I went from living independently in society for 20 years to being “demoted” to being back in mental health housing. I shared a small room for FIFTEEN months with some 27 year old guy who was homeless for 8 months, served 8 months in the Army, and had some really nice, pretty girlfriends. I’m pretty easy to get along with so we had lots of laughs, talked a lot.
But he pulled some pretty low stuff, but I wasn’t innocent of wrongdoing either. He seemed about 75% normal, but 6 months after being in there he told me that he hallucinated stuff crawling on the walls and stuff. He wasn’t schizophrenic, he had PSTD, OCD, and insomnia. Bu I was astounded because he looked, acted, and sounded normal.I am ashamed to admit it but I drove him crazy too. At this stage my symptoms are spilling over and I do sometimes kind of make certain people nervous. No one is afraid I’ll get violent, it’s just I am sometimes a little out of synch but not all the time.
So our housing kicked out a bunch of us and moved down the street. Anyways, we keep in touch. He had money problems and he made the choice o go back to the streets. But I stayed in the housing. We keep in touch and I try to help him for old times sake. He calls me occasionally to borrow money which I don’t mind because he has never stiffed me yet on paying it back. So I loan him $5.00 or $10.00 occasionally.
We meet and talk and he actually helps me too. But I have my own trip and last night I was giving him a ride to his job and I was having a little trouble staying composed due to stress and the poor guy freaked out. He got agitated and nervous and anxious and he had an attack of claustrophobia.
I know for sure that I triggered it and I tried to act more normal. That’s just the dynamics between us sometimes. Panic and stress can be contagious and we’ve had this problem before. It always makes me feel bad. I don’t want to drive anyone I know crazy. So he calmed down and shortly after that he just fell asleep in the passenger seat.
We got to his job and he was sound asleep so I didn’t bug him. Poor guy has been through so much I felt bad for him. He can be mean but his life is hard. This was a very sobering night. I’ve been treated as normal for almost the entire 37 years that I’ve been schizophrenic and I treat people as normal. But I got a little sad at our struggles. So sad for us. But it was fleeting, I went back to acting normal and he left for work.