’s a limit to what you’re unaware of. The power of potential is in your hands, and those who are not able to change their potential deserve to be.

Ignorance only distracts people from the power they have to change atoms and re-arrange planets, manifest beliefs, morph into superheroes or demons / even if we don’t know the power of evil and darkness we still prescribe it to one another in fear of an outer imbalance.

Terror is a weapon of compliance and used to influence the vulnerable or brave to submit to subversion and mind control. When you bind one person to another, both become prisoners of war. Therefore love’s attachment is the souls devotion to life’s truths, which are pure and free. But to imprison yourself in a realm of subjective ideas, become the same person, pasted side by side in the same redundant interview with existence. Wholly United we radiated hopes like supernovas trapped on the other side of the prison walls, divided and muted to frequent lights in our dream of what’s between the sleeping wires, below the endless ways she desires.

Love radiates infinitely. It is beyond the scope of reason or rhyme. It cannot be bent by gravity, and carries the soul to safety. We are riding the waves of possibility, but what about those whirlpools? Where do they lead? The fool, does he ever meet the earth?

And what was the spark? Love was the spark. It was two opposing forces, combined unselfishly, and it balanced the Universe. And it kept us Together. And it will save us in the end.

How does the soul speak? In waves of light. The sun and moon continually work together to keep a balance. The moon cries to the sky, who whispers to the sea, who rises for the sun, and journeys to shore, who reflects their entirety. You and I, Me and You.

Be both mystic and scientist. Experiment. Grow. The world was meant for us to understand more than what we were, but who we are and how we can become great.
Because I believe we are here to create something accessable and attainable. We are all artists with infinite pallets of paint. Invention isn’t easy, neither was immortality or re-creating life from dust.

In Modern society we lock visionaries in asylums and prisons, for seeing something different than we want them to. perfection was not the goal of humanity. Science has become a microscope constantly breaking apart reason into tinier and tinier pieces. Religion has become an escape, and rarely in America do you find real substance to it that extends any further.

Unity is the goal, but without diversity we’ll never see the entire beauty of all that is. Don’t cut away the pieces that are ugly, realize their importance, perhaps it is that you are simply unfamiliar with beauty.
maybe we’re fluid, maybe we are clay, or maybe we’re all exploring ourselves to find out why we tick.

I hope someday we’ll stop ignoring the beauty in something as simple as a new dawn on a winter’s day. Witness yourself change. You are the world. And yet, everything will someday wash away, is there anything you found that could make the world stay? Share that and maybe she will.

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The word would make anyone shudder. Schizophrenia, an illness that causes a normal person to lose touch with reality. Schizophrenia is more common than diabetes, and affects over 2.2 million percent of the population. It is a heart-breaking, and life-stealing mental disease. There are no cultural markers for schizophrenia. In my opinion, poverty only adds to the lack of treatment available to a person with schizophrenia.

There have been several great movies focused on schizophrenia survivors. “A Beautiful Mind” is one such movie. It portrays the adult life of John Nash, a brilliant mathemetician who was afflicted with schizophrenia. “The Soloist” is another great movie which is also a true story based on Nathaniel Ayers, a great violinist who lost a potentially bright future to this cruel disease of the mind.

I also have schizophrenia, and I can tell you first-hand it is not possible to overcome it alone. Some still believe people can “pull themselves up by the boot-straps” and carry on, but it is near impossible with medication and therapy. My first experiences were earlier than most people’s. I began having symptoms at the age of thirteen and onwards. It began to appear in a subtle way to everyone else, but me. I was very withdrawn into stories and poetry.

I would fantasize about other lives and experiences so obsessively that I tried to believe they were real. It may have been a sort of escapism, but I believe there were other factors. I was highly intelligent. I was chosen by a teacher to take the SAT for Johns Hopkins the next year, and then would take road trip to UCSC in California studying civil rights for the summer through their program. The road trip with my mom was wonderful, but she also struggles with schizophrenia.

I remember trying to meditate on the cliffs of Mt. Zion in Utah, telling mom I couldn’t shut my mind off. She tried to help me focus, but it was pretty much impossible to stop the rambling in my head. Eventually, at boarding school in Ohio, I had my breakdown. I was taken home and it took about one year to figure things out and get back to high school.

Eventually, I dropped out of HS and got a GED. This may have been better in the long run, I had time to figure things out. I even took a poetry class at Naropa in Boulder Colorado. So now that I have finally figured out that I have to take medication at all costs, I am doing much better. I’m still in college and working toward my B.A. in mass communications. Though the road is not easy, I have family and friends to help me along the way.

I still wonder about the similarities and differences between some mental illnesses. For instance, as a child I would have had more of the attention hyperactivity and aspergers traits. As a teen I had more of the bipolar and compulsive traits. Currently I am diagnosed with schizo-affective and adhd. But, the labels don’t really matter as much as gettting the correct treatment and medications. I believe that in the future the labels should be based more on current symptomology and lifestyle than anything else. For instance, I could have been Catatonic, Bipolar, Paranoid, etc. because at the onset I had various symptoms due to the illness, that didn’t fit one category.

To me, schizo-affective is still a form of schizophrenia. Even though my doctors think I am not quite suffering from “schizophrenia” it all pretty much depends on the treatment and care you receive. I do hope that more humanistic and therapy oriented models come out in the near future for people with schizophrenia and bipolar.

My therapist has said I would be good as a counseler, because I understand the illness and could help people recover. Of course, therapy alone cannot treat schizophrenia. I now realize this because of how trying to help my mother has failed many times. In the state of West Virginia, it is nearly impossible to get someone forced treatment for a mental illness as an adult. In some ways, I’m glad my parents had the resources to get me into treatment when I was a teenager, because if I had been an adult it wouldn’t have been possible. I would be disabled.

The real issue in West Virginia is a broken or outdated mental health system. If a person is completely violent, then they can be forced treatment. If a person is simply delusional and paranoid, the law system fails to see the health risk is onoing and are sometimes simply too lazy to hospitalize someone. This is why my mother cannot be helped for her illness, and until she moves out of West Virginia, or the law changes, she’s not getting better but worse.

So, while law protections should be in place for abusive situations. My mother is clearly suffering from her illness, this is not the mother who raised her two kids. This is not the beautiful wife my dad married due to the illness taking over her life and making her suffer constantly fears of persecution, hallucinations, and delusions.
I hope this article helps others become more aware that this illness is a heart-breaking and terrible thing that afflicts many lives, regardless of occupation or lifestyle. While it seemingly strikes at random, there are some possible genes that are being studied for markers in the disorder.

One last thing to note: I had a very happy childhood, I do not think stress was the reason I became mentally ill. My parents spoiled me in some ways, took me to art museums, libraries, and gave me unconditional love. They are not the reason I became ill, and I would never blame them. My parents have given me the best support they could possibly give. Thankfully, my brother hasn’t shown signs of a mental illness and I am hoping that eventually he starts seeing a therapist to cope with things. He is only nineteen, and I wish he never goes through what I went through to get better and live a good life.

http://www.abctales.com/story/gabzgrl/schizophrenia-recovering

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There was something wrong with her. Her mind, it was, too much for them. She breathed in the exhausted fires of summer, and came down into the cold and constant whine in her head. Dizzying, as it were, her mother’s sinister paranoia, somehow had projected into her world an array of marvelous dimensions. The nurse came to her bed, with an assortment of pills, informing her sternly that she would not be going home.

How does a window become a painting, or a painting become a window? What odd dreams visited the child as she lay in that lifeless tomb, but those sketches she showed the nurse in another life, as another person? She drew the eyes, and the eyes followed her waking days endlessly there-after. In a small town the eyes were the hints at a hidden meaning. When she noted it, that strange all absorbing eye in the center of a stained window- it was with an odd distance they had drawn upon something beyond her flesh. Something disguised, but everywhere, and what was it…

Her mother had always been somewhat hyper-paranoid, but intelligent and beautiful in her innocence and love for humanity and nature. Her daughter saw her father’s and mother’s lives as a book of photos unraveling, some she imagined where they may have been in the former days. Somehow all the pictures and trinkets, the memories, and photos remained still within her room in boxes and drawers. She fought so hard to bring it back, the bright light. The spark her mother sang about when she was put into the asylum. This is when she was eight years old. Her mother had been spending foolishly, and acquired a need for prescription anti-depressants. Prozac. Pills that would solve her problem since her sanity was failing due to postpartum depression.

The parents bought her books and she was visited by her mother’s friends, the Christians and activists and peace-makers, all who protested in DC before the wars escalated in the Middle East. Her mother always had those letters pop up from these inspirational figures. Now the real threat was marketed terrorism because no one seemed to understand–the consequence of violences. And when her mother came back to the U.S. from teaching Palestinians to love and cherish each other, nearly being shot by an Israeli soldier, she found her daughter’s sudden madness almost as it were an assault. She tried everything to keep her daughter afloat during the dark night of broken spirits. There were invisible scars that no one could see.

They were almost transcendental, scars that came from an unknown source, like a re-awakening as she entered adult-hood into enlightenment and Buddha-hood. They checked her thyroids, hormones, blood. Everything appeared normal other than her hyper-active mind. She was at a state that caused such distress, severe trauma or a near death experience. Her EEG proved that she was erratic and manic, and in spiritual shock. Something had to be done to bring her down, but their lack of understanding merely pushed her further from the shore of the myriad maddening memories.
When she refused the six or seven little tablets, some that melted in her mouth, that made her dizzy and disheveled and nearly comatose. She got scared and resisted it. She got thrown out of the institution after all the torture had ended, but it had terrified her enough to keep believing in her disease of paranoid schizophrenia.

It only takes a spark to get a fire going, and this is the song her mother would sing when she was dying to reach for that light–and the light would fail her then somehow. The daughter didn’t know why it failed her, and this appeared to be a strange test of God and wisdom and strength. That we cannot depend on the sun for eternity, we must become our own sparks, our own eternal light cannot fade in the face of these deviant sparks. Sparks eternally bursting within the distant suns.

It was another Omen. It was like a streak of blood across the sky, the students at the boarding school remarked that it was amazing and strange. But to her it was an omen. The next day, she lost her mind. She was tired of being bullied, suddenly her source of inner wisdom caved and resources collapsed for it was all a conspiracy. It was a traumatic shock to a misguided existence. She had been testing her limits, she had been trying to overcome this fatigue of awareness, this impending doom. She wanted to conquer Death itself. She wanted to aspire, aspire to what … She had no role models. No consistent memories of what normal society should look like.

She had been growing wild in West Virginia, taken out of public high school, by her parents to this random quaker boarding school in Ohio with only about 250 students. She had no idea of her talents or potential then. The teachers discarded her, and when she woke up with a lack of recollection and a disheveled madness, a dark anger of hurt and hatred brewed within her fragile heart, and failed to melt the endless snowflakes that fell upon her apathetic staring figure. The student who had been sent to get her, and seemed paralyzed with fear, as if mocking her. She had done this to herself. Rumors spread but the girl never found out how she came to such a terrifying episode, only theories which were eventually swept away.

So were the memories and potential. Her parents locked her in an institution because they failed to understand the trauma that was deep, and the medicine which was a lie. It hurt her even more when she was treated like a child in the hospital. She couldn’t acknowledge the abuse while being a prisoner. Instead, she wrote it down on a paper for the visiting nurse, and whispered saying that she was afraid to speak aloud and didn’t want the people there to hear her.

This note is what got her immediately released. No courts were called into the arena, as no such arena had yet existed. The hospital upgraded to a new facility and her scars were once again buried. There were still constant night terrors, tactile memories of being forced injections and laying numb on the black floor of the Quiet Room, staring up at the mirror above. Questioning herself, and her sanity, wondering what her revenge would be for this assault on her mind and body. It was after a cruel suicide attempt that she had experienced such tortures. She wondered if she would even be able to forgive her father as he stood over her in her sickly state, not realizing the amount of pain she had endured. She looked up to him as he stood over her begging her to comply with the slave-holders. She was the resistor- she was being like her mother, resisting to be treated like a subordinate slave. She could see in him such a vast hollow emptiness, could he not fathom this horrid existential and human pain…from…her…diseased…mind…

In a dream her little brother, wept in front of a mirror at the person who was me–standing afar looking with concern into the mirror, not comprehending his fear.

She wanted to reach to him, to touch him, to stop him from his pain. She saw visions of him, and the comet, and his future in New York City. Because somehow he was the one destined to save humanity. How these fantasies somehow reflected, she never knew. But from one there was two. There’s always been something mystical about her brother, something internal rising from the shores of a distant sea. She would do all she could to keep him upright on his stallion of gold, and promised to bring him home with her to follow his heart, to know every word because his life to her is worth so much more than all the beauty and art. She wants him to understand this mystery, as it presented to her in visions of realities.

I sought to become an inspiration to the lost, to overcome such fears, I depicted an image of carrying her through the Gates of Heaven, which had been closed for so long–and God said he would allow me to rescue her from the suffering of darkness. But even in complete darkness, there are distant stars to reach. There might even be invisible ones that we can’t see, those are the sparks that mom was talking about. So I shower the world in sparks, and hope we catch them like fireflies.

Please do not mock the paths I’ve traveled, for if you only understood the power of love. And now, claiming the spirit once bruised by the war scars of history. Dreams and memories that are now a fantasy, if they ever did exist–a telescope must be found to find seen the unseen. For all that appears likened to a dream, may become mere essences of palm prints in the sand–of a better time and space, of a distant shore or land. If you can find the atlas to the infinite Heaven, maybe now you’ll try, maybe now you will succeed at claiming your self from the endless loops of time to beat the odds and rise, rise, rise you eternal spark!

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It’s very poetic, your style.

I hope you are doing ok.

When I write about distance, such as seeing far off, I am usually about to have a breakdown mentally.

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Trying to find myself again.