30 Days of Mental Illness Awareness Challenge: Day Eight

Question: At what age were you diagnosed? At what age do you think your symptoms began?

 

I’m going to answer this question backward (as is my inalienable right as a willing participant), because my brain is malfunctioning lately and these things seem to happen outside of chronological order for me when I write in this condition.

Like every kid, I had imaginary friends. The difference between my friends and I was that I would talk to these imaginary pals openly, in front of everyone, up until the age of … well, I guess I never stopped. That’s the chief difference: mine didn’t go away. When others’ imaginary friends “moved away” or “disappeared” or lost their “magic”, mine continued in intensity and frequency. (Except the ones who died. For example, I watched “Katy” burn to death when I was 4, and even my older sister couldn’t convince me it didn’t happen and wasn’t real. It was extremely graphic – especially for my age – and I was a bit emotionally scarred by it. But this is another story.)

I’ve been talking to The People in My Head since I began to talk. I have no idea when this all began. It’s always been a part of, a piece of who I am, like an arm or a freckle. Around the age of 12 or 13, I started to believe I could see ghosts. I was special because I could communicate with the dead. Even celebrities joined in the mix. By the time I was 14, I was totally lost and batshit off-the-wall delusional. Three sheets to the wind psychotic. I lost my “real” friends (the few I had), because there was just no relating to me and the nonsense babbling I did about the chaos of my mind. I spent 5 years in the hole of schizophrenia without a diagnosis. My parents searched the house frantically for any drugs I might be taking, but of course found none. (I was actually so clean it hurt. I never had a big attraction to drugs, though I did try pot a few times in high school. All it did was make me paranoid, and I couldn’t understand why people deliberately made themselves paranoid and delusional, so I left it as a novel footnote to my existence. I pursued drugs no farther than that. Just in case you were wondering.)

Just a few days shy of my 19^th birthday, my mother drew a proverbial “line of death” in the sand of our household. It was demanded I see a psychiatrist. He diagnosed me with “schizophreniform” almost immediately. He gave me an anti-psychotic. It made me tired, but

THE WORLD WENT QUIET.

The official diagnosis of full-on schizophrenia followed in 6 months.

PTSD took a little longer. I had no memories of what I had endured as a teen (either because I was so out of it with the Crazies, or because the truth of it was too terrible, or a combination of the two). When I finally found a therapist I could trust, I opened up. This was about 2 years ago now, and she told me I did indeed suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

GAH.

It’s so sad to me, because I was so smart! I could’ve done almost anything! I could’ve BEEN almost anything! So here’s a poem I wrote some time ago that sums up some of my despondency over What Might’ve Been:

"The Sense of Senselessness"

You had too many faces in the first place.

You moved too quickly.

You had me neatly packed into you.

Your calloused fingers were nastily possessive from the start.

I was tied too tightly to the ligature of your doubt

so no one could pull us apart.

Now without you, I splinter into anonymity,

as if someone spliced through my ocean

but the water of me is undeterred.

I belong to no one.

I am no longer cohesive,

my holy seal broken

as you seethe and break in tantrums and traumas.

You used to be the air all around me,

but now I am too big for toys.

Seeking out my center

I have given you away, removed you from my diameter.

But here is a turning point,

a twist in the plot:

however sleep comes,

we still glide together

where the ice in your iris contracts

where you make more black space for hatred.

Your light was ingratiating and I folded like ash beneath its boot.

You’ve never been fair.

Like me, you’ve grown beyond opposites.

I was two halves of a single snapshot, imposed

by your impartial retina.

I split in the center of your eye.

Your image is stenciled in the black of my typeface,

an optical illusion.

And if I thought the world was equally weighted,

I would have measured myself

by my name tag.

And if I paid deferment to a deity,

I may have hidden behind my incomes and outcomes.

But no one ever wins a war between two.

My god! You were always in me.

 

Sleep and Ass Kicking

Hello all!

I don't have a fabulous picture or collage this time, because my creative juices have not been flowing. If you are dead set on eye candy, visit "The Number Garden" on Tumblr for edgy, off the wall pics. I'm sure one of them might convey the way I'm feeling right now.

My pshrink has reduced my secondary anti-psychotic in hopes that I will achieve more REM sleep, but that has left me hazy and In My Head most of the time. Some days it just feels like there's no fixing this thing upstairs that rattles my days and makes my nights horrifying.

I did find a sleeping pill that actually helps me sleep almost uninterrupted through the night, but it wasn't on the insurance formulary, and so I had to wait for a prior authorization from the doc and the insurance. After 2 weeks of no sleep (except for every 3rd day because I was so exhausted, and then only for a few hours), my insurance finally pushed the medicine through ... and VOILA! sleep!

The only problem is that I like to watch things like The Walking Dead or a Joss Whedon movie during the day. Now every time I close my eyes ... zombies! And they're eating me alive and then I die and it blacks out and starts over again. Unfortunately, this usually happens when there's no one else in the house to comfort me, so I'm getting my ass kicked by dead things and things that want me dead every waking moment. Sleep is the blissful interlude, but I find it is hard to wake and that the pill has me sleeping around 12 hours a night.

Off I go into the spiral of delusions and paranoia about death. My therapist doesn't want to talk about this, and tells me denial is how most people get through their days. I argued that denial keeps me dissociative and numb to the moment and the world around me. So I have been isolating myself to the nth degree, avoiding situations which cause me stress and discomfort. Since I have school during the week, this is proving difficult. I have a research paper due at the end of November. Just the thought of it stresses me out. Where to go from here?

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. 

Bad Medicine!

            For legal and ethical reasons, I don’t feel I can name the medications I’ve been on, for a few of them I would never endorse to a single soul. Let’s just say the one that worked the best (we’ll call it M for shorthand, and it stands for Medication), had the worst side effects a person could imagine for me. Even starving myself and doing TaeKwonDo several times a week as exercise, I continued to gain until little, 5’2” me weighed 226 lbs. I could barely breathe, or climb stairs. I certainly couldn’t run. My father has Type II Diabetes (adult onset at that), and I was deathly afraid I was going to die from M. I begged and begged to get off of it, and finally the doctors acquiesced. Within just a few months, I lost over half of the weight I had gained on M. That is not to say that I weigh less than 113 lbs! Far from it, but half of the weight I had gained while on M is gone. I can breathe, I can run, and I can turn over in my sleep comfortably. I can shop in normal clothing stores. I am a person again. But I have been left with some crippling, long-term side effects, such as an anxiety disorder that began with M and some others.

I guess the lesson here is to say quite loudly that if you feel your medication is not working for you, and the side effects outweigh the benefits (pun intended), talk to your doctor about alternatives. Remember, doctors are there to help you, and it is your life. In my humble opinion the docs work for me, not the other way around. Stand up and be heard! Your voice is valuable.