Truce?

            I’ve been labouring under the impression that life with medication is dull and flat, like a butter knife. I’ve come to see it as grey and unappealing. My separation from schizophrenia (we are divided by small gelatin capsules at this point) has made me perceive it not as dark chaos, but as a swirling land of light and life. In my mind, colours dive and reflect from its surface. On one end, bland tea after cleaning the house and the rigors of stepping into shoes or showers or bus stops – the hopelessly mundane. On the flipside I see a veritable disco ball of busyness, a bright, swirling world of wonder where I own and am the world.

I have a psychiatrist who says I need medication for my broken, hapless brain. He has seen too many wayfarers slip into the bottomless pit of egocentric depression. He has known too many souls who are lost in schizophrenia’s miasmic, quicksand arms. And I have a Jungian psychotherapist who insists that when schizophrenia is seen as a positive attribute that should be celebrated, and not as a negative abnormality that must be “corrected”, the downward spiral of worry and self-destruction following an episode is slowed considerably, and in some cases wiped out. He says societies that allow for such a thing to be accepted and embraced have a much lower rate of suicide as well.

Which to choose? If only there were some kind of truce, some kind of breaking the walls down between these two worlds, someway I could have both.

Every day I wake and choose my mind-numbing medication. I choose reality and now-ness. But I am tired. I am tired of living as a patient, a half-awake cripple. Some part of me wants desperately to cast off the shackles of my gelatin Safety Floats and swim away, go to the deep end where the archetypes are, frolic in the water of living (and not just surviving). I miss the cool, frantic shadows of my naked brain. I miss painting and writing on and on for half a day, thinking only a few minutes have gone by. I miss the output I achieved.

Sadly, my life story goes like this: “One time, when I was 14, I got sick and then stayed in my room for 20 years. The end.”

And in more depressing news, it shall remain this way. I will continue to gobble up Medicare and medication. But I am putting this in my blog anyway. It is a missive from me to the vacuous world of ether that says simply, I wish I were alive.