Here are some writings about my life with schizophrenia.
It was wrong, I had chronic insanity at the young age of 16. And yet of all the times I thought it would never end or get better, I found hope or that small silver lining and that really does make all the difference. It makes you stronger to have overcome de-pression or thoughts of suicide, and pills don’t cure that only you can find a way to overcome certain things. I think if I had lived any other way of life, I still probably would’ve come to some cri-sis eventually.
That’s a part of growing up, it’s a part of who I am. I ask big questions and am blessed with hard challenges. Some of it has made me bitter, but most of it has made me stronger.
I think a lot of people are drawn to that, and growing up a lot of dreamers and thinkers have an existential or depressive crisis. I con-stantly felt punished. Over time I took Abilify and my memories did suffer in the short-term but I became more rational and smarter. I’m actually Bipolar with Adhd. I take a low 10mg dose of Adderall and am using that to increase the skill I lost through this deficit and interruptions in education. The first sign I was having symptoms actually were noticed by my math teacher who said my Al-gebra grades went from straight A’s to failing in a matter of a month, and I was also having problems with fatigue. I just felt like my mind was falling away.
Despite all this stuff is probably depressing, I’ve managed to make a lot of progress in the 10 years of battling this ill-ness, and I think at 25-26 is when your brain starts fully maturing and your mind can manifest a lot of new ideas and solidify old ones. That’s why the age 25 is an important age of experience but also of forgiveness. If you have high aspirations don’t let them go, but work towards what you already have and try and build a founda-tion on what you know and learned. Reflect on all the accomplish-ments of your life and all the things you’d still like to do. Have hope don’t give up. Set a standard and example for the people who have no heroes. That’s what I want to be, a role model.
She was fourteen when her parents sent her to that horrible school. Then she came back to the world, and nothing could explain the pain, depression, anger. She slowly began losing her mind, and on the day she cracked she screamed about the greenhouse where the bomb was dropped, where the students had poured her a strange drink nights before and then told her to leave, cheering after she was gone. Waking up, numb and confused. “What happened?”
She didn’t know how she got there, and it felt strange as if she hadn’t slept. She had a fleeting image of walking around the halls with the same two men, in the dark.
But their faces were so clear, and her behavior so strange… She went home that night, and told God she was going to destroy herself for this. Her parents thought she had schizophrenia. For two weeks the pain of de-pression didn’t end. Nothing felt like anything, everything felt like nothing. They shut her up in a hospital where the nurse would go to her bedside and ask her to take pills for sleeping, but
she was sleeping better and wanted to go home. They kept giving her more pills and she wanted to remember, and it kept forcing her to split apart. The memory was erased, and then after more torment and assault, she was a chronic paranoid schizophrenic. She was only six-teen then.
CHAPTER THREE: Paper Flowers
Everything has withered, dried up, & become a void of disper-sion. The hatred, the anger, the force of his mind or the dark ink scrib-bles that I can’t simply muster anymore. The beauty of the rain drops or the bitterest downpour, soaking me to the core with vapid discon-tent. No drug could satiate nor satisfy the barren
volume which sits within me. My thoughts skim through fleeting mo-ments of what was before and the urgent sense of sanity, which could never have claimed my mind. I feel broken like a violin; voicing her song to no one but the creaking floorboards. If I could only summon the Lords of the universe to sweep me away
from the numbing chill of depression. If I could dip a brush into India Ink and smear my portrait across the infinite canvas that has become my life–to be born again in the wild thunderous storm of madness.
Instead, I remain listless as the fog mows over the evening sky, an intrepid traveler of clouds. Meaninglessly I conjure words to realms which are too far from this lake of disarray. The world spins and twists itself betwixt the hands of oblivion, but if only we knew ourselves better. A blur of watercolors descends upon this oceanic view of the neither-nor woman. I see a bright room lit by an undesira-ble opaqueness, where the listless fallen are nursed back to life. I pray to Heaven and his convoy of immortals, though I never am sure if he has heard. The voices have all gone to sleep, have been banished to never-land. Once a child of innocent insanity, now slipping past the moon as the shadows dance upon her in a circle of understanding.
She watches clouds gathering droplets of rain from her eyes. She knows it is because there is something wrong with it. Unsure if she’s angry or relieved, the woman goes and sits on the porch like she had for so long. Staring out into the beautiful green and blue, her sobs release as she pleads with the Lord for forgiveness from her ignorance. They buy Maggie flowers on Sunday, purple ones that look like daisies. That night their children dream of blood pouring from the sky. Angry voices leap at them from the shadows.
How can she begin again? Like before, after the cleansing had left her mind barren and her skin cold to the touch. Would it be wrong to suspect father’s accusations?
Her sorrow descends like a dark cloud across the horizon. Her mother’s sobs are heard from the room below; her father silently
curses the evil demon dancing in the dark, twisting anything they can touch, breaking hearts. How strange that she had to lose touch with everything she once loved so dearly.
Now the words mean nothing. A mother with secrets.
Where was the shining spark that kept her alive whether it drove her to madness… fighting a false war for a false product or are we armed against something more sinister? Is this how you take your property back? Ignorance is cowardice.
When he looked out from his big house, did he ignore the flowers? It’s not fair, said the daughter, to blame me. I hate this disease as much as anyone. The dollar bill is more cruel than a pill to wash away the memories. It’s not that she wanted the child back, it was that she had no choice but to give him the world in black.
MELANCHOLIA
It’s autumn, and all the oranges and yellows of the sun have fallen. I hold your hand because I can’t walk down the street. I am un-able to move. Flashbacks permeate my brain; I fear that I’m going in-sane for good this time. I see memories, I relive a million of these the-ories. I wash down alcohol, Pepsi, and endings. I drift in and out of clothes and Zen. I am working up a tolerance to this world. I’m gaining influence over the matrix. I’m breaking down the walls of reality; and I am falling every time I find myself alone. When will love be coming home? I drum my hands upon the cage of re-sistance. If only it were true. I smashed one thousand theories over a broken piano, screaming, thinking about you. I washed her hair and fell asleep in his eyes. I can’t get him out of my mind. But he is only a lover of the things I hide. Inside of all these houses and rooms, they close in on each other. Every empty vein is begging for a hungry mouth to feed. I begin to unveil the possibility that I do not crave what I need. I have fooled myself, how vain of me.
A pattern in the sky. A voice whispering on the wind, a colorful picture book that is too bright to call anything. I am schizophrenic. I am schizophrenic. I am schizophrenic. So I dull my hues to a perfect combination of blue and purple and yellow. I refrain from remembering, I stop myself from questioning, from asking anything. And I cry silently for the abused animal I have become. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can still hear my mother sobbing. I envision all these scary things, like a dimly lit room with a woman in restraints being zapped with electricity.
She doesn’t remember anything. Now that the once real smile on her face has melted like plastic and has been replaced with bleach, what does one do but cherish the memory of all the radical mothers in America. I remember her how she was once before this madness, she was full of bright-eyed sunlight and open to things that no one else was aware of. As a child I colored rainbows that laughed and together we vanished into the sunrise. She hands me a tearful letter, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”
I believed in her more than she realized, and her dreams were called borderline by the man in spectacles who wanted to believe in nothing. I turned eight when I heard them say she tried to catch a bus, but ended up with slashed wrists and a diagnosis of bipolar schizo-phrenia. No one ever told me she tried to run away. My memory, has it betrayed me? I have never forgotten that phone call, “she’s at a bus station. We found her.” I can believe in more than her suicide attempt.
I don’t even know why I can’t forget her standing there in tears saying
that she was afraid of the writing in the envelope and my father saying that she was being paranoid, practically begging her to calm down. She was sick. She was sick. She is sick. Please don’t take my sunshine away. Not now. So what happens when a rainbow turns upside down and the edges twist, and what happens when the flower in your hand turns into a dream that you misunderstand? What happens when it’s too much to be silent in prayer? I remember how much she believed in me, and how every-
thing she believed in caved eventually. Maybe we are the same as them, but they just don’t see. They don’t know how to embrace the deepest recesses…what it means to be human and be free. She had the passion to resist every bullet until the one that pierced right through to the core, this evil poison infecting her with disillusionment . She crossed the barred off line and got arrested for protesting a white man’s war. They painted the padded walls off-white and we were screaming until you just stop caring. The doctor used his syringe to steal every soul and cell until God danced with our demons.
WONDER WORLD
When I was little I remember asking my mom what God was
like. She told me God was kind of like Santa Clause; So I envisioned
myself sitting next to a big jolly man staring into a snow-globe that
overlooked home. I told God that my parents looked so happy and
that I thought it would be a good life. He told me I could visit Earth
for a while to learn about life, and that everyone, even good people,
had a dark and a light side.
I would tie my shoelaces and think about God, and I would walk down the stairs and contemplate the universe. I walked every-where in my own little world, as three blocks became five blocks and became fifteen million journeys instantly.I would dream of visiting other places and the wind and trees would call to me. God talked to me in the trees and the wind and the flowers. It was magical.
Come to my Universe, and let the colors and shapes move you
as if you’re in a trance; the voices will guide you into other parallel
worlds.
Be wary of the demonic delusions that can give you anything
you want, but also everything you fear. Be a friend to your
imagination, that thing full of questions and unsolved riddles.
This is the world God left behind" the pulse of your existence.
Still, no one knows the real you; no one may ever know that strange
you in the corner, the shy one who didn’t speak up loud enough for
anyone to hear. Repeat that mantra to yourself as the skies turn
grayer and your skin burns with anxiety and rage.With your head down, not wanting to meet anyone’s gaze, you walk on. Not that they were looking anyways. You continue with a sort of awkward strife. The sun seems to burn madly in the midst of
this entire struggle; it’s your struggle with being left behind with the
homeless toys. A schizophrenic. You’re an alien on this planet, earth.
Cursed by the flesh, who used to wonder, “Why do people die? What will there be leftover? What will be left of you when you leave…will there be nothing left?” Most people pay you no mind as they continue on. She isn’t there, they tell themselves. Once, before the coffee and the cigarettes, before the magic of adventure and the pain of sorrow, there was a place where we were equal. Everyone had to be somewhere beneath the surface. Everyone had to bare their knives and shred at our last agreement. We wouldn’t let ourselves be defenseless. We could not be defenseless; we needed to know the laws that controlled us. Yet maybe memory never dies, nothing is lost and every joy, every transgression, and every hope that you ever encountered is all stored in the waves of the universe and stars.
It was a rough roller coaster ride through heaven, hell, and all
those places where the sight cannot reach. This is an attempt at
creating a story of the metamorphosis. This is how the crazy little
girl recreated herself and defied all odds.